Sylvia Plachy, BAILEY: Photographs, Selections from the George Eastman Collection
Claude Lanzmann 1985 ©Sylvia Plachy
Bronx Documentary Center | Sylvia Plachy : Echoes and Omens, September 29, 2023 – November 5, 2023
“Sylvia Plachy is one of the most prolific and influential photographers of the late 20th century. After fleeing the Hungarian Revolution as a child, hidden in a horse cart, Sylvia arrived in New York City and studied at Pratt Institute, graduating in 1965. Joining the Village Voice staff under New Journalism proponent Clay Felker in 1974, Sylvia went on to document four decades of cultural happenings, homicides, artists, riots, writers, circus animals, and street scenes. Her photographs capture a time when New York City was both a center of world culture and art and a deeply fractured, churning cauldron of politics, race, class, corruption and money.
“Armed with considerable charm and five cameras, including a battered Leica (for news or street work), a Hasselblad (usually for portraits) and a panoramic Widelux (often for parades and landscapes), Sylvia broke nearly every rule of composition, many rules of lighting and a few rules of decorum as she pushed or cajoled her way past police lines, into boxing gyms, high society galas and everything in between.
“Sylvia’s resulting images—intensely personal, lyrical, and sometimes devastating—brought an astonishing, information-packed energy to the pages of the Village Voice, the most widely-read alternative newspaper in the United States for four decades. As a staff photographer, she collaborated closely with writers including Guy Trebay, Anna Mayo, and James Ridgeway. At times, the black frames she printed around her images seemed the only things that kept her photographs’ explosive vitality in check as they illustrated the most important stories of the day, or populated her various weekly photo columns: Unguided Tour, ER, Found Memories, Woodhaven Blvd, Coney Island Summer and more.”
For more information visit Bronx Documentary Center
David Hockney, 1965_© David Bailey, courtesy of FaheyKlein Gallery, Los Angeles
Fahey/Klein Gallery | BAILEY: Photographs : David Bailey, September 28, 2023 – November 11, 2023
“The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present selected photographs by David Bailey. This exhibition includes some of Bailey’s signature images of luminaries of fashion, music, and fine art. In portraits and little-known “torn” prints, he captures subjects including Jane Birkin, Michael Caine, David Hockney, Helmut Newton, Jean Shrimpton, and Mick Jagger.
“Bailey’s bold and iconoclastic style has made him one of the world’s most renowned living portrait photographers and earned him as much fame as his subjects. Discarding the rigid rules of a previous generation of portrait and fashion photographers, he channeled and immortalized the energies of London in the 1960s and beyond. Self-taught, his distinctive style comprises stark white backgrounds, uncompromising crops, and striking, seemingly spontaneous poses. From the beginning of his career, which now spans more than six decades, his arresting yet spare portraits and fashion images have conveyed a radical sense of youth and sexuality, often typifying the look of the times.”
For more information visit Fahey/Klein Gallery
Edward Steichen (American, b. Luxembourg, 1879–1973), Gloria Swanson, Gloria Swanson, 1924. Gelatin silver print, image: 9 1/2 × 8 1/4 in. (24.1 × 21 cm); paper: 9 15/16 × 7 15/16 in. (25.2 × 20.2 cm); matted: 16 3/4 × 13 3/4 in. (42.6 × 35 cm). George Eastman Museum, bequest of Edward Steichen.
Eastman Museum | Selections from the George Eastman Collection, September 30, 2023 – Ongoing
“To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Eastman Museum coming in 2024, this exhibition highlights some of the finest of the museum’s holdings. The objects chosen for the exhibition demonstrate connections among photography, history, and culture. They chart a course through photo history, identifying notable movements and trends while giving context to a breadth of photographic practices, technologies, communities, and traditions.
“In this exhibition, direct comparisons are made between early photographic print processes, such as the daguerreotypes produced by Southworth & Hawes in the United States, and the salted paper prints of Hill & Adamson in Scotland. These objects showcase the resources and technologies that were present at the time of their making, as well as the competing interests that propelled their development in the 19th century. Other pairings in this exhibition examine the development of photographic styles and aesthetics, each a response to specific cultural or artistic trends that emerged throughout the 20th century: pictorialism, Group f/64, photojournalism and reportage, abstraction and experimentation, and the influence of postmodern practices in contemporary art.
“This selection includes works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, László Moholy-Nagy, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Robert Frank, Imogen Cunningham, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, and many others. Certain items in Selections from the Collection will be rotated over the course of the next year, allowing for repeat visitors to continue to have fresh experiences. The exhibition complements the upcoming 75 Years of Photography at Eastman: Evolving Histories, an Evolving Collection exhibition, opening in the main galleries in the fall of 2024.”
For more information visit Eastman Museum
