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This well-edited show doesn’t change any of our conclusions about the obvious intelligence in Josephson’s work, but instead acts like a welcome refrain, bringing some of Josephson’s primary innovations back to our attention for another round of savoring and recalibration. Especially as seen in some of these lesser known works, Josephson’s cleverness and thoughtfulness about photography is remarkably deep; even efforts that we may have overlooked prove to be just as perplexingly magical as some of his best known masterworks.

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It seems likely that in our current times of puzzlingly malleable truth and simmering anxiety that the Surrealist impulses of the past will have a resurgence, and that photographers like Jahan might be primed for rediscovery or at least renewed interest. This tightly edited survey reminds us of his breadth of vision, the consistent quality of his efforts, and the power of an off-kilter view of unsettled normalcy.

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KHALIK ALLAH's BLACK MOTHER selected as THE NEW YORKER Best Movies of 2019

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The documentary filmmaker Khalik Allah, whose new feature, “Black Mother,” opens on Friday, is one of the most original cinematographers of the time. The modern cinema is a photographic cinema, with its roots in the hands-on creation of personal and highly inflected images; Allah is also a notable still photographer, and he made “Black Mother” the same way that he makes stills. He filmed the movie alone in the company of his subjects, doing his own camera work (in a variety of film and video formats, in color and in black-and-white); for that matter, he also recorded the sound. But his photographic sensibility is only one element of his exemplary art. He also edited the film, and his complex sense of audiovisual composition—textural, tonal, thematic, rhythmic, philosophical—is as original and as personal as his cinematography. 

Link to the rest of Richard Brody's review from March 8

Snapshot: Pierre Jahan at the Gitterman Gallery, New York

The images showcase the late French photographer’s remarkable ability to merge reportage and Surrealism.

Taken in 1941 by the late French photographer Pierre Jahan, the photos in La mort et les statues are like something from a bad dream. Dismembered statues and gargoyles appear against an incongruous background of industrial machinery, plunging the viewer into a world of shadow and stone.

Jahan produced the prints in Nazi-occupied Paris, where sculptures had been seized from their public perches to be melted down for metals to aid Germany’s war effort. These grotesque figures seem to emit a silent expression of pain for the surrendered city.

The images showcase Jahan’s remarkable ability to merge reportage and Surrealism, a slippage he described as “a kind of drift similar to dreaming”.

In the realm of photographic abstraction, Sudre’s pictures stand out – his mix of processes and experimentation led to works that don’t look like anything else we’ve seen before (or since). Their extremes force us beyond simple admiration of their rhythms and complexities into a grasping search for analogies – their strangeness looks like something else, what exactly we can’t quite say. These are intense photographic expressions, ones whose densely packed mysteries and allusions keep us wondering.

HOW KHALIK ALLAH BENT THE RULES OF STREET PHOTOGRAPHY, AND FOUND HIS VISION

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Allen Frame: Suddenly

Two works in Allen Frame’s new show use vernacular photographs that he discovered during a recent year-long residency in Rome as the jumping off point for hybrid wall-filling installations that put the found images into dialogue with his own photographs. The open-ended mysteries of the anonymous vintage photographs offered Frame the opportunity to graft his own interpretations onto the scenes, and he then went on to expand those themes further, twisting past and present into intimately coupled meditations...

The subtle codes of human attraction that inform the two installations are generally absent from Frame’s larger color images. The pictures instead capture pauses – the in-between moments that happen just before and after something else. Ivana looks out of a widow that could be a painting of the Italian countryside, Ugo checks his phone as he walks down the repaired stairs of an older stone balcony, and Pietro sits on the edge of a swimming pool, looking to his right out of the frame. The photographs linger, and that slowness provides space for vicariously stepping into the lull.

In many ways, these pictures are all testing Frame’s ability to find a particular emotional pitch and stay there, allowing it to blossom and expand into something more complex and intricate. In each of these works/projects, he’s trying to capture invisible restlessness, and attempting to freight his understated scenes with a tiny slice of agitation. When he successfully plucks that string, his pictures shimmer with unseen vibrations.

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Fantastic Views

In his three-part exhibit “Suddenly,” Allen Frame’s photographs in Italy build narrative fantasies that draw upon foreign films, theater, southern American literature and his 2018 year-long residency in Rome. Frame starts with and improvises on found Roman photographs from the 1960’s, adding his own scenes with characters who all seem to be anticipating or searching for something. The salon-style grouping “Giuseppe,” a seeming travelogue featuring a strapping sunbather and his friends, the elegantly subdued and ornately framed B&W series “Suddenly” (referencing Tennessee Williams’ 1958 play Suddenly Last Summer) and Frame’s single color photographs of individuals in sun-drenched recreational scenes, all feature a subtle homoerotic charge. With an adroit dichotomy of restrained, often pensive characters in bright, open compositions, Frame’s narratives tease like film stills, building suspense and desire.

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Feser has carved out a defensible artistic space for herself by not only smartly leveraging the natural dissonance of the image/object dichotomy of photography but also pushing her works further toward sophisticated investigations of surface and abstraction...

As intricately hand crafted objects, Feser’s prints are undeniably impressive and remarkable, but it’s their resulting ability to make us step back, think, and reassess what we assume is happening that makes them durably intriguing...

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Interview from Praxis Interview Magazine on Yale University Radio WYBCX 

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