Like self-portraiture, still life is a genre that many artists and photographers gravitate to, if only because offers a wealth of subject matter that is usually very convenient. Choice of subject and the arrangement of objects is another story - and the one that generally separates art from mere massing. When I learned that curator and critic Vince Aletti had chosen the genre for his exhibition at the New York Photo Festival, I arranged to speak with him. Following is the conversation that took place by phone last week.

Peggy Roalf: You see a tremendous amount of work over time but how on earth do you curate an exhibition that's up for just four days?

Vince Aletti: Well there are certain considerations and self-imposed restrictions that actually make it easier. For example I wanted to select work that I knew was available already framed and that could be shipped in time without causing the galleries and the festival organizers a lot of extra work. But then I also wanted a balance between photographers who are known and not well known; I wanted to have a mix of large-scale and small pieces; and I also wanted a variety of subject matter.

But after making my selections, I kept seeing things I really would have liked to pull into the show. At the last minute I added some work by Jocko Weyland, an artist who sometimes works in photography. He spent a lot of time in China in the last year and did a series of still lifes in color that I liked enough to add them in. And these are images that don't need to be framed; they will be pinned onto the wall, and I liked the idea of having some things presented that way.

Left: Jeff Bark, All He Left, nd. Right: Sharon Core, Early American Still Life with Steak and Asparagus, 2008. Copyright the photographers, courtesy The New York Photo Festival.

PR: Did you have any particular photographers or bodies of work in mind when you started out?

VA: I had a feeling that still life is one thing that many people do along with the portrait project or the landscape project - and I realized as I was starting this that I could almost pick a group of people whose work interests me and find still life as part of their body of work.

PR: Historically, still life is often thought of as a way for artists to express plenitude, for example, in 17^th Century Dutch paintings of exotic flowers and kill from the hunt - images that artists created to showcase the wealth of their patrons. The work you've selected for Object Lesson definitely comes from a different train of thought. Would you say a few words about what you had in mind?

VA : I was thinking a lot about Irving Penn when I started putting the show together and I think Penn is a perfect example of an artist who was able to take the simplest materials and turn them into something wonderful, something no one else would shoot in the same way. And I was trying to find other photographers who did a similar thing, who woud turn something quite ordinary into something I wanted to look at.

For example, Penn's shots of cigarette ends that have been thrown away are very elegant in the way he arranged the scraps and some of the ash, and how he framed it, and then the beautiful platinum prints he made. In much the same way, Laura Letinsky's tabletop pictures of what's left over after dinner, the detritus of daily life, have a kind of elegance. But what I'm interested in is the discarded or overlooked stuff that's messy, that goes back to Penn and what he values.

In a similar way, the pictures I'm using from Adam Bartos are a series he did at yard sales, which he did a whole book of. You're looking at these scatterings of accidental arrangements of sad objects and it's just the way he frames them. It's not as though he's set them up the way that Penn would have. He's putting it in a very original frame that makes it interesting.

But getting back to that idea of plenitude, as you mention in Dutch still life painting, I included work by Jeff Bark, which were at Charles Cowles last year and went quite unnoticed. I asked him if he'd mind showing just the still life panels that were shown with the nudes because I thought they stood alone, and he agreed. They're really baroque, and I think I ended up using more of them because they're like nothing I’d seen before - kind of demented in a way that I really like.

PR: The photographers' very personal views of their subjects seem to be one of the themes in your show. What work by Sally Gall will be up?

VA: I saw some pictures of hers at Julie Saul's booth at AIPAD in March, and they're probably not anyone's idea of still life. They're pictures of cobwebs and I think they're really beautiful. A lot of them are very simple, you don't see a lot of background - it's just focused on the cobweb and these patterns they create. Some of them kind of reminded me of Moholy-Nagy, in that they feel almost like photograms to some degree.

PR: What is some of the most unusual subject matter among the work you've selected?

VA: The pieces by Andrea Modica are from about 10 years back that have never been published. They sort of come out of her Treadwell series, which are portraits of rural people. These are pictures of children's underwear, very rumpled and pilled, obviously washed many, many times, displayed on pieces of equally used fabrics as backgrounds. They're platinum prints of very simple, abject objects and are very beautiful. I thought they were like nothing I'd ever seen before, really intimate but sort of touching, and came out of a series I knew well and really liked.

PR: I noticed you included work by Richard Learoyd. I saw his show at McKee Gallery last fall and wondered which piece you selected.

VA: I was totally knocked out by that show and really pushed to include one of his portraits in Dress Codes, a show I co-curated at International Center of Photography. But the still lifes really stuck in my head. It was hard to make a decision but I chose a very weird one, the fish heart, an odd-shaped fleshy thing that's all strung up with pieces of black string. It's a very large print

PR: I'm so glad you chose that one - it's so unsettling, in a very unusual way.

VA: Thank you, yes it's a very peculiar thing you're looking at and I wanted some things in the show that are a bit upsetting or unsettling, as this one is.

Object Lesson, featuring work by Jeff Bark, Adam Bartos, Sharon Coe, Sally Gall, Bill Jacobson, Richard Learoyd, Laura Letinsky, Andrea Modica, Yamini Nayar, Jiro Takamatsu, will be on view at 81 Front Street during The New York Photo Festival. In conjunction with the exhibition, Richard Learoyd speaks with Kathy Ryan, Photo Editor of The New York Times Magazine on Thursday, May 13th at noon . Other photographers from the Object Lessons lineup who will present their work are Laura Letinsky, Yamini Nayar, Sharon Core, and Bill Jacobson. Please check the website for further information and directions.

A complete schedule of events including exhibitions, lectures, presentations, portfolio reviews, The New York Photo Awards, and the Leica Photo Scavenger Hunt is available at The New York Photo Festival website.

DART: Design Arts Daily is a media sponsor of the New York Photo Festival, the first international festival of photography in the U.S.
Founded by Daniel Power and Frank Evers, the festival is an initiative of powerHouse Books, located in DUMBO, and is now in its third year. The four main pavilions, each showcasing compelling and personal visions of contemporary photography, will be curated this year by Vince Aletti, author, critic, and curator; photography curator, writer, and picture anthropologist Erik Kessels, a founding partner and creative director of KesselsKramer, Amsterdam; Fred Ritchin, professor of photography and imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts; and playwright, poet, musician, and photographer Lou Reed, whose photographs have been exhibited worldwide.

In addition to its main exhibitions, the New York Photo Festival offers a number of satellite shows, presented by organizations from around the world, at other locations in DUMBO, Brooklyn. For information about these shows, please visit the New York Photography Festival website.

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