With the eyes of L.A.
See discussion and more photos about WANTED in ARTS On com Member's Only Room
The photo exhibition
„Wanted: Helmut Newton, Larry Clark & Ralph Gibson “
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The exhibition title „Wanted“ reminds us that the shown objects mediate American western romance. With Helmut Newton, Ralph Gibson and Larry Clark the Helmut Newton Foundation presents photographers, who were not only extraordinarily estimated by Newton, but famous for setting in scene prototypical motives of the American Way of Life. |
The photographer Helmut Newton is particularly known for act photographies of women in high heels, according to the rather "biedermeierlichen" pictures beside the typical Loewy refrigerators of the fifties, then increasingly equipped to be fit for the market with pistols, flags, handcuffs and leads. The exhibition in the museum of photography in Berlin shows now In three areas artpieces, which Newton published in his own magazine „Helmut Newton Illustrated“ between 1987 and 1995. The pictures return partly to a portrait-like style, in which one does not forbid the models to have an own view even if their posing and the environment show nearly ironically the lack of distance to conventions like American furnishing and a flat belly.
The central showroom in the Berlin Museum of Photography is dedicated to the two famous series of photographical development “Tulsa” and “Teenage Lust” by Larry Clark. Developed in the seventies and sixties Clark shows in drastic pictures the life of juvenile drug-addicted and their sex, which was taboo up to then. The series are thereby considered as most influential forerunners of photographers such as Nan Goldin or Richard Billingham.
Larry Clarks photographies adapt at the best the „Wanted“ label, because they are strictly pulled through from the dream and trauma of the American liberty about the ownership and use of weapons. In the pictures pistols are toys or everyday life phenomena, whose threatening aspect becomes conscious suddenly and only for moments. They become sexualized symbols only by the contextualization with Helmut Newton's use of them in acts.
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Clarks provocing book “Tulsa” was published 1971 in the publishing house Lustrum, created by Ralph Gibson. Gibson published there since 1970 his own books “The Somnambulist”, “Déjà vu” and “Days at Sea”. For „Wanted“ the Museum of Photography created a representative screen selection in black-&-white and color. Gibsons time-forgotten and subjective picture worlds are shaped of strict contrasts and cutout abstractions. Thus, he is next to the traditions of the early, experimental photographies of Man Ray and Moholy Nagy, although many of his pictures are contentwise almost overloaded.
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Photos: Ralph Gibson
Both photographers, who associate in the exhibition with Newton, do as well as his spouse, the art photographer Alice Springs (actually June Browne), revaluate Newton, who was in most of his pictures far more marketable. If one sees in this exhibition that Newton in his worst photographies (some of his pictures were designated as „fascistic“ by Alice Schwarzer) gave way to the seduction of the market with blinded eyes, thus actually not working as a classical artist subject, it makes him to a certain extent more similar to his model objects and can, in a way, be suited as rehabilitation.
Report: Dr. Ulrike Ritter
© copyright of the photos with the photographers and the Helmut Newton Foundation
Museum of photography * Museum für Photographie
3 June - 18 November 2007
Wanted: Helmut Newton, Larry Clark & Ralph Gibson
Jebensstrasse 2
10623 Berlin
Tel.: +49 (0) 30 - 266-2188
Fax: +49 (0) 30 - 266 3255
Read this article in german language at www.kunst-spektrum.de
