Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography 1944-2013
International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas
(212) 857-0000
Through Sept. 7
Large swaths of Latin America keep slipping from consciousness; except in times of crisis, they are just not as present as Europe or Asia. This is certainly true of its art. This exhibition of more than 200 photographs from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba and Mexico is filled with startling images of what we have ignored. The emphasis is on pictures from the 1950s to the 1980s in the region’s cities, a time when urban areas were the sites of frequent political and social turmoil.
The show conflates several genres—art, photojournalism, documentary—into nine subject categories, including: “Nightlife,” “The Forgotten Ones,” “The People and Protest,” “Pop Street Culture,” “Urban Geometries” and “Identities.” The prints are mostly black and white, stark and modernist in temperament, painful in the realities they explore.
“Repreción No” is scrawled on a concrete wall in Venezuelan Jorge Vall’s “Untitled” (c. 1978); the windowless wreck of a car sits in a cutout of the wall. The three pictures titled “Valparaiso, Chile” (1963) by Sergio Larrain were taken in the Seven Mirrors, an upscale brothel that’s no less depressing for its fancy trappings. Gertjan Bartelsman’s two pictures titled “Pogo (Moshing), Medellin” (1994) show young men in the drug-dominated Colombian city working off their tensions. The naked and disassembled female mannequins in Daniel González’s “Untitled” (1962) seem emblematic of a larger breakdown in Venezuela’s society. Iván Cañas’s “TV Pride” (1985) shows a Cuban couple with their prized possession. A revelatory show.
John Pfahl: Found Pfahls
Janet Borden
560 Broadway
(212) 431-0166
Through June 27
John Pfahl (b.1939) is a landscape photographer—with a twist. In “Altered Landscapes,” his first major project, he presented pictures of nature in which he had made interventions. In the seascape “Triangle, Bermuda” (August 1975), he arranged markings on the beach that vectored toward a rock formation offshore so that it appeared to be the apex of a triangle. In “Six Oranges, Delaware Park, Buffalo, NY” (October 1975), six orange balls were laid out on a path through a wooded area; each succeeding ball is slightly larger than the one it follows, creating an odd illusion—the balls do not diminish in size as they recede in the distance. These works and a few other “Altered Landscapes” are included in the current exhibition.
But the other 18 medium-format pigment prints are naturally occurring oddments. In “Logging Ribbons, Dillon, CO” (August 1977) it wasn’t Mr. Pfahl who tied pink ribbons around the trunks of selected trees in a stand of timber. The red expanse that takes up the bottom two-thirds of “Red Seascape, Pismo Beach, CA” (March 1981) looks at first glance as if it is the beach, but actually it is the roof of the building the photographer stood on to take his picture. “Tire Track X, Great Salt Lake, UT” (October 1977) might be the work of an abstract expressionist. Mr. Pfahls’s images are attractive, but is that because of, or in spite of, his quirky sense of humor?
The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus
Aperture
547 W. 27th St.
(212) 505-5555
Through July 10
The history of photography is the history of technology, but also the history of the financing of production: Who pays determines not only what, when and where a photograph is taken, but how it is displayed. Photographer Rob Hornstra and journalist-filmmaker Arnold van Bruggen financed their extended “slow journalism” documentation of the region around Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, by crowdsourcing. The contributors to their project, which began in 2009 and ended after the games, were compensated by receiving periodic pamphlets and books: Small donors got pamphlets published on newsprint, the larger donors got hardcover books. For this exhibition, most of the photographs and their extensive captions are printed on 331/2- by 223/4- inch sheets of newsprint and pasted directly on the walls.
Russian history is ugly, and that of the Soviet era and of the Caucasus region especially; ethnic violence is an honored tradition in these mountains, and it is reflected in damaged bodies and degraded environments. The most moving pictures here are the many portraits of people who lived through the Soviet period and of the generation born in its wreckage: Vladislav Demyanov contracted tuberculosis in a prison camp in 1977; Ilona lost her mother and brother in the Beslan school hostage crisis; Nargiz Zaidova lost two brothers to terrorism; Terik Bairamukov is on a mission to convert his village to Islam. At Sochi, the perdurable backstory was as dramatic as the ephemeral sports.
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