Boxer’s Hands, 1933 © Willard Van Dyke

Exhibition on view:
June 16–September 30, 2012

Monterey Museum of Art
559 Pacific Street
Monterey, CA
(831) 372-5477

Group f/64 was a pioneer photography crew of seven residing in northern California. They abandoned the soft-focus, pictorial style of photography popularized in the early twentieth century and instead promoted “straight” photography, communicating by means of realism, high contrast, and extreme detail. Monterey Museum of Art presents In Sharp Focus: The Legacy of Monterey Photography, which examines Group f/64 and their successors. Legendary artists Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Alma Lavenson, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston are included in the exhibition. These photographers transformed American photography by relinquishing interpretive manipulation by progressing towards pure, sharp images with a maximum depth of field. Joining these legendary artists will be works by: Henry Gilpin, Rod Dresser, John Sexton, and Michael Kenna.

One of the founding members of Aperture and Group f/64 Ansel Adams is featured in Aperture issues 169 and 168. Cunningham’s work can be seen in the Aperture published, The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious. Weston is featured in Aperture issues 188 and 140, appears in Aperture published The Edge of Vision as well as Edward Weston: Nudes.

Footage from the opening reception at Von Lintel Gallery. Courtesy NYC Gallery Openings.

Marco Breuer, otherwise known as the “photographer without a camera,” has built a strong reputation over the course of the last 20 years exploring lens-less “photogenic” art. While many photographers today are employing more and more complex technology in their work, the German conceptual artist and 2006 Guggenheim fellow says his is an “ongoing attempt to strip down the photographic process, to remove the distractions of equipment, and to force imagery out of photographic paper itself.”

His latest solo exhibition Condition (on view at Von Lintel Gallery through June 23, 2012) presents work he made in and out of the darkroom, stressing photographic paper by exposing it to heat, light, and physical abrasion with “coal, sandpaper, heat guns, burning swaths of cotton, electric frying pans, and other unexpected objects,” as one interviewer catalogues.

Ranging from small photographic sketches, to larger 30 by 40-inch prints, “every individual piece constitutes a search, a move away from the given, a test of the materials’ limits,” the press release states. He fuses image and medium, “rendering them inseparable, one and the same.”

In 2007, Aperture published his monograph Early Recordings, the first comprehensive look at his boldly experimental work, alongside a limited edition slip-cased book which comes with a unique-to-each-edition Polaroid print. His work is also featured in Lyle Rexer’s sold out book, The Edge of Vision (Aperture 2009).

Read John Yau’s review of Breuer’s solo exhibition on HyperAllergic. View installation shots and photos from the opening reception on May 10, 2012 on the Von Lintel Gallery blog. And read interviews with the artist about his work on ARTLOG and on MPR.

Marco Breuer: Condition
Exhibition on view:
May 10 – June 23, 2012

Von Lintel Gallery
520 West 23 Street
New York, New York 10011
(212) 242-0599

The photographic process is often credited in part with displacing representation from painting, pushing it over the course of the first half of the last century further into the domain of abstraction. The camera was commonly thought to capture and document a supposed objective reality in a way the human hand never could. However, photography itself has also been variously employed for nonrepresentational abstraction since its inception.

From the very first photograms to Aaron Siskind‘s ab-ex alluding macrophotography, to Penelope Umbrico‘s digitally-manipulated found images of “Suns From Flickr,” The Edge of Vision: Abstractions in Contemporary Photography (on view at Schneider Museum of Art in Oregon through June 16, 2012) examines the history of nonrepresentational photographic image-making and its role in contemporary art.

In a two part video interview, independent writer and critic Lyle Rexer, who curated the exhibition and authored the 2009 Aperture-published book by the same title, says he was drawn to artists that “were making pictures that moved away from from an easily identifiable subject, or that complicated the picture or the response that we normal have to pictures, in what is essentially thought of as a denotative medium.”

The traveling exhibition, which has been on view in a number of places around the world, each time in a slightly different iteration, features work by a diverse group of contemporary artists including Bill Armstrong, Carel Balth, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Ellen Carey, Roland Fischer, Michael Flomen, Manuel Geerinck, Edward Mapplethorpe, Penelope Umbrico, Silvio Wolf, and more listed here. For Rexer, he says, bringing this group together and seeing what they have in common is meant to address the following question:

What is it about photography now that makes it possible for us to have artists that  on the one hand do very documentary work, and other artists at the same time, sometimes the same artists, who are also doing work that would qualify as abstract?

For more information on the work on view, be sure to check out the Edge of Vision Video Interview Series, conducted during the installation at Aperture Gallery in 2009, on vimeo:

• Penelope Umbrico persents her work “For Sale/TV’s From Craigslist,” and explains why she considers herself a documentary photographer, “a traveler through media.”
• Ellen Carey discusses her large-scale work “Pulls with Lifts and Drops,” film pulled through the rollers of a Polaroid large-format camera, and her color photogram, “PushPins,” exploring how each challenges the viewer to rethink the medium.
• Barbara Kasten explains her work based on physical constructions that play with light and are created only for the purpose of being photographed. By this approach, the photograph itself becomes the object and is removed from being representative or documentary.
• Silvio Wolf presents his work which combines straight photography and the unexposed ends of film rolls as negatives exposed to light. The end results are mesmerizing and meditative colorful images about light and absence of light.
• Bill Armstrong puts in context his “Mandala #450″ piece, explains why he uses blurring as a process and explores his “painterly approach to photography.”
• Charles Lindsay speaks about how he started working with his unique carbon emulsion process, his inspirations and the combination of his photographic, video and sound works.
• Seth Lambert contextualizes his work in the show “Nothing on the Bed of an Epson Expression 10000XL” within his Failures series of grids mapping out anything from beard hair, mirror pieces to nothing with a blank scan.
• Carel Balth explains the process behind his works “Moving IV” and “Madrid V,” and how his appropriation of images through a digital format functions as a new medium.
• Jack Sal speaks about his piece “Sale/Sala (Salt/Room)” while you watch him installing it.
• Manuel Geerinck, who started his career as a painter, speaks about his unique process combining his drawings that he then photographs in motion.

Also, watch a panel discussion on Abstraction in Photography from 2009 at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, moderated by Rexer, and read a review of the exhibition when it was on view at Lewis & Clark College in Portland earlier this year, from the Oregonian.

Exhibition on view:
Thursday, May 10 – Saturday, June 16, 2012

$5 Suggested Donation

Schneider Museum of Art
1250 Siskiyou Blvd
Ashland, Oregon
(541) 552-6245

Courtesy Market Street Productions

“While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent,” Chuck Close says in the clip above for the “Artists & Alchemists” documentary feature, “I think it is the hardest medium in which to have a distinctive personal vision.”

Known for his unparalleled attention to detail in hyperrealist portraiture, Close explains in conveying that vision his predilection for using immensely revealing daguerreotypes, plates that capture just about the widest possible range of highlights and shadows with the use of strobe lights that capture quite literately the power of the sun.

This clip offers a bit of background on the labor intensive process that went into his series A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, on view at the Wichita Art Museum through this Sunday, April 15, 2012. The series features fifteen massive prints of the artist’s world-renowned friends (Cindy Sherman, Philip Glass, James Turrell, Laurie Anderson, to name a few) presented with microscopic intimacy, each alongside a poem by Bob Holman. The work was inspired in part by a collaborative series of lithographs done by poet/curator Frank O’Hara and artist Larry Rivers in the late 50s, as Close explains briefly in the accompanying interview from the 2006 Aperture monograph A Couple of Ways of Doing Something with Lyle Rexer, author of the Edge of Vision.

As photography moves forward becoming more widespread and accessible, in an era when the premium put on absolute originality is largely in question, sometimes reaching back for precedent can be as fruitful as rediscovering archaic technology. Or as Close puts it, “In 1840 virtually everything I love about photography was already there.”

Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something
Through Sunday, April 15, 2012
$7 adults, $5 seniors, and FREE for children

Wichita Art Museum
1400 West Museum Boulevard
Wichita, Kansas
(316) 268-4980

Aperture has long been recognized as an excellent source for quality traveling exhibitions to museums, university galleries, libraries, and art centers around the world.  The foundation has a prestigious roster of exhibitions available at any given time, currently there are ten different exhibitions moving around the world and another four that are currently in development. These exhibitions reflect the diversity of our book program including monographic exhibitions from masters of the medium such as Bruce Davidson and Alex Webb to exciting group shows including The New York Times Magazine Photographs, a never before seen collection of some of the greatest photography ever published in the Magazine and reGeneration 2 a  introduction to the most promising photographers of the next generation. See below for more details on where our exhibitions are currently on view.

Dawoud Bey: Class Pictures

Dawoud Bey’s Class Pictures are portraits of American adolescence across the social, economic and racial spectrum. Now on display at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, PA, the 40 x 30 inch color prints are paired with page-long statements written by the subjects–sometimes touching, sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing–that deepen our understanding of the most awkward age.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012–Saturday, March 10, 2012

Silver Eye Center for Photography
1015 East Carson Street
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
(412) 431-1810

The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography

The Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR presents The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Color Photography. Photographs and photo-based installations, many exhibited for the first time, “explore the territory of ‘undisclosed’ or abstract imagery in all its forms.” Single-artist installations examine the photographic process and visual culture in an effort to discover new optical possibilities and meaning-making.

Thursday, January 19, 2012–Sunday, March 18, 2012

Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery, Lewis and Clark College
0615 S.W. Palantine Hill Rd.
Portland, Oregon
(503) 768-7687

Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something

In Witchita, KA, the Witchita Art Museum presents A Couple of Ways of Doing Something—fifteen of Chuck Close’s intimate daguerreotype portraits of influential contemporary artists alongside Bob Holman’s beautifully typeset poems.  In addition, Close a curator has included examples of his other works taken from each daguerreotype in a variety of media, including tapestries and photogravures.

Sunday, January 29, 2012–Sunday, April 15, 2012

Wichita Art Museum
1400 West Museum Boulevard
Wichita, Kansas
(316) 268-4980

We update all traveling exhibition schedules on a regular basis on our website here and here.  Please feel free to contact Annette Booth, Exhibitions Manager at 212.946.7128 or at abooth@aperture.org for further information on hosting an exhibition at your venue!

Now on view at A.M. Richard Fine Art is the group exhibition “Polaroid: Instant Joy”. The show attempts to provide an overview of those who have used instant film to push limits and embrace unpredictability. One of the artists, Chuck Close, was featured in Aperture magazine issue 160 and Aperture published his book of daguerreotypes, “A Couple Ways of Doing Something” in 2006. Ellen Carey, who was recently published in “The Edge of Vision” (Aperture, 2009) is also included in the exhibition.

Polaroid: Instant Joy
June 19–July 31, 2010

A.M. Richard Fine Art:
328 Berry Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY

Thank you to Photo District News for throwing a fabulous party atop Tribeca Rooftop celebrating the the winners featured in the 2010 PDN Photo Annual issue. This year’s issue recognized a number of Aperture books and affiliated photographers  including Jonathan Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences; Doug DuBois’ All the Days and Nights; The Edge of Vision, by Lyle Rexer; Paolo Ventura’s Winter Stories, Eirik Johnson’s Sawdust Mountain; Joel Meyerowitz’s Legacy; and Robert Adam’s Summer Nights, Walking, as well as photographer Gabrielle Stabile who is part of the Aperture Green Cart Project.

Check out the fun had by all, thanks to Fujifilm Instax Cameras! Pictured above: Casey Kelbaugh of Slideluck Potshow, Editor of PDN Conor Risch, Photographer Wyatt Gallery, Andrew Hetherington of Whats the Jackanory, Photographer Gillian Laub and Aperture’s Lesley Martin, Photo Editor of Time Magazine Paul Moakley, Michelle Dunn Marsh, Photographer Paolo Ventura and Aperture’s Denise Wolff, including Photo Annual Winners Gabrielle Stabile, Rachel Barrett and Jon Smith.)

Click here to view PDN’s online gallery of works featured in the 2010 issue.

China: Friday, September 18: Aperture Editor, Lesley A. Martin and artist Penelope Umbrico arrive in the midst of installation at Pingyao International Photo Festival for The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography . 90% there … all images up; text panels still missing.

Exhibition opens at 9:00 a.m. … Fingers crossed!

Check out the latest press on Aperture’s new and upcoming releases!

Coming Soon the new edition of the Robert Adams classic, Summer Nights, Walking as featured in the September issue of Visionaire magazine.

Click here to view Lyle Rexer’s The Edge of Vision.

Click here to view Dan Winters’ Periodical Photographs.

View new videos from the weekly series of artist’s interviews with Barbara Kasten and Carel Balth included in the exhibition now on view at Aperture Gallery, The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography.

In the first video-clip, Barbara Kasten presents her work Studio Construct 17 as based on physical constructions that play with light and are created only for the purpose of being photographed. By this approach, the photograph itself becomes the object and is removed from being representative or documentary. Kasten expands that while subject matter is inherent to photography, her images are unidentifiable and exist as records of light that explore spatial and formal ambiguity. This distance results in a more indirect connection between the viewer and the work.

In the second video-clip, artist Carel Balth explains the process behind his works Moving IV and Madrid V, and how his appropriation of images through a digital format functions as a new medium. Originally recorded as digital video taken by Balth, he carefully selected screen-grabs that are later printed on canvas called Piezographs. He explains that this approach creates a new vantage that confronts reality though light, space, time, and movement into a culmination of images. Balth likes the idea that people may not completely understand his work at first, and recommends The Edge of Vision by curator Lyle Rexer for further insight to his aesthetic.

Click here to view The Edge of Vision limited-edition portfolio.

Click here to view related microsite including previously posted videos with Lyle Rexer part 1 & part 2, Bill Armstrong, Seth Lambert, Charles Lindsay, Jack Sal, Penelope Umbrico, Silvio Wolf.