There are no big crowds or large gestures in
But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World at the International Center of Photography in New York, which brings together the work of nine photographers to illuminate, as if by aleatory spotlight, corners of the United States in everyday endurance. Instead, the mood is quietly contemplative, a muted melancholy settling over the show like a light fog.
But Still, It Turns what Galileo reportedly said upon the church’s rejection of his most famous theory was planned before the pandemic but held until this February. If the exhibition feels prophetic, you might attribute that to the tricks of time. If it feels a bit random, that is no accident, writes curator and photographer Paul Graham in the stylish catalogue, published by MACK. “To some viewers, the artists’ work presented here, with its tributaries and eddies, its non-sequiturs and perambulations, its lack of drama and prize winning moments, will mean it does not appeal
The World Revisited
Is documentary photography dead? Recent years have seen a proliferation of work that intentionally subverts the genre â images that blur fact and fiction or are staged.
But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World, a group exhibition curated by Paul Graham (b. 1965) at the International Center of Photography in New York, shows another form of reportage is still possible, one that does not set out to tell a story or push a particular message, but â in so much as it can â quietly captures the world as it is.
Graham emerged as a pioneer of colour in the 1980s, who created work straddling the worlds of fine art and documentary. He describes the featured artists Vanessa Winship, Curran Hatleberg, Richard Choi, RaMell Ross, Gregory Halpern, Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti, Kristine Potter and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa as âpost-documentaryâ â conscious of asserting their authorship. These artists acknowledge the aestheti
Malia Jensen: Nearer Nature
Until 3 April at Cristin Tierney, 219 Bowery Floor #2, Manhattan
This show represents the culmination of a multi-year project for the artist, whose work often probes into the gray area between the human world and the natural one, pointing to the poetic symmetry between the two. The work began in early 2019, when Jensen carved sculptures from livestock salt licks and installed them in the wilderness throughout Oregon state. The salt licks were carved into a number of forms, some, such as a plate of donuts, recall the domestic and mundane, while others shaped as a hand or a breast invoke tender, life-nurturing figures. When placed in this context, one salt lick carved in the shape of Brancusi’s
Guadalupe Maravilla, Ancestral Stomach (2021) PPOW
Guadalupe Maravilla: Seven Ancestral Stomachs
Until 27 March at PPOW, 392 Broadway, Manhattan
The Brooklyn-based Salvadoran artist Guadalupe Maravilla recalls how a chemotherapy appointment in New York left him nearly unable to walk, and how a sound bath he encountered on the way home led to a years-long sound therapy treatment that he credits for his successful recovery from colon cancer in 2013. In this exhibition for the gallery’s newly inaugurated space in Tribeca, Maravilla has produced a series of esoteric and deeply personal retablos, sculptural “stomaches” and free-standing sculptures rich with spiritual symbolism. Some works generate vibrational sounds and are made from materials collected throughout Central America, simultaneously referencing the artist’s personal history of crossing the US border and his solidarity with the pain and trauma experienced by undocumented immigrants. The show fo
Curran Hatleberg, Lost Coast (8), 2014
The International Center for Photography (ICP) is celebrating their one year anniversary in their new home on Essex Street with a new exhibition of “post-documentary” style photos from around the world. ICP was forced to shut it’s doors last March, due to the pandemic, and offered virtual programming only for six months. They re-opened in hybrid form this past October.
Gregory Halpern, Untitled, 2016
The new exhibit, titled,
But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World, opens on February 4, 2012 and is curated by photographer Paul Graham. It brings together nine photographers and their recent photo projects. They write, “Extending the tradition of Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Diane Arbus, this work fits a notion of “photography from the world” photography that resists both narrative arcs and the drama of photojournalism or staged photography, grappling instead with the world as it is, in all its