Roundup

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 - Nicholas Calcott

stoller
After that last post, I just couldn’t help posting an Ezra Stoller photo on this one

So I got back from Arles about a week ago, but getting back into the swing of things has proven a bit difficult.  We had a great time down there, but you’ll have to read more about the festival elsewhere.  In the meantime, however, my folder is overflowing with things to post, so I’m just going to have to clear away some of the more miscellaneous ones now:

Saul Leiter

Friday, April 18th, 2008 - Nicholas Calcott


Saul Leiter, ‘New York, circa 1960′

It’s over now: The Saul Leiter exhibition at the Fondation HCB has closed, but last week I made a trip down there during the last nocturne to see it. I don’t have much to say about it… Lens Culture does a pretty good job of giving the background here… The French press threw the term po√©tique around like it was an oxygen molecule: I found it competent but not amazing.

Part of the problem had to do with the print size: They were printed to 11″ x 14″ or thereabouts, while they really looked better at the much more modest size reproduced in the Steidl catalog. The thing about photographs is that large fields of color are not intrinsically interesting like they are in painting when they often seem to glow from within. With Leiter, it’s much more interesting for me to see the idiosyncratic compositions of form at a size where I can take in the whole picture at once.

[Which reminds me of a lecture Jeff Wall gave at his MOMA show where he talks about how every photograph has an appropriate size and his pictures are made at exactly the size they should be at. Available here, on the MOMA podcast pages.]