The Armory Show: 11 Photography Picks
The Armory Show officially kicks off this week at Piers 92 and 94 in Manhattan, with 199 galleries from over twenty-eight countries participating in this year’s edition. Below, we highlight some standout photography from around the fair, ranging from documentary photographs from the Civil Rights movement to abstraction, including a series of portraits featured in the newest issue of Aperture magazine. Be sure to also check out Aperture Foundation at Booth 827 on Pier 94.
Duane Michals, Willem de Kooning, 1985
DC Moore Gallery devoted a wall of its booth to the work of Duane Michals, recently the subject of a retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Among the works featured are Michals’s portraits of artists, from Willem de Kooning to Rene Magritte to Andy Warhol.
Gordon Parks, Outside Looking In, 1956
The presentation at at Howard Greenberg Gallery focused on color photography from the Civil Rights movement as well as the work of prominent African-American photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose work for the Time photo-essay “Back to Fort Scott” is currently on view at the MFA Boston.
Thomas Ruff, ch.phg.06, 2014
In the contemporary wing of the show, David Zwirner Gallery has a major focus on photography at the fair this year, featuring large-scale photographs by Thomas Ruff from his Photograms and Stars series as well as smaller work from his Negatives series. (Read a recent review of Ruff’s exhibition in Düsseldorf.)
Work from Chris McCaw’s Sunburned series.
Yossi Milo also has abstract photography on view, with selections from Chris McCaw’s Sunburned series, for which the artist allows hours of sun exposure onto light-sensitive negatives, causing solarization—they are literally holes burnt into the image.
Photographs by Zanele Muholi at Yancey Richardson’s booth.
At Yancey Richardson, portraits by the South African photographer Zanele Muholi are on view—many of the works appear in the new issue of Aperture magazine, “Queer,” alongside an interview with Muholi about her depictions of the gay and lesbian community in South Africa. She will have her first large-scale exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in May this year.
Alfredo Jaar, Angel, 2007
At Lia Rumma from Milan, Italy, a large-scale Alfredo Jaar photograph dominated the booth.
Alec Soth, Crazy Legs Saloon. Watertown, New York, 2012
Alec Soth, Robert E. “Bob” Waitt. College Station, Texas, 2013
Sean Kelly is showing multiple photographs by Alec Soth, who headlined Aperture’s 2014 Benefit.
Mona Hatoum, Four Birds (Baalback), 1998.
At Alexander and Bonin, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s art and photography rounded out the Armory Focus section, which this year centers on the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean (MENAM).
Talia Chetrit, parents in the sun #1, 2014
Sies + Höke from Düsseldorf showed the work of Talia Chetrit at their booth. The New York–based artist often repurposes photographs from her family archives, re-cropping, zooming, and rearranging them to create new juxtapositions of past and present.
