Ice Bound
Julia Comita and TwistedLamb
345 Broome Street
Opening December 10

Julia Comita & TwistedLamb present Ice Bound
RSVP@ebconsultsworldwide.com

Tags: Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet), Exhibition Mounting, Exhibitions, Julia Comita

Hole in the Curtain
Brea Souders
Bruce Silverstein Gallery
October 29 – December 23

Brea Souders: Breaking Ground, 2015
16″ x 20″ archival inkjet print

From the Bruce Silverstein Gallery press release:

Hole in the Curtain, [is] the gallery’s second solo show of new works by Brea Souders. The exhibition is comprised of portraits and abstract compositions that further Souders’ interest in fragmented narratives, the inchoate versus the fully formed, and the uncontrollable nature of time.

Souders creates her latest works with bleach, photographic chemistry and watercolors using unexposed film emulsion as a substrate. Souders writes, “I approach the emulsion as a vulnerable skin, subject to constant transformation. I was drawn to work with it because of this changeable quality.”  The bleach and chemistry rapidly degrade the film, and are thus a purposeful incubator of chance occurrences–fissures in emulsion, selective lightening, bored holes, color shifts, and breached borders.

Brea Souders: Jane, 2015
30.4″ x 38″ archival inkjet print

While in process, Souders’ works exist in a state of timed decline that serves as a metaphor for the nature of both our physical bodies and our memories of people and events. At a moment when artists are grappling with our surrender to a digital world, Souders turns her attention to a fundamental aspect of the human experience: how we connect as individuals. Souders’ portraits demonstrate a humorously expressive quality, yet, as with her earlier work, a certain weight is felt in the dark spaces, the various rents in the emulsion that open up to what looks like a wide starry sky.

Brea Souders: Max, 2015
24 x 30 archival inkjet print

Our relationship with Brea Souders goes back her being awarded the 2011 WIP-LTI/Lightside Kodak Materials Grant.  Hole in the Curtain, however, is our first time working with her on a specific project. That we had only seven working days to complete sixteen of the pieces on exhibit at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery is a reflection of just how tight Souders’ craft and intent is. The process of producing her final prints was specific, efficient and distinctly satisfying for us — we are quite pleased to have been given the opportunity to be a part of this exhibition.

Brea Souders: Hole in the Curtain
Bruce Silverstein Gallery

You can see more of Souders work on her own website here and on the Bruce Silverstein Gallery here.

Tags: Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet), Brea Souders, Bruce Silverstein, Exhibitions

The Ballad Live
An evening of art and entertainment featuring Nan Goldin
October 26, 2015

On Monday, October 26th, Aperture Foundation celebrated the thirteenth anniversary of the publication of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a milestone work by anyone’s standards. By now, the reach of Goldin’s Ballad is incalculable and certainly no one can argue how fitting it is for Aperture to give it (and themselves) the nod for it’s influence after all these years.

This is our third year in a row contributing to the Foundation’s Fall Benefit, the largest and most elaborate event on their annual calendar. We produced over 50 prints for the Ballad’s silent auction, now working within a well established protocol. We’re fortunate to have the generous support of Hahnemühle to thank for their spectacular Photo Silk Baryta material for the second year in a row.

(a small selection of …) 2015 Aperture Foundation Silent Auction Submissions
12 x 12 Archival inkjet prints
Credits: top to bottom / left to right
Olivia Bee, Hannah Whitaker, Henny Garfunkle,
Roberta Bayley, Jacqueline Hassink, Amy Elkins
Richard Renaldi, Kathy Ryan, Shane Lavalette

It’s been an ongoing privilege to be exposed to the wide array of artists and photographers associated with Aperture. Over the past years we’ve repeatedly handled submissions from a diverse group including (but not limited to) Penelope Umbrico, Zoe Crosher, Todd Hido, Amy Elkins, Richard Renaldi, Olivia Bee, Jen Davis … and honestly, far too many others to list here. More than a few have become regular clients of LTI/Lightside and we’re immensely grateful to Aperture for the opportunities presented to us via this terrific collaboration.

2015 Aperture Foundation Fall Benefit: The Ballad Live

Like last year’s event (The Open Road), The Ballad also featured brilliant musical performances. Once the big doners finished doing their thing, which, included duking it out over offerings from Richard Moss, Katherine Opie, Stephen Shore and of course, Nan Goldin herself (!) … the stage at Terminal 5 was rightly relinquished back to the likes of Laurie Anderson and the Bush Tetras … I mean seriously, way to go Aperture!

2015 Aperture Foundation Fall Benefit: The Ballad Live

Tags: Aperture Foundation, Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet)

I’m Selecting
Talia Chetrit
Sies + Höke
May 12 – June 19

Talia Chetrit: from I’m Selecting at Sies + Höke
L: Untitled (Bottomless #2), 2015
R: Untitled (Street #9), 2015

From the Sies + Höke press release:

I’m Selecting, Talia Chetrit’s second exhibition at Sies + Höke, comprises two discrete bodies of work. One consists of 13 images shot on the streets of New York and Paris. The other, made using a mirror, is a suite of four photographs which depict the artist in her studio, nude from the waist down. Tightly cropped and grainy, semi-anonymized images of businessmen crossing the street and groups of people buying museum tickets typify the impersonal. While, contrastingly, the artist stares back at her viewer in bottomless, startling self-portraits.

The seeming incongruity between these two series is bridged by the amount of control exercised over both. Chetrit’s focus has long been aimed at the ways in which images are constructed and the manner in which they function in society: their contrivances, their agendas, and their fictions. Often the body serves as a site for this exploration of photography’s tenets, and in I’m Selecting, Chetrit uses the bodies of others as well as her own. These images are a reminder of the degree of self-scrutiny we impose on ourselves when we know our pictures are being taken, and the feeling of panic inspired by being photographed without realizing it.

Here the artist has brought these two emotions into the same room. It is clear that the unwitting subjects of the street photographs haven’t been given the opportunity to pose for the camera. Instead their images are forged after the fact – Chetrit has seemingly scoured her negatives for marginal moments of intrigue, cropping and enlarging to direct our attention to individuals who never sought it in the first place. It is therefore an almost conciliatory gesture that the artist reinserts herself into this narrative. Chetrit’s four half-nudes are an objectification and aestheticization of the artist’s own body, ostensibly revealing much more of herself than what she has taken from her subjects on the street. If control is the the guiding principle in I’m Selecting, then Chetrit deploys it in two fashions: on one hand taking control over images of others that initially had none, and on the other carefully crafting self-portraits that relinquish the possibility of that very control.

– Patrick Armstrong

Talia Chetrit: I’m Selecting at Sies + Höke
Untitled (Bottomless #’s 1-4)

Talia Chetrit: I’m Selecting at Sies + Höke
Untitled (Street #’s 1-12)

This is the second Talia Chetrit exhibition we’ve helped produced for Sies + Höke. We’ve been working with Talia since 2009.

For more on our projects with her click here
For more on I’m selecting at Sies + Höke click here

Tags: Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet), Exhibitions, Sies + Höke Galerie, Talia Chetrit

The Effect of Motherhood
Elinor Carucci
Conde Nast Gallery
May 11 – June 26

Elinor Carucci showing off The Effect(s) of (her) Motherhood, in real time ….

It wouldn’t seem right to have an exhibition called The Effect of Motherhood without a bunch of kids running around being goofy … and Elinor Carucci’s opening at the Conde Nast Gallery had a plenty of them present to enliven the event. Carucci’s exhibition, the first solo artist show at the new Conde Nast Gallery on the 34th floor of One World Trade Center is heavy with content. Curated by Shawn Waldron, Conde Nast’s Senior Director of Archives and Records, the majority of images were pulled from assignments Carucci completed for various Conde Nast publications documenting personal accounts of cancer, Alzheimer’s and other trials of modern family life. Yet when viewed together (and in the bright shiny newness of the gallery) Carucci’s sense of humanity and tenderness towards her subjects comes through to disarm the often brutal reality of those stories.

The scene at The Effect of Motherhood: Conde Nast is a media company, after all ….

… and one with a pretty sophisticated sense of style, at that!

LTI/Lightside produced over 30 prints for this exhibition, our first with Carucci. To help facilitate the production, Elinor introduced us to Joshua Fisher, Brand Manager of The Mac Group. There are a number of iconic companies under the umbrella of The Mac Group these days: Tenba, Sekonic, Toyo-View to name a few … but the brand most relevant here is Ilford. Josh has been instrumental in sponsoring Elinor as an Ilford Master and also, fortunately for us, in supplying her with a seemingly endless run of Ilford Gold Fibre Silk paper, which, we printed the entire show on.

Elinor Carruci: The Effect of Motherhood … present and accounted for.

You can learn more about the Ilford Master program here. More about The Mac Group here. And more about Elinore Carucci here.

Tags: Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet), Conde Nast Gallery, Elinor Carucci, Exhibitions

Frédéric Brenner
An Archaeology of Fear and Desire
Howard Greenberg Gallery
May 7 – July 3

David Leventi
Opera
Rick Wester Fine Art
May  7 – July 10

David Battel
Out of Time
Rick Wester Fine Art
May  7 – July 10

It’s not often that we see three of our wildly diverse customers having fancy openings in New York City on the same night. Yet on Thursday May 7th, David Leventi, David Battel and Frédéric Brenner all held court in various galleries showing off their work. And what’s even more oddly-coincidental is that these three guys are film shooters who process with us … we couldn’t have been more proud!

David Leventi: Proud papa in front of his Palais Garnier, Paris, France, 2009

For more on David Leventi’s Opera at Rick Wester Fine Art click here.
Read an additional post on David in our Project Archive here

See more of David’s work on his website here

David Battel at Rick Wester Fine Art

For more on David Battel at Rick Wester Fine Art click here

Frédéric Brenner: Sderot, 2011 from An Archaeology of Fear and Desire at Howard Greenberg Gallery

For more on Frédéric Brenner’s work at Howard Greenberg click here

Read an additional post on Frédéric in our Project Archive here

Explore Brenner’s project This Place here

Tags: David Battel, David leventi, Exhibitions, Film Processing, Frédéric Brenner, Rick Wester Fine Art

Four Decades
Tina Barney
Paul Kasmin Gallery
May 7 – June 20

Tina Barney Four Decades,  Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2015

From the Paul Kasmin Gallery press release:

Since the early 1980s, Tina Barney’s large-scale photographs have laid bare candid moments in the elusive lives of those in the upper classes of American and European society.  Through Barney’s humanist lens, she consistently demonstrates that life in a rarified world is idiosyncratic and spontaneous in its own way. The works presented in Four Decades offer a succinct overview of Barney’s oeuvre, featuring notable early works such as Mark, Amy and Tara, 1983, and The Reception, 1985. Later photographs from the acclaimed series “The Europeans” and “Players” continue to articulate a narrative about the lives of the wealthy as Barney depicts familiar scenes against lushly saturated, opulent backdrops allowing the viewer to share in intimate moments. Four Decades also highlights one of Barney’s editorial masterpieces, The Limo, 2006, as well as works from her series “Small Towns,” focusing on the nuances of regional American life.

Tina Barney: Four Decades opening at Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2015

This is Tina’s first exhibition with Paul Kasmin and our second with her. Four Decades allowed us to print a few pieces from her archive that we had not seen before as well as more recent work that we’ve been involved with since we started working together in 2010.

Production on Tina Barney Four Decades at LTI-Lightside, 2015

Tina Barney’s legacy is well documented, of course … but here’s a brief bit anyway — again, from the Paul Kasmin Gallery press release:

Born in New York City in 1945, Barney turned her concentration to photographing in color with a large format view camera in 1982 – an analogue process she steadfastly continues today. The artist was included in the 1987 Whitney Biennial, and significant solo exhibitions have since been held at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, in 1990; Das Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, in 1999; The Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2005; the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria, in 2006; and the First Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, in 2015. Barney’s works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, among many others. She currently lives and works in New York City and Westerly, Rhode Island. 

You can see more works from Four Decades here.

Tags: conventional c-prints, Exhibitions, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Tina Barney

Aperture Spring Party
April 17
Featuring unique works by Penelope Umbrico

Aperture Foundation held a Spring Fundraiser — the first annual, they said (though later it was determined that Spring Fundraisers may have occurred in the past). Anyway, this one was centered around a Penelope Umbrico project called Moving Mountains, which, is likely best explained in her words:

Mountains, Moving, 2012 – ongoing, considers an analog history of photography within the digital torrent that is its current technological manifestation. I steady my focus on the mountain: oldest subject, stable object, singular, immovable landmark, site of orientation, place of spiritual contemplation. I employ smartphone camera apps to make new photographs of the images of mountains that appear in canonical master photographs. I find them everywhere: in books, magazines, advertisements, online. Pointing my iPhone down at these mountains, the hallucinogenic colors of the camera app filters blend with the disorienting effects of the iPhone’s gravity sensor. Photo grain, dot-screen, pixel, and screen resolution collide, often performing undulating moirés. My mountains are unstable, mobile, have no gravity, change with each iteration, remastered. Here is the biggest distance, the longest range. I present a dialogue between distance and proximity, limited and unlimited, the singular and the multiple, the fixed and the moving, the master and the copy. I propose an inverse correlation between the number of photographs that exist of mountains at any one time, and the stability of photography at that time.

What she didn’t say was that there were 350 pieces in this project (and we printed ALL of them for a one-night event!). It was easy though … Penelope is super-together and terrific to work with.

That’s a mere 84 out of 350 Moving Mountains right there …

As usual, it was a booming fun party with lots of people and food and music … and an open bar that didn’t seem to disappoint anyone involved.

 
Purple, the color of Spring 2015

Tags: Aperture Foundation, Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet), Penelope Umbrico

Playground
James Mollison
Aperture Foundation Gallery
April 16 – June 11

James Mollison: Dechen Phodrang, Thimphu, Bhutan 2011
37.5 x 50 archival pigment print

Back in December 2014, Kellie McLaughlin from Aperture Foundation approached us to print an exhibition for James Mollison’s project, Playground.  Aperture and Mollison had been working on the book and the exhibition was to be timed with its release for Spring 2015. We weren’t familiar with James’ work, though Chris Boot (Aperture’s Director) had published a number of his projects over the years before coming to Aperture. So obviously, we had not met him at this point — and as it would turn out — we wouldn’t meet him until the opening night of his show!

This could be considered a somewhat unusual approach — or at the very least, maybe not ideal circumstances for producing a 30 (+) print exhibition of works for the first time, with a new customer! But James lives in Italy and wasn’t in a position to travel for proofing and well, sometimes these things just happen this way …

The solution turned out to be fairly straightforward: we would simply use FedEx to shuttle a series of tests and proofing rounds between Italy and New York. It was certainly easy enough for us to produce a set of full frame proofs and an additional set of “at-size” sections of each image. This enabled James to review all of his on-screen post-shoot work in physical form and lay out the entire exhibition to get a feel for the balance of color and density. The at-size sections were particularly useful in allowing him to examine the minute details of each complex interaction — a hallmark of this project — and rest assured that everything was falling into place as intended.

 
James Mollison: Freretown Community Primary School, Mombasa, Kenya, 2011

From the Aperture Press Release:

Mollison’s photo projects are defined by smart, original concepts applied to serious social and environmental themes. For Playground, Mollison photographed children at play in their school playgrounds, inspired by memories of his own childhood and interested in how we all learn to negotiate relationships and our place in the world through play.

Various scenes of laughter, tears, and games demonstrate the intense experiences which happen in the playground. For each picture, Mollison sets up his camera during school break time, making multiple frames and then composing each final photograph from several scenes, in which he finds revealing “play” narratives.

With photographs from rich and poor schools, numerous middle schools, and some high schools, in countries including Argentina, Bhutan, Bolivia, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Nepal, Norway, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., Mollison also provides access for readers of all ages to issues of global diversity and inequality.

The scene at Aperture Foundation for the opening of James Mollison’s Playground

Aperture’s Chris Boot (center) counting down the ways he is so pleased with James Mollison’s (right) work.

James Mollison’s (born in Kenya, 1973) work has been featured widely in such publications as Colors, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review, among many others. He has also published several books, among them James and Other Apes (2004), The Disciples (2008), and Where Children Sleep (2010).

You can see more of James’ work on his website by clicking here.

Tags: Aperture Foundation, Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet), Exhibitions, James Mollison, Mounting

Walls of Sound
Danny Clinch
Milk Gallery
March 6 – April 6

Our good friend — and perhaps even our oldest customer — Danny Clinch had something of a retrospective at NYC’s Milk Gallery in March. Clinch is a prolific shooter, so editing his absurdly large catalog of images into a cohesive show proved to be a significant challenge for him — but one that, by judging from the crowd’s reactions on opening night, was well worth his efforts.

The Milk Gallery is a pretty impressive space — and one capable of constant reinvention. Clinch’s team mashed up two thematic solutions: Walls of Sound meets Motor Drive — that’s a double, albeit mild, double entendre, I believe — and they created a number of installs to work specifically within the site’s unique features (note the giant window covers). He even pulled out a few of tricks of his own, like this viewer accessible Hasselblad set-up and a huge “festival wall” installation, which, was later sold off piece by piece at a final de-install party.

We helped out with the big prints (though not that giant cling-wrap thing of Bruce’s face in the window!) and by far not the majority of the exhibition — no, more so for us — the show was a bit of a walk through the past with some new twists here and there. It was great to see prints from the old shoots that we processed film from as far back as 1997 — and sometimes surprising to see the new edits as well. Danny mentioned wanting to shake things up from his usual selects … and Walls of Sound did not disappoint.

Of course, the man himself was on hand, signing copies of his aptly titled latest book Still Moving.
(note: that’s got to be a record beating third double entendre in one blog post)

Tags: Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet), Danny Clinch, Exhibitions