A New American Portrait

ulrich.jpg
© Brian Ulrich

I’m incred­i­bly excited about A New Amer­i­can Por­trait, open­ing June 21 at the Jen Bek­man gallery. Per­haps my excite­ment affects my per­cep­tion, but I have the sense that some­thing his­tor­i­cal is tak­ing place with the hang­ing of this show, along the same lines of the 1967 New Doc­u­ments show at the Mod­ern that intro­duced Diane Arbus, Lee Fried­lan­der and Gary Wino­grand. Think­ing about MoMA these days, it’s hardly the place where cutting-​​edge work would be pre­sented as it is hap­pen­ing. It seems to me that no group of peo­ple bet­ter under­stand con­tem­po­rary pho­tog­ra­phy than the group of peo­ple involved in this show.

Jen and Joerg Col­berg have co-​​curated it and it will fea­ture work from Alec Soth, Brian Ulrich, Todd Hido, Chris­tine Collins, Jen Davis, Ben Don­ald­son, Amy Elkins, Shen Wei and Peter Haakon-​​Thompson. If this isn’t a defin­i­tive show, I don’t know what is and should prob­a­bly think about find­ing a new way to spend my time. What’s more cer­tain though is that it’s worth a bus trip to New York to be at the opening.

Will there be a book? I cer­tainly hope so.

Update: The date of the open­ing has been moved to Fri­day, June 22. Any­one inter­ested in going up to New York City with me?

Posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 1:34 pm

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