John Lipkowitz: Wild Places, Wild Things

Keith de Lellis is pleased to present an exhibition of four distinguished African-American photographers who professionalized their passion for the photographic arts by establishing careers as masters in the world of photojournalism. Eli Reed, Coreen Simpson, Ozier Muhammad and Beuford Smith all brilliant and savvy picture makers, are shown here documenting the world around them in images of historical and cultural significance. The exhibition consists of a sampling of about a dozen images per artist, each revealing a distinctive vision and a keen ability to capture the moments that tells us so much not only about their subject but about the picture maker themselves. Eli Reed has the distinction of being the first black photographer to become a member of the elite photojournalists collective Magnum Photos along with its’ prestigious international roster of some of the finest photographers in the field. Reed’s images are a study of the human condition. While many focus on the lives of people of color in all strata of society from the impoverished to the gifted and celebrated, he treats all his subjects with dignity and deference. Reed’s 1994 canny portrait of Gordon Parks and his daughter Toni taken in London, reveal their faces etched with what feels like a complicated and perhaps difficult moment in a father-daughter relationship. Coreen Simpson is the rare African-American female artist whose portraiture whether it be her powerful studio work or on location pictures in art galleries, performance venues or celebrity photo ops, convey her empathy for her subjects. A touching 1989 photograph of Oprah Winfrey at one such photo-op where Winfrey has completely fixed her gaze on Coreen’s camera ignoring the gaggle of other photographers. It’s that moment that makes one wish they could read Oprah’s mind as she is confronted by another professional black woman, perhaps seeing herself in Coreen’s lens. Ozier Muhammad, a Chicago born Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, has photographed some of the most historical moments of the past 30 years including hunger in Africa, Nelson Mandela’s Election and the Obama Campaign for the Presidency. We chose to exhibit some of Ozier’s earlier work for its prototypical purity and clean lines that reveal an honesty and authenticity that are the hallmark of his later work. His portrait of Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley at Congressman’s Funeral in 1973, reveals a fully formed artist who knew how to get a picture and get it right from his earliest efforts as a photojournalist. Beuford Smith is a natural born photographer, and powerhouse in the world of African American Photography. His accomplishments include President and founding member of Kamoinge, founding editor of the Black Photographers Annual, Photography exhibition curator and owner of the Cesaire picture agency. His contribution to the exhibition is a suite of photographs taken the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. This tragic and historic event moved Smith to deal with the shock and pain of losing such a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement by grabbing his camera and preserving the fleeting moments that must have been achingly sad on that day. Image: Homeless March for shelter. Missouri, USA. 1986 © Eli Reed

This exhibition explores the commodification of athletic bodies. Bringing two projects into dialogue, Katinka Herbert delves into the lives of Mexican wrestlers and Cuban athletes. In doing so, her images capture the dilemma of physical performance: a tense relationship between economic necessity and the human form. While some athletes experience their bodies as vehicles of financial stability and international travel, many grapple with unpredictable incomes, visa barriers, and the looming threat of career-ending injuries. As such, ‘Bodies of Work’ is a study of precarious labor. Here, lives that are ordinarily defined by movement are frozen in the photographic frame. Their muscles resonate with tension and potential; their poses strain under personal and political weight. ‘Slam’ This project offers unprecedented access to the stars of the Mexican wrestling scene. Notoriously secretive about their true identities, it follows these hyper-masculine stars from the drama of the ring to the intimacy of their own homes. Eight years in the making, Slam is a story of trust. In documenting each costumed character, the project unmasks their private lives and alter-egos. Because concealed behind each disguise, many legends of Lucha Libre are a mess. Their foreheads are covered in scar tissue, their lives are marked by self-harm. This series brings a dignified lens to the characters hidden behind a uniquely Mexican ritual of performance, spectacle and machismo. ‘The Movers’ This project explores the subject of mobility through portraits of Cuba’s top athletes. Their lives are dictated by movement: running, dancing, leaping and jumping. For a lucky few, this opens up new kinds of mobility – geographic, economic and social. But most of them remain trapped: frozen inside a communist regime. The Movers captures this dilemma. Each subject is perfectly motionless within the frame. Each static body resonates with tension and potential. Their bodies are either a means of escape – a ticket to freedom – or the very obstacle to it. This exhibition invites us to consider the labor conditions that determine the lives of professional athletes, and the economic architectures that construct their performing bodies. These are bodies under tension: suspended between action and transaction, poised between freedom and constraint. KatinKa Herbert – Katinka is a commercial portrait photographer based in London. Her projects explore identity, performance and extroversion. Brought up among filmmakers and circus performers, she is fascinated by characters who visibly manufacture their own identities: wrestlers, cross-dressers, movie stars and burlesque dancers. Her work is highly-constructed, immersing her subjects in a world of seduction, theatre and enigmatic humor. This approach has fueled a highly-acclaimed career in commercial portraiture, capturing A-listers from Beyonce to Brian Blessed, Hulk Hogan to Heston Blumenthal. Alongside these assignments, she regularly works on commission for clients such as Adidas, English National Opera, Coutts, Casely-Hayford, Iris Worldwide, Gillette, Jaguar Land Rover, Dazed & Confused, The Observer, Guardian, Telegraph, The Times, Wunderman Thompson and Martin Agency. Her accolades include a catalog of international award shows. Recent highlights include Portrait of Humanity (2019), Portrait of Britain ( 2018), IPA Lucie awards (2018), Taylor Wessing shortlist (2018), LensCulture (2018), SIPA (2018), AOP Open (2017) and the Royal Photographic Society International Photography Exhibition (2017) Finalist in the Sony World Photography Awards (2020) and Shortlisted for the Alpha Female Award, Sony World Photography Awards (2020).

Marlborough New York is pleased to present Nightlife, a group exhibition featuring iconic images by six of the most prominent photographers of the twentieth century whose images all celebrate the nocturnal hours of city life. Featuring works by Berenice Abbott, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, and Weegee, this exhibition unites photographs which capture underground subcultures, illicit activities, subversive fashions, and those otherwise existing on the fringes of society searching for hedonistic escapism. Ultimately, Nightlife will pay homage to the joyous freedoms experienced from dusk to dawn. Working in Paris and London respectively, Brassaï and Bill Brandt captured the joie de vivre of night-goers in the 1930s, as the recent invention of the flashbulb allowed for the new genre to be possible. Brassaï would often walk around the city at night, carrying his camera, tripod, magnesium flash powder and a box of 24 glass plate negatives to photograph Parisian nightlife. Wandering the dimly lit streets, he captured the excessive nightlife of the demi-monde in bars and brothels, creating a unique visual topography of the city and a colorful chronicle of its subcultures. Inspired by Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit published in 1936, Brandt’s second photobook, A Night in London, chronicles the events transpired on a London evening out, oscillating between capturing a variety of social classes. Interested in shadows, Brandt often used the darkroom to alter his photographs in decisive ways, using the “day for night” technique employed by cinematographers to transform images photographed in daylight into night scenes. New York-based photographers Berenice Abbott and Weegee employed a documentarian approach when photographing their nighttime scenes. Abbott is most notable for her book Changing New York, which documents the modern skyscrapers, harbors, highways, city squares, neighborhoods, storefronts of New York City as it swiftly evolved. On view in this exhibition will be New York at Night, one of the most iconic images featured in Changing New York which depicts an aerial view looking north on New York’s West Side. Taking a bleaker approach, legendary news photographer Weegee would listen to a police scanner radio installed in his 1938 Chevrolet in order to arrive first at crime scenes to produce gruesome, yet compassionate, photographs of murders, fires, car accidents, burglaries, and brawls. With a penchant for eccentric trends influenced by nightlife subcultures, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn both produced fashion photography for Vogue magazine. As one of fashion’s most prolific photographers, Newton is most notable for his provocative images which draw from influences such as film noir, Expressionist cinema, S & M, and surrealism. Penn’s fashion photography exercised a more pared-down aesthetic, often staging his motifs in front of white backdrops with minimal lighting. Nightlife celebrates a pivotal period in the history of photography, when the medium firmly established its position as an independent art form. The show also pays tribute to the critical role Marlborough played at the forefront of exhibiting photography during the 1970s and 80s. Many of the photographs on view have not been seen in decades and are from the gallery’s extensive collection. Marlborough’s program continues to highlight historical shows and artist estates alongside leading contemporary artists.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Born Black, an exhibition of Gordon Parks’s photographs—curated in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation. This presentation is inspired by the 1971 book Gordon Parks: Born Black, A Personal Report on the Decade of Black Revolt 1960-1970, which brought together a collection of essays and photographs by Parks that were originally created for Life magazine. Translating the essential themes of the text into an exhibition, Jack Shainman explains, “We seek to commemorate Parks’s ground-breaking 1971 anthology, and the enduring impact of his photographs and writing today. This exhibition is an act of expansion—presenting both seminal and lesser-known works from his renowned photographic series, offering contemporary meditations on his incisive eye and insightful prose.” Gathered in this presentation are images that were featured in, relate to, and extend beyond the photographs illustrated alongside the nine essays in Born Black. In each photo essay, it is clear that Parks’s images capture momentous scenes that exceed the limitations of language, and simultaneously, the frankness of his prose grounds the accompanying images with vital sociopolitical context and his personal perspective. Through his photography and writing—but also clear in his films, literature, and musical compositions—Parks demonstrated the value of empathy and compassion when creating art. Before picking up his camera, he took a vested interest in getting to know his subjects when embarking on a new project, taking time to situate himself both on the frontlines and front porches of the events and lives he covered. Though positioned as an outsider with his camera and pen, as a Black man in America, Parks never shied away from incorporating his nuanced impressions and political solidarity with his subjects, nor did he conceal his personal investment in the experiences, movements, and history he depicted. Situating himself between the mainstream and the radical, this selection of works display his efforts to portray Black Americans from youth to adulthood, a multigenerational archive that expresses the inextricable links between the urban and rural, the individual and communal, and the center and periphery. Whether anonymous or celebrated, each of his subjects prompts the viewer’s participation in critically contemplating what it means to be born into, to be shaped by, and to strive to reimagine life in the United States. His images hold both the force of who is represented and what is symbolized, like the memorialized portraits of Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X shown alongside photographs of crowds gathering to protest against police brutality. In the final essay of the book, Parks reflects on his conversation with Eldridge Cleaver in which the Black Panther Party leader invited Parks to serve as their minister of information. In response, and reflection, he explained, “my interests go beyond those of the Black Panthers, to other minorities and factions of the black movement who want change…Looking back to that moment I find that I am displeased with my answer. I should have said: Both of us are caught up in the truth of the black man’s ordeal. Both of us are possessed by that truth which we define through separate experience. How we choose to act it out is the only difference. You recognize my scars and I acknowledge yours.” Parks was attuned to the importance of singular moments, everyday and monumental, in developing a comprehensive portrait of his time—a precise but inclusive vision of Black life in the twentieth-century. This spring, Steidl, in partnership with The Gordon Parks Foundation, will release an expanded edition of Born Black that illuminates Parks’s vision for the book and offers deeper insight into the nine series within it through additional images, related manuscripts, and scholarly essays. Reflecting on the book’s enduring legacy, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Executive Director of the Gordon Parks Foundation shares, “Born Black, the first book to unite Parks’s writing and photographs, illustrates his thorough effort to platform first-person narratives of Black lives and experiences across America at a time of unequivocal revolution. We are also pleased to include two new essays by renowned critics Jelani Cobb and Nicole R. Fleetwood.”

Mixed Up – Connected presents the works of California photographer, Joe Ramos. The exhibition merges intimate portraits of family and friends with captivating landscapes, reflecting themes of identity, belonging, and the intricate interplay between humanity and nature. The portraits capture a lifetime of cherished faces, while the landscapes reveal the artist's profound connection to the Salinas Valley. As a person of mixed Filipino and Mexican heritage, Ramos navigates the complexities of identity, echoing the experiences of many. These photographs, from birth to the end of life, remind us that we are all connected, regardless of our backgrounds. Joe Ramos, a San Francisco-based photographer hailing from Salinas Valley, has dedicated over four decades to the art of photography. Trained at the San Francisco Art Institute under Richard Conrat, a close associate of Dorothea Lange, Ramos specializes in documentary photography, capturing profound imagery from the Salinas Valley and San Francisco's Mission District. Beyond documentary, his botanical images reflect a deep appreciation for nature, emphasizing the sculptural essence and vibrant hues of plants, often bordering on abstract representation. Ramos's forte lies in portrait photography, evident in the depth and strength of his images—a testament to the mutual trust between the photographer and the subject. Since 2006, he has significantly contributed to San Francisco's Project Homeless Connect, capturing over 1,000 portraits, which culminated in a notable exhibition at the San Francisco Main Branch Library in 2012. Drawing inspiration from legends like Robert Frank, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier Bresson, Ramos's work transcends mere imagery, encapsulating the essence of both everyday and profound moments. Image: ​Monique as a Child, 1980/2023 © Joe Ramos

As one of America's most notable documentary photographers, Dorothea Lange offers a compelling glimpse into a pivotal period in American history. Marked by the Great Depression (1929-1939) and the tumultuous years leading up to World War II (1939-1945), this exhibition displays Lange's seamless ability to capture the essence of human experience in times of profound hardship. The photographs in this exhibition – selected from the Oakland Museum of California's Dorothea Lange Archive and the United States Library of Congress – showcase Lange's unwavering commitment to documenting history. Focused on the impacts of life in California, these photographs reveal Dust Bowl migrants, braceros (Mexican laborers brought to the U.S. as seasonal agricultural workers), and life within the migrant labor camps. Image: Filipinos cutting lettuce. Salinas, California, 1935

Born in 1963 in the South Bronx, Joe Conzo Jr. acquired a passion for photography as a young boy. By some combination of luck and circumstance, as a teenager Joe found himself at the very center of cultural and activist movements changing the Bronx. His father was the personal confidant of Tito Puente, promoting some of the biggest salsa shows of that time; his grandmother, Evelina López Antonetty, was a community activist known as the Hell Lady of the Bronx; and Joe’s classmates at South Bronx High School were literally birthing the culture of Hip Hop. Starting at the age of 10, Joe began to carry his camera daily, photographing everything from school walkouts, to the infamous fires ravaging the Bronx, to rap battles between the Cold Crush Brothers and other foundational Hip Hop groups. Forty-five years later, Joe’s images provide an unmatched and intimate document of the complex forces that created today’s Bronx. The silver gelatin prints in this exhibition were created at the BDC from Joe Conzo’s original negatives generously loaned by Cornell University.

We are pleased to share our next exhibition with our friend and photographer, Steve McCurry, will open this January. “Steve McCurry: The Endless Traveler” will be on view January 27th - April 27th, 2024 at the gallery alongside our concurrent exhibition, "Jeffrey Conley, An Ode to Nature". “Steve McCurry: The Endless Traveler” will feature a selection of Steve's greatest images from across the world, that have touched the hearts and minds of so many. Iconic images will include Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl, which graced the cover of National Geographic in 1985. We look forward to this exhibition, and encourage our audience to RSVP to our opening reception below.

Peter Fetterman Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition, "Jeffrey Conley: An Ode to Nature" featuring the remarkable works of photographer Jeffrey Conley. The exhibition, opening on January 27th, 2024, promises to transport viewers to a world where nature's beauty takes center stage. "Jeffrey Conley: An Ode to Nature” is a retrospective showcase of Jeffrey Conley’s exceptional career up to the present. Currently residing in the Willamette Valley, Oregon, Conley’s ability to capture the essence of nature is unparalleled.. Conley is also a master printer, with each photographic print a testament to his meticulous craftsmanship and exacting standards. He works in multiple processes which include traditional gelatin silver darkroom processes, platinum palladium prints and archival pigment prints on Japanese Kozo paper.. The exhibition will feature a carefully curated selection of Conley’s most recognizable works, as well as some new images, never exhibited before. "Jeffrey Conley: An Ode to Nature" promises to be a must-see event for nature lovers and photography enthusiasts. The exhibition at Peter Fetterman Gallery will be on view between January 27th to April 27th, 2024 at Peter Fetterman Gallery, located in Santa Monica, CA.

oseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Sage Sohier: Passing Time. This solo exhibition will feature a remarkable selection of black and white photographs from Sohier's recently published Nazraeli Press monograph of the same title. The show will run from February 17th - April 27th, with a reception and book signing with the artist from 5-7pm, on Saturday the 17th of February. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The images that comprise the exhibition are drawn from the photographer’s compelling and kindhearted portraits made between 1979-85 of people living in working class and ethnic neighborhoods in her hometown, as well as in the towns she visited each summer during her annual road trips through the eastern and southern regions of the country. The exhibition will showcase both a selection of vintage gelatin silver prints, as well as 16 x 20 inch modern gelatin silver prints, which are the result of the photographer revisiting her archive of negatives and contact sheets from the early 1980s where she discovered a trove of captivating images that had never been printed. Of the work, Sohier observes, “ I noticed a kind of relaxed sensuality in many of the pictures. A kind of theater of the streets emerged”. Sage Sohier has been photographing people in their environments for more than 30 years, and has been awarded fellowships from the No Strings Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation in recognition of her work. Sohier received her B.A. from Harvard University and has taught photography at Wellesley College, Massachusetts College of Art, and Harvard University. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; Portland Museum of Art; and the Brooklyn Museum. Books by the artist include: Perfectible Worlds (Photolucida, 2007), About Face (Columbia College Chicago Press, 2012), At Home With Themselves: Same-Sex Couples in 1980's America (Spotted Books, 2014), Witness to Beauty, Kehrer Verlag, 2016), Americans Seen, (Nazraeli Press, 2017), Animals (Stanley/Barker, 2019), and Peaceable Kingdom (Kehrer Verlag, 2021) and Passing Time, (Nazraeli Press, 2024).

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Josef Koudelka at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. On view from March 29 to April 27, this will be the artist’s first solo show in New York in nearly a decade, bringing together six large-scale panoramas he created between 1987 and 2010 as part of a project titled Industries. The exhibition will also include a display of small-scale, accordion-style maquettes of Mission Photographique Transmanche, Beyrouth Centre Ville, The Black Triangle, Reconnaissance-Wales, Lime Stone, Teatro del Tempo, Camargue, Piemonte, WALL, Ruins, and Solac. This presentation at Pace coincides with the release of Josef Koudelka: Next, the definitive and only authorized biography of the artist, published by Aperture. The book will be available for purchase on-site at the gallery during the run of the exhibition. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1938, Koudelka trained as an aeronautical engineer but began photographing Romani people—their everyday lives, their struggles, and their traditions—mainly in central European countries in the early 1960s, making a full-time commitment to photography later that decade. In 1968, he photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague, publishing his works under the initials P.P. (Prague photographer). Koudelka, who was anonymously awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for those photographs, left Czechoslovakia seeking political asylum in England, with assistance from the Magnum Photos cooperative, in 1970. His first book, Gypsies, was released by Aperture in 1975, and he has since produced more than a dozen publications of his work. Koudelka’s interest in the social and political dimensions of photography, evident in his earliest bodies of work, would endure through the following decades. He has been working in large-format, panoramic photography since 1986, capturing images of changing landscapes around the world—places that have been reshaped, altered, and in some cases devastated by the effects of industry, time, and war. Adopting a semi-nomadic lifestyle in pursuit of documenting these haunting, elegiac scenes, Koudelka produced deeply interconnected bodies of work that speak to the ways that the weight of history lingers within the natural world. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the artist photographed the Berlin Wall; the streets of Beirut immediately following the Lebanese Civil War; outsized industrialization and pollution in the Black Triangle, a border region between Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic; the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland; and other places forever transformed by sociopolitical turmoil, violence, and environmental destruction. Also among Koudelka’s famous panoramic projects are his Ruins series, for which he photographed more than 200 archeological sites across Greece, Italy, Libya, Syria, and other countries between 1991 and 2015, and his body of work on Israel’s West Bank Wall, which he created over the course of seven trips to Israel and Palestine between 2008 and 2012. “The face of the wounded landscape—it is marked by trouble, by suffering,” Koudelka tells his biographer, Melissa Harris. “It is the same as the face of people who have a difficult life. I am interested in real people, real faces ... In this wounded landscape, I admire the fight for survival ... Nature is stronger than man.” The artist’s upcoming exhibition with Pace in New York, his first solo show in the city since 2015, will be presented on the gallery’s seventh floor against sweeping views of the Chelsea skyline. Measuring some nine feet in width, each of the six monumental panoramas that Koudelka has selected for the exhibition—captured across the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Azerbaijan, and Israel between 1987 and 2010—tells a different story.

We are delighted to present the first exhibition in the United States, of Dutch photographer David van Dartel. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Elliott Gallery, Amsterdam. This Time Tomorrow brings together a selection of ten color photographs from two of the photographer’s acclaimed projects—On Vlieland and What Once Was—that explore an intimate portrayal of friendship and masculinity. Initially exploring and documenting his close circle of friends on Vlieland, a remote island in the north of The Netherlands, Van Dartel then photographed subjects as he travelled across several European countries; constructing a vivid portrait of young adults, and raising questions about male friendship and the classical discourse of masculinity. The photographs portray young men, located in soft, quiet landscapes, isolated from the external noise and distractions of society. Although stylized and constructed, the immense power of the photographs come from their success in conveying emotion across a succession of itimate scenes.