Leslie Hewitt, Riffs on Real Time with Ground (Deep Reflection) (2021), via Anton Kern
On view this summer at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Photographic Pictures arranges a body of work drawing on photography and the possibility for expanded senses of perception and representation through the medium. Curated by artist Anne Collier, the show culls together a range of works including pieces by the artist, Luigi Ghirri, Jack Pierson, and Jiro Takamatsu, whose 1972-73 series provides the central inspiration for the show.
Marlo Pascual, Untitled (2017), via Anton Kern
Takamatsu’s Photograph of Photograph series serves as a central inspiration. Takamatsu commissioned a professional photographer to make photographs of some fifty snapshots taken from Takamatsu’s family albums. The resulting uncanny images are literally “photographs of photographs.†Despite the project’s conceptual origins, Photograph of Photograph presents images-within-images, elusive and illusory in their operation between still life and print, conceptual operation and plain image. This notion runs throughout the show, using the concept to present a meditation and consideration of photography’s capabiliy for self-criticism and self-reflection. Of particular emphasis, as always in photography, is the notion of looking itself, gazing through the viewfinder to construct the image, or perhaps, to allow the image to construct itself.
Melanie Schiff, Neil Young, Neil Young (2006), via Anton Kern
Jiro Takamatsu, Photograph of Photograph (1973), via Anton Kern
Girri’s work is a particular fascinating iteration of this notion, using vantage point and perspective as a way to consruct geometrically rich and meaningful constructions of the image. Similar notions come to the fore in Marlo Pascual‘s work, where images of the human body are suspended in the picture plane, creating subtle iterations of depth, flatness and geometry. Another meditation on similar themes comes from work on view by Leslie Hewitt, a series of images drawing counterpoint from dense fields of color, creating grammatical systems between the exhibited image and the artist’s own contribution to the image. Using both the framing itself and the added meanings of color and space, each of the works allows new senses of space to emerge from the work.
The show closes August 26th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Photographic Pictures [Exhibition Site]
