Yearly Archives: 2012

Domesticated

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In Domesticated, artist Amy Stein explores the archetypal motif of man versus nature. More specifically, her photographs explore the tenuous relationship between man and animals as human civilization continues to encroach upon nature. Informed by actual newspaper accounts and oral histories from citizens of the small town of Matamoras in Northeast Pennsylvania, which borders a state forest, Stein’s photographs are inspired by true events.

Halloween in Harlem

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“In October of 2003, my husband and I moved to New York and found an apartment on 112th Street in East Harlem. That Halloween I decided to take my camera out and capture the colorful stroll of kids taking part in the same holiday activity happening in every small town, suburb, and city in America.

“In Harlem, children dress up as witches, fairies, and their favorite comic book heroes, but they don’t go door-to-door asking their neighbors for treats. Instead, they walk up and down Lexington and 2nd Avenue collecting candy from the many liquor marts, dollar stores, beauty shops, and bodegas. It is a ritual that is at once completely familiar and yet wholly unique to this culturally vital and rapidly gentrifying area of Manhattan.

“Halloween in Harlem is an ongoing project largely inspired by the work of Helen Levitt.”

–Amy Stein

Stranded

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“Beginning with the government’s failed response to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, the American people suffered through a series of devastating corruptions of their traditional structures of support. Stranded is a meditation on the despondence of the American psyche as this collapse of certainty left the country stuck in an unfamiliar space between distress and relief. In this series the car serves as both a figurative symbol of American destiny and a literal representation of the personal breakdowns on the road to that promise. The images live in the road photography tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, but where they sought to capture the American experience through ‘the journey,’ my photographs seek to tell the story of this time through the journey interrupted.

“I have spent the past five plus years driving across America photographing stranded motorists. Finding subjects is a matter of chance and every encounter is tense because of the unusual circumstances of our interaction and the inherent danger of the roadside environment. Most of the photographs from this series can be found on a Google Map that documents my travels across the US.”

—Amy Stein

Show

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Show is photographer Henry Horenstein’s long-anticipated look at modern burlesque. The photographs were made from 2001 to 2009, and serve as an homage to the neo-burlesque resurgence of the last several years.

The noir-styled images in Show are variously amusing, sexy, and harsh — true reflections of the world they document. The book covers a myriad of burlesque-style performance, including drag, fetish, and sideshow. Horenstein says, “These performers are today’s version of the ‘starving artist’ — living on the margins and delivering their personal expression through song, dance, comedy, and narrative — charged sexually and often highly political.”

Show includes portraits of many of burlesque’s most recognizable performers, including Dita Von Teese and Catherine D’lish, Angie and Helen Pontani, Peek-A-Boo Point, Julie Atlas Muz, Miss Saturn, Dirty Martini, Jackie Beat, Bonnie Dunn, Verushka — and the legendary Murray Hill.

Animalia

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“Horenstein’s creatures are decontextualized. They appear without the backdrop of the natural landscape, outside even the artificial world of the zoo or aquarium, and devoid of their true color. As a consequence, the images are truly arresting; and in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, we see these animals as we have never seen them before. We notice details, and Horenstein focuses our vision on the unexpected: the foot of an elephant, the eye of an octopus, the hair on the back of a gibbon’s head, the pattern of feathers on a bird’s neck. He plays with scale: the rear end and tail of a rhinoceros occupy the entire picture frame. We see these as if through a magnifying glass. His pictures challenge us to look more closely, to ask questions and make connections. We think about form and function: the relationship between an elephant’s foot, a horse’s hoof, and our own toes. We ponder modes of sensing and communication: the signals that hold together a school of fish. Examining these photographs, we become scientists and discoverers.

“In some respects, Horenstein’s work continues a centuries-old tradition of natural history illustration in the realm of photography. In natural history illustration, animals are often presented in shallow space with limited landscape, sometimes even against a blank page, in order to promote close examination and study of detail. But as much as these photographs promote scientific inquiry, they are more than scientific illustration. Animals were the subjects of our first art and our first metaphors; and freed from the constraints of space and time, many of Horenstein’s creatures remind us of the lost magical connection between the ‘animal world’ and our own. They are unsettling and they mesmerize. They transcend and transgress familiar boundaries between subject and object. Who is observing whom? The Komodo dragon looks at us with piercing eyes. We’re transfixed by the gaze of the harbor seal.

“The combination of the scientific and the metaphorical, the artistic and the analytical in these images is what accounts for their extraordinary power.”

—Elisabeth Werby, Executive Director, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Humans

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“These are not in any conventional sense nudes in the often grand and equally often tawdry tradition of photography. They are not scientific or medical, despite the disturbingly clinical close-up viewpoint they take. Finally, they are not abstractions, even though some of the imagery is challenging through the manipulation of focus and cropping. In actuality, there is some truth to Horenstein’s recent work containing aspects of all of the three categories mentioned above, while maintaining an originality all its own.

“There are few contemporary photographers whose works, like Horenstein’s, do not make the human body the object of a cultivation of beauty. The languid, ample female nudes of Irving Penn come to mind in their balance between grace and grotesque. Likewise, the gnarled and drooping flesh of the late John Coplan’s powerful self-portraits that chronicle the ravages of time.

“In his intense and candid examination, Horenstein cannot but invest his works with sexuality. The lack of narrative or objectification, however, removes any sense of eroticism that would compromise his vision. Horenstein’s photographs are aspects of the human body as geography. The more the works defy immediate identification, the more they stimulate our imagination. Through concept, focus, cropping, and exquisite printing, Henry Horenstein transforms the ordinary and seemingly obvious and makes us re-examine the components of what we are.”

—Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator-in-Charge, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Close Relations

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In Close Relations, noted photographer Henry Horenstein presents his earliest images, made when he was a student at the Rhose Island School of Design. Mixed with humor and history, this collection of family and friends, landscapes, and period imagery, describes a time familiar to everyone, when one moves from adolescence to adulthood – – remaining part of a family while beginning to create a world of one’s own.

As a history student in the late 1960s, Horenstein learned the importance of preserving the present to create a record for the future. As he took up photography, he carried these lessons with him. In Close Relations he offers us a warm and quirky look at his personal history, and at a particular place and time.

[Text taken from the dust jacket of Henry Horenstein, Close Relations (New York City: Powerhouse Books, 2006).]

Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music

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Forty years after he began documenting the country-music scene in and around Nashville, Henry Horenstein’s deep love for the music and its people continues. Having spent a lifetime around performers and fans, he has been granted access to the high-glamour backstage at the Grand Ole Opry in its heyday, as well as the rough-and-tumble dive bars and family-friendly festivals. Spanning from 1972 to 2011, Horenstein’s photographs capture the irrepressible spirit of an American institution as it has evolved over the years.

[Text taken from the dust jacket for Henry Horenstein, Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music (New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012).]