Although the weather in New York seems uncertain, winter is in fact over and the time has come for some fresh art. It's springtime for photography in the Artnet gallery center, where new photo shows are popping out all around the globe. Use this edition of Artnet Insider to survey photography in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Italy and London.
At Studio la Città in Verona, Italy, which specializes in Post-War and Intimist Italian artists, you can count on at least one important photo show each year. Dramatic photographer Hiroyuki Masuyama fills that spot this season, Apr. 6-May 25, 2002, following previous shows of work by Thomas Demand and Uta Barth. Masuyama makes panoramic photos that can measure as much as six times as wide as they are tall, and exhibits the resulting images in light boxes. Most of his works here are exterior views empty of people, like Park - One day - 13.04.2001 (2001), but one work, titled Private Room #1 (2001), is a tantalizing timed exposure with ghostly images of several figures.
Over in London, at Robert Sandelson Gallery in the hip Cork Street gallery district, is a show of anamorphically erotic photos by Paul Smith dubbed "This Is Not Pornography," Apr. 11-May 18, 2002. Smith's work features both a male and female model in a variety of chimerical situations that suggest a certain, shall we say, androgeny? In Bathroom, a topless man looks in the mirror at his female reflection, for instance, while in Doggy a man and a woman. . . well, never mind, go look for yourself.
Photographer Lynn Davis is expert at capturing evocative, large-scale images of the land. At Galerie Karsten Greve in Paris, Apr. 13-May. 25, 2002, is an exhibition of 40 recent photographs of icebergs in Greenland and landscapes from her travels in Turkey, Egypt, Sudan and Mali. The Greenland photos emphasize nature and elemental forces while the others show cultural archetypes using temples, the pyramids and the otherworldly cities carved out of stone in Capadocia. Davis uses large-format prints to transform travel photography into a romantic idealization of the world around us.
The Photography gallery Apex Fine Art in Los Angeles presents "America at Mid-Century: Two Views," Apr. 12-May 18, 2002. The show presents more than 50 photographs from the 1950s by Ida Wyman and Larry Silver, who documented the suburbanization of life in the great American cities of Los Angles, Chicago and New York. The photographs capture simpler times -- an iceman carting ice off of his wagon on the streets of New York, muscle beach in Santa Monica and boys playing with dolls in the Bronx. Call it nostalgia in springtime.
Here in New York, Garner Tullis gallery presents works by five new artists -- including photographer Thomas Shelby. The Tribeca-based documentary photographer has worked for everything from Playboy to National Geographic and Time. Featured in this exhibition are quiet, melancholy photos of Dennis Hopper, a woman on a typical old Paris stairway and smoke flooding the streets from the World Trade Center. The show runs Apr. 18-May 16, 2002.
