PhotographyWhat's NEW in NYC Photo?By Carl GunhouseMonday, June 11, 2007Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Sculptures of doll’s heads and photographs of sculptures of dolls’ heads. Through Jun 16th Matthew Marks Gallery Gursky is a black hole in photography. Photographic anti-matter. He goes out and finds amazing things, “an observatory 1,000 meters underground….containing 50,000 tons of water and surrounded by thousand of golden tubes” that watches for supernovas or a North Korean government-organized “performance of over 80,000 gymnasts…perfectly coordinated” performing for “10,000 children …each holding colored flipcards that form a constantly changing mosaic of nationalist imagery.” Gursky then applies his undead-like abilities to suck anything interesting out of his inherently amazing subject matter and replace it with soul-killing formal investigations into digital manipulation and perspective. It is time for his Photoshop CS2 to be confiscated. We can’t go on allowing him to crush the life out of photography. He must be stopped before he bores us all. Through Jun 30th D’Amelio Terras 525 W 22nd St. Btw. 10th & 11th Aves. Sam Samore Close-up panoramic grainy black and white pictures of peoples’ faces that reference …you guessed it, film noir. The thing about creating mystery out of still images is that it’s easy. Still images by nature are ambiguous, and leave much to interpretation. Add some grain, remove the color and provide little visual information, and you’ve got a potboiler for those who missed the invention of cinema. Through Jun. 29th Sonnabend Gallery Who knew the Bechers were still making images? Here is something to do while having your mind numbed by a conceptual framework that expired sometime in the early eighties: try to pick out the pictures that weren’t taken two decades ago. Through Jun. 30th Steven Kasher Gallery 521 W 23rd St. Btw. 10th & 11th Aves. New York Genius I am powerless to resist Steven Kasher Galleries’ never-ending shows of vintage and vernacular photographs. The current show is a collection of famous figures from the Magnum archive curated by one of Kasher’s few living artists, Lou Reed. The show is the grocery-store tabloid you wish existed, Henri Cartier Bresson photographing Robert Rauschenberg and Brice Marden at the kitchen table, Bruce Davidson photographing Roman Polanski hanging on to the side of a pier, or Thomas Hoepker photographing Mohamed Ali in his prime doing anything. If only there were an art world US or In Touch. Art Forum could certainly elevate the level of its content with some paparazzi photographs of art stars and stories on how best to lose ten pounds for Art Basel. Through Jun 19th Matthew Marks Gallery I don’t understand why Fischli and Weiss insist on making photographs. This time around it is an endless array of formally incompetent pictures of sculptures William Wegman and Jan Groover might collaborate on if they were bored at a dinner party. The series is unrelenting. I’ve had the fortune to see it twice and have yet to get through the entire show, before wondering off. Maybe that is the point. I don’t know. Through Jun. 30th Robert Mann Gallery Blurry color pictures of people flying through the air or floating in a lake. I am gonna guess and say the work is about memory or possibly dreams . . . oh, it’s about “the artist’s search for inner balance during a time of global uncertainty.” Damn didn’t see that coming. For me, Elijah Gowin’s work will always be about the artist’s memory of dreams about a search for inner balance during a time of global uncertainty. Through Jun. 30th Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art Grainy color photographs that look like location shots for ‘50 First Dates’, and bringing to mind a romantic comedy about amnesia is in no way a good thing. Through Jun. 16th Mitchell-Innes & Nash Chelsea A group show about something or other, by the looks of things possibly photographic abstraction? It is a rather nice showcase for Walead Beshty’s continuing series of ray-o-grams. Once again, he is displaying large pieces of photographic paper that he crumpled up, exposed to light and then developed, creating an abstract cubist take on Man Ray’s process. The two images in the show are in color and seem harsher than those he showed at Wallspace Gallery last fall. Their presence in the group show strips the images of their conceptual framework leaving them bare, as beautiful formal images that should put the likes of James Welling and Adam Fuss to shame. Through Jul. 27th Pace/MacGill 32 E 57th St. Btw. Madison & Park Aves. Jocelyn Lee, Grounded I find Jocelyn Lee frustrating. She makes undeniably beautiful photographs: her color is consistently vibrant without being garish, her subjects are engaging and beg to be looked at, but there is something holding the pictures back. The phonographs feel too constrained and managed. There is an unneeded stillness that tends to mute the otherwise wonderful images. Everything is so resolved, from the light, to the pose, to the framing of the images, and it is all so immaculate, that any semblance of a human maker gets lost in the professionalism of the pictures. The loaded subject matter, a topless pubescent girl, countless awkward teens in bathing suits, an old couple with a young girl submerged in a misty lake, or a pregnant teenager, feels more like editorial work than a glimpse into the artist’s inner psyche. Some pictures have some life: two boys hunting in golden underbrush up to their necks or two well-meaning girls about to perform a stream-side autopsy on a dead beaver, or a slightly heavy teen with her face turned away and hidden in her own hair. These pictures feel real, happening in a world that wasn’t created solely for our own examination. Through Jun. 16th Gitterman Gallery Clearly 35mm black and white photographs are no longer the language of contemporary photography. They are akin to speaking old English. One can pronounce the words correctly and use proper grammar and still not be understood. Or worse, create little interest in finding out what the photographer is saying. So why invest your time in communicating in a dated language? Because without a base language, all the linguistic liberties (or transgressions, depending on your point of view) will make no sense to anyone, even those trying to create a more specific and contemporary language that fits their needs. The art world has too often been awed by the inventiveness of new artists and work that speaks to interests we don’t understand (like Siebren Versteeg). But without a Vatican-like monitoring of visual quality, contemporary art easily slides into a unintelligible mush (like Wolfgang Tillmans). Of course, work can be beautiful even if it is dated, as is the case with Rosewell Angier’s gritty show documenting Navajo Indians in New Mexico and Arizona. The work dates from the late seventies and early eighties and shows a painful visual clarity that tugs at the heart or at least asks that you numb it with a strong drink, while displaying a visual intelligence that makes that drink at a dreary bar or that young girl at the closing of a fair visually spectacular. It is this clarity of content and visual intelligence that stands as a stern reminder of what is so often forgotten in contemporary photography. Through Jul. 28th  
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