Exhibits

NYC Boy with Ribbon 1939 Helen Levitt

In the three years I've been studying with OCA I've been to perhaps a half dozen exhibits.  I've looked at far more books, and even more online collections or etexts.  Given the ease of viewing from the computer, I find it difficult to justify the time and money to visit an exhibit, especially when many are so paltry.

I'll be in the USA for a couple of weeks this summer and have found the city art museum is holding an exhibit of 30 Helen Levitt images.  30.  Tickets are $20.00, parking will be $10.00, plus gasoline and the stress of an hour's drive either way.  Forget it.  Here are 50 images and I don't even have to get up from where I'm now sitting.  Can anyone say I've missed anything essential by not seeing the printed images hung on a wall?

http://www.atgetphotography.com/The-Photographers/Helen-Levitt.html

http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/levitt_just_kids.html

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08 July

The tutor offered a reply in his report on Assignment 3:

1 It is great that you sent me prints to look at and following on from the discussion about the importance of print quality, exhibitions are ideal for looking at incredible print qualities. 

2 Sometimes the scale of an image is incredibly important for the way that you experience an image. Have you ever seen an Andreas Gursky image in the flesh (see below)? 

3 Photographs are objects not just images and entire fabrication of a single or series of photographs is really important. Have a look at the photographic images of Maurizio Anzeri, these are photographs that have been stitched into and are completely different when experienced in the flesh. 

4 Exhibitions are usually curated in a very particular way and the way the images are organized can give new insight in to a photographers work. The recent Taryn Simon project is a really good case in point (see below). 

5 ‘They are only a glimpse of our experience, and to be completely understood, they have to be properly contextualized’ - Susie Linfield. Exhibitions are a great way of contextualizing photographic images. 

In light of these points, ‘essential’ is a word you have to define for yourself.

All fair points. 

If there were an exhibit of outsize images, I could appreciate the difference in viewing them in a gallery versus on my computer. Likewise, if I were interested in investigating the printing process. The argument from context is less convincing aside from the case where images are stacked, or configured in some kind of shape (though something similar can be achieved on the computer). In my experience most galleries and museums sequence images singly in a horizontal line at eye level, which fairly mimics the viewpoint of scrolling through an online gallery.

He offered, as well, additional reading/viewing suggestions related to this question, including:

Taryn Simon – A living Man Dead and Other Stories

Would love to see this, but will not be spending €250.00 for the book.  I found online a selection of images from this project and an installation and assume the point the tutor is trying to make is about how images can be arranged and exhibited.  There are certainly unique and creative ways to do this and I would very much appreciate visiting such an installation.  This might be worth my time, money, and effort.  But these kind of projects are the exception rather than the rule.  

Andreas Gursky 

He makes big prints and I suppose they are impressive. I saw a similar sized print only yesterday at college, an aerial of the the campus.  From a distance I thought it might be a painting.  Only when I got close did I realize it was a photograph.  The print quality was impressive.  This is an exhibit I might makethe effort to visit, but I assume that after 3,4, or 5 such exhibits size would lose its novelty appeal and you’d be left evaluating them as you would smaller images.  

Maurizio Anzeri 

The tutor wants to demonstrate how photographs can be incorporated into other work that might not be best viewed on a computer screen. In this example from Anzeri, embroideried masks cover the faces of what appear to be found portraits.  This is something I wouldn’t make the effort to see in exhibition.   I can nevertheless appreciate the effort that went into making it and why someone might want to see this in exhbition rather than online.  Again, this kind of work is not what one finds at most photography exhibits.