Renate Aller’s previous show at Adamson Gallery—a decade's worth of sea-and-sky photographs taken from the same point on southern Long Island—was rousing success, offering hyper-real portrayals within ever-changing atmospheric conditions. But Aller's new exhibit demonstrates the perils of taking a good idea a step too far. Titled “dicotyledon,” after a flowering plant that grows in [...]
The title “Time & Land” describes with precision this exhibit of photographic works by Ken D. Ashton, Kate MacDonnell, and Terri Weifenbach at Civilian Art Projects: The artists explore, in their own way, the passage of time on the land. MacDonnell’s works are hobbled by needlessly claustrophobic wood frames and an indifferent color palette, but her [...]
The prolific and stylistically restless D.C.-based artist Colby Caldwell is not only mounting two simultaneous exhibits—at Hemphill Fine Arts and Civilian Art Projects—but the exhibits feature four distinct bodies of work, each with a varied take on photography. Several works (including the one below) are new examples from Caldwell’s decade-old series “How to Survive Your [...]
The National Geographic exhibition “Samurai: The Warrior Transformed” explores not just the warrior culture of the samurai, but also the way Japan used the samurai to build bridges to the West. Appropriately, the organizers included an exhibit-within-an-exhibit of photographs by Eliza R. Scidmore, who first visited Japan in 1885 and who from 1910 to 1912 [...]
In which one of our art critics highlights a favorite work on view in a local gallery. Click to enlarge!
Like so many photographers today, Georg Kuettinger is concerned not just with portraying reality but with filtering it. This is not a new approach, of course—in photography, it goes back at least to the pictorialists of [...]
“Miniatures” sounds precious, in more ways than one, and most of the examples in “Mementos: Painted and Photographic Miniatures, 1750-1920” at the National Portrait Gallery fit that description closely—they’re tiny, elegantly crafted, and sentimental, particularly those with the soft edges of an oval format. They “were often made as mementos, love tokens, or memorials that [...]
Is it possible for a work of art to look cutting-edge and dated at the same time? The images in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibit “In Vibrant Color: Vintage Celebrity Portraits from the Harry Warnecke Studio” manage this odd feat. They served as cover art for the New York Daily News’ Sunday magazine during the [...]
Georg Kuettinger’s photographs perch uneasily on the border between reality and fiction. The Munich-based artist’s images—now on display at Project 4 Gallery—are big and bold, with a highly reflective coating and dimensions as wide as 106 inches. He makes them by digitally stitching together and repeating portions of several photographs taken at a single location, [...]
Iwan Bagus, a D.C. photographer and professor, asks, “How long does an image last?” His answer: “An eternity and a blink of the eye.” That pretty much sums up his newest series, now on exhibit at the Studio Gallery. Bagus took a series of fractured self-portraits using rolls of old-school color transparency film, cut out [...]
Imagine you’re National Geographic Society photographer Joel Sartore. You set up your gear inside a cave in Uganda, photographing a roost of 100,000 Egyptian fruit bats. You catch a dollop of fresh guano directly in your left eye. It’s hot and it burns. You check with the health authorities, and they tell you the cave [...]
