The Armory Show Part 2: Photography

There seemed to be a huge selection of photography available at the Armory and much of it large-scale work of a consistently high quality. First up: Enrique Metinides at the Anton Kern Gallery. Metinides is best known for his accident and crime-scene photography. Metinides' work is notable for his use of wide angle lens and daylight flash, which result in action photos that are strangely static. But the pieces on show that I saw were a departure from the work I associate with Metinides. Two diptyques, the works which alas I could not find on an internet trawl, juxtaposed images of people with images of physical space. The exceptional feature of this was the close relationship between the lines within each pair of photos. At a purely formal level the photos were almost identical, yet in content they differed not only in degree but in kind.

At the Project NY Gallery Coco Fusco impressed. Arguably not a photographer, strictly speaking, the photos on view here document Bare Life Study 1, a group street performance using routine methods of humiliation in military prisons as choreography. The phrase 'bare life' is a reference to the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who argues in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life that modern politics works by de-individuating people - a process of reducing them to a basic biological entity, one that can be tracked, identified and, ultimately, tortured. As such he sees modern politics as a culmination of a process that found it most overt manifestations in the concentration camps of WWII. Fusco's work emphasizes the role of humiliation in this process and seeks to overcome the marginalization of detainees by presenting her work as performance. Confrontational and aggressive, the documentation gains strength from the urgency of the project.

Catherine Yass at the Alison Jacques Gallery displayed large-scale photos mounted in light boxes. The work has a stillness and is scrupulously composed, clearly representational with no ambiguity as to subject matter but by virtue of the light box and use of filters it has an unearthly, otherworldly feel. Lars Nilsson's photograph 'Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood' (2002) at the Milliken gallery also has an otherworldly feel, achieved through a meticulous staging of his imagery (see it at http://www.millikengallery.com). Both provocative and unsettling, the photo draws as much attention to the viewer as to itself, with it's suggestions of voyeurism and observation. It's rich palette however detracts somewhat from the power of the imagery, by placing it in an almost fairytale environment. This merely serves to blunt the tension in an otherwise strong work.

Bellwether Gallery obviously have great confidence in Trevor Paglen as he was their sole artist on show. Perhaps this is understandable as his photos undeniably have a power, one that is greatly increased upon closer viewing. Shot with a high powered telescopic lens, the photos record the comings and goings of CIA aeroplanes as well as documenting alleged CIA black sites.
The work is highly charged, its nature emphasized by the surreptitious nature of the photos, and it succeeds in concretizing aspects of a new social geography that is often denied by those involved. Like Willie Doherty's work on the North of Ireland, we see that nothing is neutral and little is innocent. The nature of visibility and invisibility is also interrogated here. For the work suggests that invisibility is less an ontological determination but more a question of proximity. If we cannot get near such sites, who is to say they are there? What is real and what is not becomes radically subjectivized and open to negotiation - or abuse.

At Peter Blum Gallery the photos of Kimsooja stood out, as did Sabine Hornig at Galerie Barbara Thumm and Elger Esser at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. The latter's filtered and sometimes painted over pictures are almost classical in their attention to balance and measure. The yellow filter is also reminiscent of the autumnal colors favored by Turner in his landscapes. Other honorable mentions were Ryan Gander's photos at Annet Gelink Gallery, utilizing pieces of silver affixed to the images; Olufur Eliason's incredible set of 42 photgraphs documenting the changes on a single view over 24 hours and Frank Thiel's images of decaying surfaces at Sean Kelly Gallery.