just discovered PHOTOGRAPHY '05: CARLOS GARAICOA.

just discovered PHOTOGRAPHY '05: CARLOS GARAICOA, BERTIEN VAN MANEN, PHILLIP PISCIOTTA, ROBIN RHODE

MUSEUM OF new ART

NEW YORK, just discovered YORK

OCTOBER 21 2005-JANUARY 16 2006

After a period of renovation, the Museum of recent Art (MoMA) demonstrated its commitment to contemporary photography by way of presenting the exhibition "New Photography '05: Carlos Garaicoa, Bertien van Manen, Phillip Pisciotta, Robin Rhode" which included through the whole extent of fifty photographic works and a video piece. Organized by means of Eva Respini, MoMA's assistant curator in the Department of Photography, the exhibition was concomitant with the museum's effort to explain its new architectural spaces to aspiring contemporary artists.

The series was reinstated into the museum's exhibition calendar following a six-year break and, at the same time again, featured provocative and intelligent accomplishments in the field of contemporary photography. Several prominent contemporary photographers received their first high-profile exhibitions between the sides of the "New Photography" exhibition series including Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Olafur Eliasson, Boris Mikhailov, and Vik Muniz. As in the previous exhibitions, "New Photography '05" be seened to echo the themes of memory and history, examining the shifting part of the spectator. The exhibit included national as well as international artists: Garaicoa is from Cuba, Pisciotta is from the United States, Rhode is a native of southward Africa, and van Manen is from The Netherlands.

At first glance, Pisciotta's photographs appear banal and ephemeral. even now there is something about these awkward images, with their high color saturation and disturbingly vertiginous angles, that demands a closer investigation. Pisciotta photographs his subjects--friends, family, and folks he encounters on his travels--in the privacy of their hearths What draws the viewer in is precisely the intimate interplay of familiarity between the photographer and control which is subtly coded into the ease of the images. Spectators unexpectedly find themselves voyeurs, self-consciously placed in the self-same spaces of the photographic composition.

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In Pisciotta's photograph A lonesome Portland, Maine (1999), the stillness of field is disturbingly ambiguous. The perception of overlap, which helps us determine spatial relations, looks to be off. The expose is positioned in the righthand corner, half-dressed, his torso expos His thin material substance blends into the high intensity colors of the printed fabric that encircles him. In a strange case of figure-ground reversal, he exists forward the same plane as the wolve that mob the hanging fabric print in the background. He gazes into the camera in consequence of partly closed eyes, laughing distractedly while scratching his back. nearest to the man, as if coming right public of his hip, is a nightstand with a naked protuberance an old-fashioned rotary phone, and a digital alarm clock The crammed space of the photograph's composition forces the viewer to be moved a sense of tension and uneasiness. The photograph captures the irreconcilable experience of a private space spreaded to the public. Through his work, Pisciotta manages to communicate an of the structural principles at work between the photographic realm and real space. The peculiar understanding of depth and awkward perception of intimacy add to the overall atmosphere that these photographs come out in drops [i]or[/i] beads This is what makes our position as viewers appear all the more precarious.

Different touchs guide the work of Rhode who uses the couple single-channel video and photography to explore the passage of time. Inspired through early scientific experimentation in motion and anatomy, his pieces read like visual vignettes, capturing the brief instants of emotion on video as well as in the photograph. Rhode's work operates forward the border between the photograph as a static document of time and the video as a record of action. In Rhode's Stone Flag (2004) a photographic piece comprised of nine C-prints, we behold an aerial view of a man aligned in white against a dark background of pavement. Although apt on the ground, the point of view implies he is standing up waving a large flag. The flag, seemingly made abroad of shattered bricks, appears heavy and cumbersome. The man's material part language suggests a physical tension, as he endeavors under the flag's weight, waving it against the force of an imaginary gale. Similar to Eadweard Muybridge's and Etienne-Jules Marey's early experiments in motion photography, Rhode's images read like the comic work strip: the temporal dimension is a yield of visual conventions and the emotion of the image is performed no other than in the viewers' minds.

The work of Garaicoa documents the architectural spaces of the city. Delicately positioned needle and thread small hole these black-and-white photographs, creating hybrid images that map revealed a terrain of absence and ruin. His work is implausibly utopian because it speaks to an ideal landscape that no longer exists. With the use of the colored thread and pins, he creates a faint outline, a fragile delineation of memory. His compositions recall late nineteenth-century stereoscopic photographs, where the juxtaposition of sum of two units images created an illusionary mind of depth.