This year’s installment of "Gute Aussichten"—an annual selection of new German photography—features seven artists. The theme is “editing,” though it’s not always clear how each artist hews to it. Sara-Lena Maierhofer creates a psychodocumentary of a compelling subject—Clark Rockefeller, the German-born impostor and accused murderer—but the series provides insufficient context for nonexperts to fully understand [...]
In a new exhibit at the Adah Rose Gallery, it’s surprisingly hard to tell apart the photographs of Esther Hidalgo and Julie Wolsztynski. Both offer square, similarly sized, unframed, bleeding-to-the-edge, close-up images of female bodies and body parts. For these two old-school, film-shooting photographers, the most noteworthy difference is color palette. Hidalgo’s abstract and [...]
The devastating Haitian earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010—which struck almost two years ago—has inspired many artists. Last fall, Wyatt Gallery offered photographic meditations on life amid temporary housing in the exhibit "Tent Life: Haiti," while the Watergate Gallery is currently showing Haitian paintings from a damaged arts venue in Port-au-Prince. At Studio Gallery, mixed-media artist [...]
Arthur Drooker’s photographic documentary project, Lost Worlds, brought him to 33 ruins in 15 countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, some of them famous (Peru’s Macchu Pichu, Guatemala’s Tikal) and some decidedly less so. As an exhibit at the Art Museum of the Americas illustrates, not all of the sites he visited ended up [...]
Sometimes an exhibit is great in its entirety; sometimes one particular piece rises well above the rest of the exhibit. The images below fall into the latter category. Together, they constitute the 10 best photographic images of 2011, at least in this reviewer's opinion.
1. Harry Callahan, “Telephone Wires,” National Gallery of Art. The National Gallery [...]
Locally, the past year has been a good one for two types of photography—landscape work and documentary. It's also been notable for several smart shows at the American University Museum and Goethe-Institut, but the sad closing of a venerable venue of good photography, Bethesda's Fraser Gallery. Here's my list of the 10 best photographic exhibits in [...]
The three photographers showing jointly at the Goethe-Institut—Iris Janke of Germany and Kaitlin Jencso and Sara J. Winston of the United States—intend their works to be a “dialogue on a common topic: self-identity.” Each does indeed present a deeply personal vision, but in combination, their offerings are uneven. Winston provides depressing visions of disorder—matted hair [...]
Got a hankering for retro? Photography-wise, it doesn’t get more retro than the creamy grayscales of the 1920s and 1930s now on display in “Photography Between the Wars” at Addison/Ripley Fine Art. The exhibit, composed of works from Virginia Marshall Zabriskie’s venerable New York City gallery, includes lesser-known, but classic, images by such giants as [...]
There are at least two contrasting schools of photographic portraiture. In one, a photographer (most famously Arnold Newman) places subjects within their natural environments, like the workplace or some other meaningful spot. In the other, the photographer seeks to visually isolate their subject from all outside influences (as Richard Avedon famously did with his stark, [...]
It’s hard to decide what’s more unusual in “Mistify,” a series of photographs by Alexander Vasiljev—the location, or the technique. Vasiljev took the photographs in a remote region of Peru known as the Wax Palm Forest, where fog shrouds 200-foot-tall palm trees. Once he takes his photographs, Vasiljev prints them on archival paper, mounts them [...]
