RE: Galleries & Museums in New York City - Photography
On Tue, 14 Aug 2007, Dave Soemarko wrote: Dave, I can't guarantee that MoMA doesn't have something swell in photography now, but I don't recall it in the press, and I haven't been there since they opened the new building (there hasn't been anything I felt motivated to pay $20 to see. The Met is more forgiving: the "suggested price" is (as I recall) $12, tho I'm a member -- which means I pay about $85 per visit, because that's the annual membership & I never seem to get there more than once, or maybe twice a year. But anyway, they will accept your lesser payment, tho you may have to endure a dirty look if it's *really* small.How about the Museum of Modern Arts? Is it good? I have visited it only once but that was, hmmm, maybe 15 years ago or longer, so my memory is fading. I can't remember anything I saw except maybe a toilet bowl mounted on the wall. Isn't it the first museum in the world that collects photographs as arts, or something like that? As for MoMA -- in the long ago, John Szarkowski curated a couple of fabulous photography shows there (and of course there was "The Family of Man: Quick! for 25 points, who curated that ?!) But Szarkowski is dead, and frankly the pop stars of photog I've noticed there lately do not, as noted above, seem worth $20. As I recall, MoMA does have a free (Friday?) night, but I'm told the line is so long that by the time you get in, the open hours are nearly over. ICP (International Center for Photography) also has a free, I think also Friday, night, but the lines aren't so bad ... I understand. But that's not why I'm writing, which is to say that I picked up last Friday's Arts section of the Times today (looking for something else) and noticed a capsule review of its current photo show, as follows: "Hidden in Plain Sight: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection, through Sep. 3. "A small but potent exhibition of contemporary photographs from the museum's collection that opens with an epigraph by Henry David Thoreau:'The question is not what you look at but what you see.' Artists here find beauty in the everyday and mundane, from Walker Evans' late series of Polaroids to Stephen Shore's landscapes and Rachel Harrison's photograph of a house in Perth Amboy, N. J., where thousands believed that they saw the face of the Virgin Mary on a second floor window." Below that is Museum of the City of New York (5th Ave at 103 st): New York Rises: Photographs by Eugene de Salignac. Quote: This exhibition makes a case for adding Eugene de Salignac, the official photographer for the NYC Dept of Bridges [to something garbled by the printer]... He captured the Williamsburg, Manhattan and Queensboro Bridges just as construction was completed and the subway tracks were being laid..." (Tho on 2nd thought that sounds like a show for NYC buffs, or at least bridge buffs, of whom of course there are many. So I still suggest the Met.) But Mark, tell your student to get Friday's NY Times when he gets here... and check the Arts section. If he's staying at a hotel, they'll have lots of museum, gallery, & general art lit, too. I'd also guess the Times Arts section would be on line all week. Judy
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