Several photography shows currently on view have spurred a wider interest in studio-based, conceptual, and non-objective photography. Following is a cross-country lineup of current and upcoming exhibitions of interest.

The Photographic Object, 1970, at Hauser & Wirth, New York City.

The exhibition revisits Peter Bunnell’s landmark 1970 MoMA exhibition, in a much expanded version of the 2011 show at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, as part of Pacific Standard Time.

Mary Statzer, author of the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, writes, “Classically trained as a photographer (at Rochester Institute of Technology and Ohio University) and an art historian (at Yale), Bunnell learned the history of photography while working with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall at George Eastman House and Minor White at Aperture," she continues. "While he gladly took on his share of historical shows and rotations of the permanent collection, Bunnell switched course to organize Photography into Sculpture. 

Ellen Brooks, Untitled (Lawn Couple), 1970. Photo: Peggy Roalf

"Described by him as the ‘first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner,’ the list of materials employed (photo linen, light bulbs, film, cardboard, wood, Astroturf, and plastics among them) and the manner in which they were handled (vacuum-molded, layered, stuffed, stitched, and hand-colored) read like no other exhibition of photography at the time.” [more]


Carl Cheng, V.H., 1969-1972. Photo: Peggy Roalf.

The Photographic Object, 1970 continues through July 25 at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69^th Street, NY, NY. Information.



Installation view, Fixed Variable. Photo courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Fixed Variable, a companion exhibition of contemporary photo-based images, is on view at Hauser & Wirth, Chelsea, featuring works by Lucas Blalock, EthanGreenbaum, John Houck, Matt Keegan, Josh Kolbo, Kate Steciw, Chris Wiley Letha Wilson, and more. From the press release: Through process and play, these artists confront the reductive definition of the photograph as a truth-telling, two-dimensional document. The image is intervened with and acted upon, be it with Photoshop, poured concrete, or a simple crease.

Fixed Variable continues through July 25^th at Hauser & Wirth, 511 West 18^th Street, NY, NY. Information. A number of these artists, and more, are featured in the current issue of Foam magazine, Issue #38: Under Construction. Information.

A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio examines the ways in which photographers and other artists using photography have worked and experimented within their studios, from photography’s inception to the present. Featuring photographs, films, and videos by artists such as Berenice Abbott, Uta Barth, Zeke Berman, Karl Blossfeldt, Constantin Brancusi, Geta Brtescu, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Paul Outerbridge, Irving Penn, Adrian Piper, Edward Steichen, William Wegman, and Edward Weston.

A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio continues through October 5 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53^rd Street. NY, NY. Information.

Robert Heinecken: Object Matter is the first retrospective of the groundbreaking work of Robert Heinecken since his death in 2006. Heinecken dedicated his life to making art and teaching, establishing the photography program at UCLA in 1964 and serving as a professor there until 1991. The exhibition features over 150 works from throughout the artist’s career, many of them never seen before in New York—including the largest display to date of his altered magazines (above), which were the backbone of his art. Heinecken always celebrated photography’s limitless permutations and possibilities, and proposed alternative ideas about the medium—ideas that continue to resonate well into the 21st century.

Robert Heinecken: Object Matter continues through September 7^th at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53^rd Street. NY, NY. Information.

The Believable Lie: Robert Heinecken, Sigmar Polke and Hans-Peter Feldman at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

This exhibition focuses on relationships among the photographic work of three artists active during the 1970s that drew on ideas of surrealist/Dada culture of the 1920s and 1930s and influenced succeeding generations of photographers and media artists. The artists hail from different backgrounds: two Germans and one Los Angeles native who all matured in the decades following World War II.

This is the first exhibition to bring photographic work by these artists together. Each embraced photography as one element of an artistic practice guided as much by literature, philosophy, and an attention to popular culture as by classical formal concerns of the medium. Yet, photographic process and context remained important to them.

The Believable Lie: Heinecken, Polke and Feldman opens July 20^th and continues through November 30^th at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, OH. Information.




Installation view, Michael Flomen: Wild Nights. Photo courtesy Boite Noire Gallery.

Michael Flomen: Wild Nights at Boîte Noire Gallery, Los Angeles. An artist working in photography, Flomen looks closely at nature through large-scale cameraless images. For two decades, he worked in the decisive moment style of street photography practiced by Cartier-Bresson and Gary Winogrand, among others. By the early 1990s he had begun to use large format cameras to photograph the landscape, particularly the rural snow fields and urban snow depositories of his native Montreal.

In 1999, Flomen started using camera-less techniques, collaborating directly with nature to create photograms outdoors in the countryside. The current exhibition is a mini-retrospective of 15 images, one of which measure 120 inches wide.

Michael Flomen: Wild Nights, continues through August 29th at Boite Noire Gallery. Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Avenue, Space B222 West Hollywood, CA Los Angeles. Read Lyle Rexer’s review in Photograph.

György Kepes, 1967. © Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Photo: Ivan Massar.

The New Landscape: Experiments in Light by Gyorgy Kepes, opening July 23 at the Cantor Arts Center.

This exhibition explores the question of art’s relevance in a scientific age through the work of pioneering Hungarian-born American artist, designer, and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes (1906–2001). Forty-five panels depict what Kepes, associated with Germany’s Bauhaus and Chicago’s New Bauhaus, called the “new landscape” of scientific imagery—microscopic minerals, cellular patterns, and tissue fibers—as well as Kepes’s own experiments with camera-less photographic techniques.

The New Landscape: Experiments in Light by Gyorgy Kepes continues through November 17^th. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, 328 Lomita Street, Stanford, CA. Information.

Sara VanDerBeek: Ancient Objects, Still Lives, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco.

This exhibition might be more accurately described as “sculpture into photography,” as the artist continues along the lines of her 2013 show at Metro Pictures. In an interview for Aperture’s blog, she said, “The studio now functions for me in a manner similar to my understanding of these classical figures: it’s a meeting point of different times. I take images, print them out, bring them into the studio, and consider them alongside sculptures or other, earlier photographs—it creates a “still life” of various pasts in the present. We are continually trying to understand and process our past as we address ongoing issues. I feel these works are representative of that kind of grappling, of coming to terms with the foundations on which we build.”

Sara VanDerBeek: Ancient Objects, Still Lives continues through August 2 at Altman Siegel Gallery, 49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA. Information.