pretty serendipities

  Lest the weary and faithful visitors think that I have abandoned this pursuit for good, here's a fresh installment of serendipities, discovered near and far.

At Yossi Milo, Loretta Lux, many a blogger's favorite, presents a show of increasingly creepy and consistently mum children's portraits. It follows December's exhibit of new and noteworthy imagery by Simen Johan, whose earlier work reflected a preoccupation with disturbed tots. Perhaps Lux too will soon branch out and engage other subject matter.

In the window of the Jewish Museum, the poster with Guillermo Kahlo's photograph of the young Frida Kahlo, discussed on these pages earlier, has been replaced by Lotte Jacobi's photograph of Lotte Lenya. Beginning next week, the museum launches a large exhibition of Jacobi's work, of which regrettably few images are to be found online.

Also next week, the nearby Museum of the City of New York will commence a substantial photographic exhibition by many of the medium's heavyweights - "Magnum's New Yorkers". A curator-led tour of it is scheduled for Saturday, the 7th, and a discussion with Bruce Davidson and Susan Meiselas for the 14th.

Diane Arbus' understandably acclaimed photography is the focus of two extensive exhibits on both coasts. At NYU's Grey Art Gallery is Diane Arbus: Family Albums, while Diane Arbus Revelations can be seen at SFMOMA.


On view at the Portland Museum of Art through March 21st is Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness. Porter's unassuming and unflinching work remains enigmatically unparalleled. Images in this exhibition come from the collection of the Amon Carter Museum in Texas, whose website contains an immense and honorably reproduced for the web collection of Porter's work, full of marvelous, marvelous stuff.


Over at Santa Fe's Andrew Smith Gallery are the Antarctica photographs of Joan Myers. The color images -- grand, glorious, bathed in a quiet bronze light -- outshine the B&W specimens, for the most part.

If I were closer to Arizona, I would pay frequent visits to the Lisa Sette Gallery. Kevin Sloan's opulent canvases just finished a run on display there, and Alain Clement's photogenic drawings are up next.

Lumina Gallery in San Diego is presenting Burton Pritzker's Artifacts Series.

Other miscellaneous finds for the day include a hodgepodge of a collection at Tepper Takayama Fine Arts. A couple of my favorites include two of Kunihiro Shinohara's photographs.

Also worth checking out is an online presentation by the Victoria and Albert Museum -- Exploring Photography. Eclectic and tasteful, it is rather delightful and enlightening.


And on the coming attractions circuit is the intriguing "Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature in the Victorian Era", to run from June through August at the Yale Center for British Art. The exhibit will be devoted to examples of "nature printing" by Henry Bradbury, Anna Atkins' cyanotypes, William Henry Fox Talbot's photogenic drawings and other botany-inspired products of early photography.

Until next time!..