Plus: fig leaf ice cream, a hotel in the hills of Majorca and more from T’s cultural compendium.
There are several paintings scattered around Pablo Barba’s studio, at the end of a far-flung industrial block in Long Island City, Queens. One is of a young woman in a short floral dress gazing wistfully, even tragically, at the plumber fixing her kitchen sink. In another, a different woman, in a pink nightgown, stands at her front door accepting a pizza box from a delivery guy as if it were the newborn Christ. Yet another woman in a third painting is topless and asleep in a lounge chair by a pool, white doves flying above her. In the background, a pool boy averts his eyes as he drags a net across the water’s surface to skim off the debris.
Barba, 38, was born in Santiago, Chile, and grew up in the waning days of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, when there weren’t many opportunities for artists. His grandparents and parents were architects but, he says, “everyone wanted to be a painter. The next-best discipline in a place where being a painter wasn’t really an option was architecture. When I said, ‘Mom and Dad, I’m going to be a painter,’ they were excited.”
The country had neither a notable museum collection nor an art market, which was both limiting and liberating. Barba had difficulty finding certain art supplies, but he was free to paint whatever he wanted. He moved to New York in 2014 to enroll in the M.F.A. program at Columbia and spent a lot of time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was drawn to 17th-century Dutch paintings, particularly those in a Baroque style known as geselschapje, which means “merry company.” Comedic works, they depict grotesque, often ominous acts of consumption in various forms, possibly, Barba says, as “a Protestant reaction to ‘The Last Supper.’”
Of considerable influence to him is Jan Steen — seen in a self-portrait at the center of the masterpiece “The Dissolute Household” (circa 1663-64) bearing an alcoholic’s blush and affectionately tickling the hand of his maid, who with her other hand is pouring Steen’s suitably bosomed and incapacitated wife an overflowing glass of wine. Barba likewise tends to concentrate on moments where decadence tips over into chaos: The paintings are funny, embarrassing, empathetic, ugly and appealing, all at once. His main focus is, to borrow the artist’s own phrase in describing Steen, “a group of people gathered around a table in, basically, debauchery.”
“There’s something about Pablo’s work that makes you want to vomit into your mouth,” says Adam Cohen, a director at Gagosian Gallery and the proprietor of New York’s A Hug From the Art World, where Barba had a solo show in 2022 and will have another in the fall. “Even though I feel I am part of the thing Pablo’s painting, I also don’t want to be part of the thing that Pablo’s painting.” — M.H. Miller
Photo assistant: Rafael Rios
From ruby butterfly brooches to bracelets in the shape of leaping panthers with sapphire eyes, fine jewelry has been inspired by the animal kingdom for centuries. But perhaps no other creature is so perfectly suited to adorn the body as the snake, its sinuous form at once alluring and dangerous. A recurrent motif in jewelry since ancient times, the serpent symbolized health to the Greeks and eternal love to the Victorians. Bulgari, founded in Rome in 1884 by the silversmith Sotirio Bulgari, has long explored the power of the reptile’s undulating curves: The house debuted its first gold watch made to resemble an abstract snake 75 years ago. Since then, its designers have come to interpret the Serpenti motif more literally and with daring aplomb. Case in point: this new high jewelry necklace, in white gold with onyx embellishments and a combination of more than 90 buff-top emeralds and pavé-set diamonds that tumble and twist. Chasing its tail, green eyes aglow, it is intended to encircle the neck, boldly, forever. Bulgari Serpenti High Jewelry necklace, price on request, (800) 285-4274. — Nancy Hass
Photo assistant: Alice Beltrami
About nine years ago, the British photographer Kate Bellm, 36, and her partner, the Mexican artist and horticulturist Edgar Lopez, 40, were living in Berlin when they decided to escape city life for a while on the Spanish island of Majorca. After three months in the coastal village of Deia, they knew they wanted to stay. “I was blown away by the Tramuntana mountains — the fields of wildflowers, the old olive groves and wild goats,” says Bellm. “People think you should come to Majorca for the beach but, for me, it’s all about the mountain villages.” The couple bought a house not far from the historic town of Soller and in 2021 purchased a nearby 16th-century country estate, which they’ve now turned into a small inn. Opening next month, Hotel Corazón sits on 12 acres planted with ancient palm, jacaranda, olive and citrus trees; the property is also home to a working farm. Inside, the rooms are an eclectic mix of fur rugs; large, egg-shaped ceramic bathtubs from Studio Loho; fish-eye mirrors; and four-poster beds. None of the 12 guest rooms — three more are in the works — are the same, but almost all have sweeping views of the terraced mountains and the gardens, where visitors can dine under the stars. Rooms from about $490 a night, hotelcorazon.com. — Gisela Williams
Loro Piana is not a name generally associated with the beach. Founded 99 years ago in the Northern Italian town of Trivero in Piedmont, the brand is a mainstay of wintertime luxury, known for its multi-ply cashmere knitwear, featherweight vicuña scarves and tailored wool overcoats. The house’s latest offering, however, has a sunnier outlook. Inspired by the Mediterranean seaside, the Blossom bag — a roomy, leather-handled tote — is meant to be carried both on and off the sand. It’s not, however, a complete departure from the Loro Piana tradition. Woven from jute cord, ribbons and strips of two different printed fabrics, the Blossom has the softness and variegated texture of a hand-knit sweater, complete with intricately crocheted trim. — Jenny Comita
The word “fig” appears dozens of times in the Old Testament; its leaf, in comparison, is associated with prudery. But recently, chefs and bartenders have been teasing flavor from the greens alone. At Osip in Somerset, England, chefs dehydrate and blitz them, then use the powder to flavor ice cream. Fig leaf oil — made by blanching and blending the foliage in neutral oil, then straining out the solids — is spooned over each scoop, adding a “deep green, aromatic quality,” says the chef Dan Byrne, 25, who forages the ingredient from the surrounding neighborhood. Fig leaves “are not something you often see in the market,” says Sylvan Mishima Brackett, 47, the chef and owner of Izakaya Rintaro in San Francisco. He relies on his garden in Oakland for his supply, which he uses to wrap sake-spritzed local trout before grilling it. In London, the chef Claire Ptak, the owner of Violet Cakes and author of “Love Is a Pink Cake,” out this month, makes what she calls “figgy peaches,” swaddling the halved fruits — their center dimples filled with frangipane — in fig leaves and then searing them on the grill. The leaves “impart this coconut flavor,” she says. For her part, Margot Lecarpentier, 36, the owner of the cocktail bar Combat in Paris, makes low-carbon-footprint tropical drinks, substituting homemade fig leaf-infused liquor — which she describes as “bright, with a silkiness” — for imported coconut. Her extremely exclusive, hyperlocal source: her parents’ yard. — Lauren Joseph
Retouching: Anonymous Retouch. Photo assistant: Karl Leitz. Set designer’s assistant: Erin Kelly Meuchner
Photo by Selina Roman
Say cheese! May is International Month of Photography, and St. Pete is celebrating with a series of events showcasing the area’s best photographers.
The events come courtesy of a small group of Tampa Bay-area photo influencers, three of whom are no strangers to CL. They include Tampa photographer Agueda Sanfiz, who introduced the Tampa Bay area to family documentary photography with “Picture (im)perfect” at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in 2021; Beth Reynolds, who became Tampa’s first Photographer Laureate in 2003; and photography historian and curator Marieke van der Krabben (formerly of FMoPA). The three women form the Board of Directors of one of St. Pete’s newest arts organizations – St. Pete Month of Photography, or SPMOP for short.
When I wrote this, The SPMOP website listed eight SPMOP events. Some of them were already in the works and SPMOP is just promoting them, but the majority are fresh collabs.
“When we started sending emails out to the people that we know, word of mouth worked really well,” Agueda told CL. “People started suggesting to us events and partnerships. So it’s been a good combination of us reaching out to organizations, but also people coming to us, which shows how excited the community is about having something that is lens-based [photography] centered.” It seems like every time I visit the website, they’ve added something new.
SPMOP began with the idea for a photo laureate competition. “The photo laureate was the first thing we knew we were going to do because it’s a way to bring new talent forward,” Sanfiz told CL in a phone interview.
Thirty-two photographers applied during the 3-month submission period. From those, the team narrowed it down to five finalists — Jaime Aelevanthara, Selina Roman, Thomas Sayers-Ellis, Emily Will, and Tristan Wheelock. The Morean Arts Center is displaying their work throughout SPMOP.
“The main goal was to select photographers that show their own style and creativity, and most importantly, their own way of telling a story in their photographs,” van der Krabben told CL. “The five that we selected all show their own specific style and their specific way of narrating a story inside of a photograph or a series of photographs.”
May 13 at the Morean, SPMOP organizers announce which of these five photographers gets to be St. Pete’s first-ever photo laureate. St. Pete’s first photo laureate will spend the next year documenting life in St. Pete. At the end of the year, they’ll print and frame their photos for all of St. Pete to see.
Before that, St. Pete residents can see (and purchase) photos from a much more extensive selection of St. Pete photographers at Five Deuces Galleria’s “Unique Perspectives,” which opens May 6 and will also be on view during Second Saturday ArtWalk May 13 and on Mother’s Day.
Tampa Bay area photographers submitted 444 photographs for inclusion in the show. From these, Five Deuces gallery curators Geoffrey Baris (fashion photographer) and Julie Haura selected 107 images with input from van der Krabben.
Together, they selected images demonstrating unique perspectives, as the show’s title suggests.
“We were looking for photographers that showed us a perspective you don’t always see,” says Baris. “We didn’t need to see sunsets, although there are probably a couple of them in there. But the majority of the work is something the photographer caught with their camera that people wouldn’t normally see…..”
“The three of us together ended up being a good mix, and I think we’re going to have a great show,” Haura added.
In addition to showcasing the work of our Tampa Bay area photographers, SPMOP provides professional photographers and photography enthusiasts with several opportunities to improve upon their craft, including workshops in street photography and seascapes, and a portfolio review at The Morean.
Beyond SPMOP-organized events and collaborations, several May photo shows were already in the works in and around St. Pete. Exhibits at the Leepa Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs celebrate the legacy of two St. Petersburg photographers – Herb Snitzer and Tom Kramer. Meanwhile, the Museum of Fine Arts hosts a series of images from Japanese photographers working in Japan during the Meiji Era (1870-1900).
Keep St. Pete Lit! closes SPMOP with a photography-themed open mic at The [email protected], where participants recite an original poem inspired by a photograph of their choosing. The event represents SPMOP’s desire to honor photography’s interdisciplinary nature. “Photography penetrates every single aspect of our lives,” Agueda told CL. “It’s present everywhere. We use it for marketing, we use it to document our family lives…That interdisciplinary nature is so important.
“I’m excited about this [open mic],” says Agueda, who hopes to couple photography with music for next year’s SPMOP and Lumen Photo Festival. “We can do that with the other arts. I mean, you look at how the Morean presented Tom Kramer’s work – dance inspiring photo and the other way around. We have to foster those kinds of collaborations, particularly in a large platform like a photo festival….”
For the complete list of SPMOP events, see spmop.org
Award trophies were lined up for recipients at this year’s Richmond Show, held Friday at Altria Theater. (Jonathan Spiers photos)
After a Martin Agency sweep at last year’s awards, it was a night of unexpected best-in-show winners at the Advertising Club of Richmond’s annual Richmond Show, held Friday at Altria Theater.
Breaking through this year with two of the evening’s top awards was The King Agency, which took home best-in-shows in the advertising and design categories for work done not for a client, but for its own 25th anniversary party.
The nine-person firm led by industry veteran Dave King received the recognitions for its Netflix-themed party invitations, which were disguised as the iconic red envelopes – complete with a (blank) DVD – that the then-movie rental company started mailing in 1997, the same year King founded the agency.
The King Agency’s Netflix-style invitations.
In the interactive category, best-in-show went to Bridget Guckin, an art director with local agency Think, whose freelance web design work for On Three Photography beat out the competition.
Film studio Mondial won the production best-in-show for its work on The Martin Agency’s “Cross Country” ad for phone brand Straight Talk Wireless.
Straight Talk “Cross Country” from MONDIAL on Vimeo.
And in the student competition, Noelle Jessup of Old Dominion University took top honors for an illustrated map of Norfolk’s Ghent neighborhood.
Also presented were more than 50 gold, silver and bronze Bridge awards, the pewter trophies depicting Richmond’s arched CSX bridge that replaced the show’s longtime cannonball trophy last year.
Gold awards in the four agency categories went to Alice Blue, Arts & Letters Creative Co. (2), Campfire & Co., Martin Agency (2) and Wildfire. Silver awards went to Campfire & Co., King Agency, Martin Agency (4), Owen Design Co., Spang, Rian/Hunter Production and Wildfire (2).
Charles Hodges
The show’s three judges were Adam Cote, a freelance creative director in Boston; Lap Le, lead designer at MediaMonks and part-time faculty at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles; and NiRey Reynolds, director of creative impact North America at McCann in New York.
Non-competitive recognitions also were presented, including the honorary title of Ad Person of the Year, this year awarded to Charles Hodges, founder and executive creative director of Arts & Letters. The 6-year-old agency’s accolades this year included being named a “standout” on trade publication Ad Age’s Agency A-list rankings for its “Work Together, Anywhere” hybrid work model.
Rachel Spiller
This year’s $2,500 Women in Advertising Scholarship was awarded to Rachel Spiller, a creative advertising major with a marketing insights minor at VCU’s Robertson School of Media and Culture. Emery Schindler was awarded the $1,500 Excellence in Creative Education Scholarship, awarded to VCU Brandcenter students.
Emery Schindler
Ad club board members Yasir Afzal and Rebecca Frankel emceed the ceremony, the theme of which was “Adage” – a reference not to the trade publication (which also named Martin its 2023 Agency of the Year), but to its definition as “a proverb or short statement expressing a general truth.”
Afzal, a recruiting manager with Atlantic Vision Partners, was announced as the club’s next president, replacing Brandon Shields.
Shields said this year’s show saw engagement from several first-time entrants and an uptick in submissions from beyond Central Virginia, specifically in the Hampton Roads area, noting ODU’s best-in-show and increasingly higher rankings.
Brandon Shields
Noting as well the showings of smaller shops like King Agency and Mondial, Shields said, “I believe we will continue to see our large agencies such as Arts & Letters Creative Co. and Martin Agency take home a large amount of awards. However, the rest of the community is gaining traction across the board, including new names, familiar faces and independent creatives claiming higher ranked awards.”
Shields said the ad club tripled its membership over the past year and gained seven new corporate members. He said new programming has also contributed to consistent attendance at club events throughout the year, adding that it’s aiming to keep up that momentum.
“We hope to continue trying new ideas that will build connections with more organizations in the community, and build a thriving atmosphere for creative talent and agencies in Richmond,” Shields said.
The RE/MAX Living real estate business in Marion recently opened its doors for business in a new building on South Main Street.
The grand opening and ribbon-cutting for the new RE/MAX office was held on Friday, April 21. The brokerage specializes in residential, commercial and land transactions serving both buyers and sellers and offers property management services as well, according to a news release.
The staff includes its owner and broker-in-charge, Whitney G. Willey. Affiliated brokers include Paul Willey, Larry Pinkerton and Pat Pinkerton. These brokers combine to bring over 60 years of real estate experience.
McDowell Chamber of Commerce President Kim Effler, other Chamber leaders, Mayor Steve Little, Council Member Ann Harkey and City Manager Bob Boyette were on hand to help RE/MAX staff cut the ribbon for the new building. A reception was held inside for all who came to celebrate the new location.
“Today’s real estate market is competitive and complex, so the need for a real estate firm with the tools to help navigate it is imperative,” reads a statement from the business. RE/MAX is a well-established, global real estate firm offering state of the art marketing and technological tools to help you achieve your real estate goals. The agents at RE/MAX Living understand today’s changing market and are equipped and ready to guide you through the buying or selling process. Our agents are rooted in the community, giving them a unique understanding of local market trends and plugging you into a vast network of potential buyers and sellers.”
The newly renovated office is located at 459 S. Main St. in Marion. The office number is 828-559-2121. Office hours are Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., according to the news release.
Presented by The Torch, Confined is an annual exhibition of artworks from Indigenous artists currently in or recently released from prisons in Victoria. The 14th exhibition, which coincides with National Reconciliation Week, will be on display at the Glen Eira Town Hall Gallery for four weeks from Friday 5 May 2023.
With a record 473 artworks from 402 artists from across Victoria, this collection of works is a strong visual metaphor for the continuing over-representation of Indigenous Australians in the criminal justice system.
232 in-prison artists and 170 in-community artists are represented in Confined 14, many at different stages of their practice – from the 57 artists looking to make their first sale at the exhibition to established artists who are completing large scale public commissions and projects.
An extraordinary range of paintings, 410 in total, and 63 three-dimensional works across different mediums including hand-woven rugs and baskets, carved emu eggs, a terracotta wombat and a range of ceramics including Sean Miller’s work Galibaay on Country that was shortlisted for the 2022 Indigenous Ceramic Award (and won South-East Australian Aboriginal Artist Prize of $5,000), hand-carved wooden sculptures from native cyprus and silk scarves dyed from natural materials found in Gariwerd.
For the first time, The Torch is presenting a satellite exhibition in Gallery 2 called In the Torchlight, which this year gives additional space and an expanded voice to In-Community women artists who are pursuing their cultural practice post-release. Set to become an annual event, this year’s presentation feature bodies of work by Heather Shawe, Melissa Bell, Sonia Singh, Veronica Hudson and Thelma Beeton.
All artworks are available for purchase from the gallery and online with 100% of the sales going to the artist. For participants, the creation and sale of their artworks is part of the rehabilitation process that helps build confidence, social capital, economic stability and pathways to reconnect with the community.
In 2022, The Torch sold and licensed over $1.1million dollars’ worth of artworks for First Nations men and women participating in The Torch’s Indigenous Arts in Prisons and community program. Over 600 Indigenous men and women are currently connected to The Torch program.
Income earned from the program provides participants with the ability to realise their potential and change their circumstances while in prison and when connecting back to the community. Participants are able to provide approved support to their families on the outside, increasing stability and helping to alleviate ongoing socio-economic disadvantage.
Participants are also able to stand more confidently on their own two feet and avoid common pitfalls upon release from prison such as finding and maintaining affordable and safe accommodation. This decreases recidivism and opens new pathways towards education and employment with many positive intergenerational impacts.
The knowledge and experiences of Community Elders and those participating in the program continues to define the program’s design and delivery. Employment of men and women from the program to work on all aspects, including going back into prison to support others, has been significant to the program’s ongoing success.
The Torch now employs 23 permanent staff, 13 are First Nations men and women – six of whom have transitioned through the in-prison and in-community programs to now work at The Torch.
“The Torch program was built upon the foundation of Indigenous knowledges, philosophies and support processes that have been developed, taught and embraced for generations,” said Kent Morris, The Torch CEO.
“It shows that Indigenous led and delivered solutions to some of the ongoing issues caused by systemic over incarceration can be addressed successfully if driven by the Indigenous community.”
The Torch presents Confined 14 at the Glen Eira City Council Gallery from Thursday 5 May to Sunday June 4 2023. For more information, visit: www.thetorch.org.au for details.
Image: Emily Toulson, My Path Travelled and Future Paths Made, 2022 – courtesy of The Torch
He arrived at the coal mines, textile mills and industrial factories dressed in a three-piece suit. He wooed those in charge, asking to be let in. He was just a humble Bible salesman, he claimed, who wanted to spread the good word to the laborers inside.
What Lewis Hine actually wanted was to take photos of those laborers — and show the world what it looked like when children were put to work.
Around the turn of the 20th century, at least 18 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 were employed. Hine’s searing images of those children remade the public perception of child labor and inspired the laws to ban it.
Now, conservative lawmakers in a handful of states are seeking to relax child labor protections, amid what activists say is a surge in child labor, mostly by undocumented immigrant children, at meatpacking plants, auto factories and other dangerous job sites.
The Library of Congress maintains a collection of more than 5,000 of Hine’s photographs, including the thousands he took for the National Child Labor Committee, known as the NCLC.
“It was Lewis Hine who made sure that millions of children are not working today,” Jeffrey Newman, a former president of the New York-based nonprofit, said in 2018.
A century ago, NCLC’s mission wasn’t about showing the public that children were being used for financial gain — that was already a well-known fact. At the time, many believed the practice had substantial benefits. Youths could learn the value of hard work. Businesses could increase their productivity and decrease the hourly pay. Parents could depend on their children to support the family, meaning the adults could work less or not at all.
As one mother remarked to the NCLC in 1907: “I am really tired of seeing so many big children 10 years old playing in the streets.”
Hine’s photos showed the price: unsafe working conditions, dangerous machinery and business owners who refused to educate the children or limit their working hours.
Though there had been investigations that attempted to expose these circumstances in the past, “The industry simply dismissed those reports as — the term they would use today is — ‘fake news,’” said Hugh Hindman, a historian of child labor. “When Hine comes along and supplements the investigations with pictures, it creates a set of facts that can’t be denied anymore.”
Taken with a heavy Graflex camera, Hine’s photos were paired with captions and stories from his interviews with the children, who would tell him their ages, backgrounds and working conditions.
If they didn’t know their own age, Hine would estimate it by measuring them. As a Bible salesman or in one of his other disguises — he posed as a postcard salesman and a machinery photographer — Hine could hardly be seen whipping out a measuring tape. That’s why he wore a three-piece suit. He could measure the children against the buttons on his vest.
Hine’s affinity for telling the stories of the downtrodden probably came from his own start in life. At 18, he began working at a Wisconsin furniture factory after the death of his father. It was up to Hine to keep his family financially afloat.
According to the International Photography Hall of Fame, Hine worked 13 hours a day, six days a week, until he could move on to a seemingly better job — as a janitor in a bank. He began taking college courses on the side to become a teacher.
One of Hine’s mentors encouraged him to move to Manhattan and begin his teaching career in one of the city’s private schools. It was there that Hine picked up photography. In the hope of teaching his students to respect the new wave of immigrants coming into the city, he began visiting Ellis Island and photographing the new arrivals.
Hine’s work attracted the attention of the NCLC, which had been founded in 1904 with the mission of ending child labor. The organization had a particular project in mind for Hine.
Today, the use of photography as a tool to expose wrongdoing is hardly revolutionary. But in Hine’s time, when newspapers were just beginning to incorporate photos into their daily product, it was nearly unheard of. Hine is credited with inventing the term “photo story” and for popularizing a style of portraiture in which the subject looks straight into the camera.
His images demand that the viewers look into the children’s eyes. In many, the children are looking right back.
The National Child Labor Committee published Hine’s photos in its publicity material, trying to influence lawmakers and power players to address the injustice being done. Exhibits, newspapers and progressive media outlets picked up his outrage-inspiring work, ensuring it was seen across the country.
But there was no such thing as going viral in the early 1900s. The spread of Hine’s photos and the reform that they inspired was extremely slow.
The Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law that would prohibit most employment of minors, wasn’t passed until 1938. Hine died two years later — long before his work would be recognized for the impact it had. Now Hine’s photos appear in museum exhibitions, are sold at auctions for upward of $5,000 apiece and are credited with influencing generations of documentary photographers.
In the NCLC’s final years, the threat of child labor didn’t have the fundraising power it once did. In a rare instance in which an organization dedicated to a social ill had worked itself out of a job, the NCLC board decided in 2017 to “declare victory and just move out,” Newman said the next year.
But, he predicted, “there may well come a time when the NCLC may need to be reinvented and started up again.”
You can explore the archive of Hine’s photos on the Library of Congress digital archive.
A version of this story first published on Sept. 3, 2018, with the headline “The searing photos that helped end child labor in America.”
Working in his California home 3,000 miles away during Covid, the director struck a sympathetic chord with the venerated photographer. A book and two gallery shows resulted.
It was a happy fallout of Covid.
During the pandemic shutdown, the filmmaker Joel Coen and his wife, the actress Frances McDormand, hunkered down in their home on the Marin County coast of California. The photography dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel and his husband, Alan Marks, a real-estate consultant, relocated from San Francisco to their weekend house in a neighboring town. The two couples, who knew each other casually, began spending more time together.
One evening, Fraenkel asked if Coen and McDormand were familiar with the work of Lee Friedlander. At 88, Friedlander is one of the greatest living photographers, whose pictures Fraenkel has been exhibiting for more than 40 years.
“I thought Lee was ripe for an outside approach and inviting a filmmaker seemed like the way to go,” Fraenkel said of his matchmaking inspiration. “Anyone who’s seen Joel’s movies knows he has a special eye for images.”
Although the subjects of Friedlander’s black-and-white photographs since the early ’60s have been wide-ranging — public monuments, motel rooms, party scenes, portraits, self-portraits, nudes and landscapes — what unites them is his unerring sense of composition. In his ability to create harmonious wholes out of urban fragments, he is the contemporary heir to Eugène Atget, who memorialized Paris in the early 20th century. Like Atget, too, Friedlander finds unexpected juxtapositions in the reflections in plate-glass windows.
The witty and carefully crafted movies that Coen has written and directed — most with his brother, Ethan, including “Barton Fink,” “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men”— display a similar flair for revealing the mystery in what might seem at first glance to be ordinary and banal.
Fraenkel’s question about Friedlander landed on fertile ground. “I certainly knew of him, and I think Fran did a little,” Coen said recently, in a joint video interview with McDormand from California. “Jeffrey floated the idea of doing a show of Lee’s photographs. He said it could be whatever you want. ‘Just 10 photographs if you like.’ ”
Coen and McDormand visited the Friedlanders in New City, N.Y., to make sure they were simpatico. The meeting was a great success. “They came here with Jeffrey,” Friedlander recalled. “We were ready for them with food, but they brought food, too. We had a sort of picnic indoors. When Joel and I met, we both thought we might have known each other. We didn’t, but we were so familiar with each other.”
Over the last year, Coen expanded the project into a sequenced book of 70 Friedlander photos, “Framed,” that is the basis for two exhibitions, at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, from May 6 through June 24, and at Luhring Augustine in New York, from May 13 to June 24. Each show will display about 45 photos.
Coen began by leafing through books of Friedlander pictures and decided to arrange the new book to draw attention to Friedlander’s compositional approaches. “Looking through these books and going back and forth, it was a pattern recognition for me — patterns which I know are instinctive but are manifold in everything he does,” he said.
He began with the artist’s simplest formal structures and advanced into greater complexity. “The first thing I noticed was the splitting,” Coen explained. Friedlander repeatedly organizes a picture with a vertical post dividing the frame. “The post, the post,” Coen continued. “Then I see the posts are slightly diagonal, and the affinity between the diagonal post and how car interiors are designed. Then I see how he uses diagonal shadows like the posts. Now I see how he is using television screens like windows. Now I see how he is using light to define the same areas.” As the book unfolds, the themes and variations become evident.
“Because he’s a filmmaker, he would show me the sequences on an iPad,” McDormand recalled of the way her husband storyboarded the book.
In addition to the book, Coen created for the two gallery shows what he calls a “flip book” — a three-and-a-half-minute video of images arranged in an order that highlights these strategies.
To learn what the artist thinks of Coen’s curatorial approach, I traveled to suburban Rockland County on the west side of the Hudson to pay a call on Friedlander and his wife, Maria Friedlander, driving down a wooded road, past an apple orchard, to the rambling 1947 house faced with brown shingle and stone from a local quarry that they have inhabited for over half a century.
Friedlander said he found Coen’s observations intriguing. “I tend to put posts in,” he remarked. “He says all kinds of nice things that I don’t recognize. Splitting, splintering. Evidently my pictures are that way, but I didn’t think, ‘I want to take a splintering picture.’ If you’ve done the same thing for 60 years, you don’t think of motive very much. I just walk and see something interesting.”
Friedlander works with film. Unlike a digital photographer, an artist who shoots film doesn’t see the images until the film is processed and printed on contact sheets. Photography thrives on accidents; there can be surprises. “In one photograph, the reflection looks like part of the building,” Friedlander said of “Albany, New York, 1967,” a picture that Coen chose for the book. “I didn’t notice until I printed it.”
Friedlander is the most cerebral of photographers, making intricate images marked by divisions, reflections and repetitions; and yet, discussing his work, he insists that none of this is on his mind when he takes the picture. “It’s just a great game,” he said. “As complicated as a picture could get, it’s done in 1/100th of a second — or less.”
When asked about this paradox, Coen said, “I’m extremely sympathetic to Lee’s point of view in how he thinks about his own work. It comes up with any writer, photographer or filmmaker, because you’re always asked to analyze your own process or the obsessions of your own work. I’ve always been very much of the opinion that the obligation of the person who makes the work is to make the work, and the obligation of the people who view the work is to think about it.”
“You’re not living retrospectively,” McDormand interjected. “You’re living alive in the moment, creating something.”
“But when I look at someone else’s work, I take on the mantle of the opposite side of the fence,” Coen continued. “Whether you intended it or not, I’m telling you what I see and what I’m drawn to.”
A still photographer and a filmmaker have very different aims, Coen said. “I take photos with my iPhone like everybody else, but I was looking at a visual form that I have no connection to. The primary thing in cinematography is a narrative, and everything else is secondary. Often the director of photography will set up a shot that is so beautiful but so deficient from a narrative point of view.” And the shot is scrapped.
Coen said that Friedlander’s photographs are animated with his idiosyncratic wit. “They are extremely cerebral, they are extremely formal,” he explained. “At the same time, they have a sense of humor, a very delicate one. For that reason, they’re not cold. I love the fact that they’re so complicated that way, but he doesn’t talk about them analytically.”
McDormand is drawn to the long, close marriage of the Friedlanders, who were wed in 1958. “I think Jeffrey was interested in us meeting them,” she said. She remarked that for her, this was a story about three married couples. “The six of us, we don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do,” she said. She was especially moved by Lee’s portraits of Maria, in particular “Maria, Las Vegas, 1970,” which is also in the new book.
“There is a tenderness,” she said. “One of the most resonant ones, for both of us, is his shadow across her partially nude body. For me, and then meeting them, that photograph is resonant to their whole relationship.”
Friedlander continues to photograph, and six days a week, he prints from his old negatives in a spacious darkroom he constructed in the basement of his house. “I love working,” he said. The prints he is making now are of the landscapes he photographed 20 years ago in the West — thick tangles of branches, boulders and pine needles.
“I’m still shooting the same subjects when I go out west,” he said. “The more jumble, the better I like them — if they work. I don’t want to repeat Ansel Adams. It wouldn’t be any fun to do that.”
Images like “Albany, New York, 1967,” where a woman stands by a post that divides a row of tall buildings from the mirrored reflection of other tall buildings, or “California, 1970,” with the diagonal struts of Plexiglas pay-phone enclosures interrupting and refracting the city scene, organize urban chaos miraculously. Coen said that as he perused Friedlander’s photographs, he thought at one point, “‘These are impossible compositions. How does it happen that these things that seem to be so impossible are so perfect?’ Thinking more about an artist I admire was the whole motivation.”
The Met Gala began in 1948 as a $50 fund-raising dinner. Today its tickets cost $50,000 and, like Coachella or Art Basel, its ostensible occasion — an exhibition opening at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute — has largely disappeared in the flash and bright lights of media spectacle.
The fanfare surrounding the event takes center stage: celebrity selfies, red-carpet gossip and attention-seeking fashion stunts. Whether attendees know anything about the show they are there to honor is beside the point.
The Met Gala is perhaps the most high-profile example of a much broader phenomenon: the accelerating convergence of art and fashion. It epitomizes the rewards, as well as the risks, that come with this marriage of aesthetic industries — mainstream visibility and financial gain on the one hand, and the reshaping influence of success on the other.
At first glance, the event appears to offer nothing but benefits. Each May, Anna Wintour, the longtime editor of Vogue, brings the glamour and excitement of celebrity-fueled fashion to the Met’s hallowed halls, while the museum steeps fashion in the august trappings of timeless art. The event is a boon to both. It raises millions for the Met ($17.4 million last year) and generates more “media impact value” than the Super Bowl. For fashion, there is no greater showcase. Louis Vuitton C.E.O. Michael Burke has called the Met Gala “the pinnacle of our business.”
The confluence of art and fashion at the Met Gala and elsewhere has far-reaching ramifications. Each field has begun to see itself anew. Art, having never achieved such mass relevance, wonders whether it might descend from its ivory tower and become genuinely popular. Fashion, unused to such high-culture cred, wonders if it might win new seriousness and cachet in the public eye. Inspired by these potentials, each side turns more ardently to the promise implicit in the other.
This cross-pollination has a long history. At the dawn of the 20th century, Paul Poiret, “the king of fashion,” enlisted artists to create his textile patterns, fashion illustrations and business stationery. Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with Salvador Dalí on several iconic designs, including the “shoe hat” and “lobster dress” of 1937. Christian Dior ran an art gallery before becoming a fashion designer and later named his dresses “Matisse,” “Braque,” “Dalí” and “Picasso.”
But in recent years the reciprocity between of art and fashion has become big business. Fashion houses now look to transcend their narrow identification with clothing and accessories. Louis Vuitton, according to Bernard Arnault, the C.E.O. and chairman of the fashion and luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, which owns the brand, is “much more than a fashion brand. It’s a cultural brand with a global audience.” By emphasizing its links to art — and, by implication, art’s rarity and exclusivity — Louis Vuitton symbolically undercuts the reality that its business imperative (to sell more goods) effectively decreases the rarity and exclusivity of its products. The company made $20 billion in sales last year, doubling its revenue from four years prior. But as a “cultural brand,” Louis Vuitton dissolves the crass reality of products and sales in the mythic allure of storytelling and image.
Art institutions have come to regard themselves as cultural brands too. For many, the pandemic was clarifying. In the early days of Covid, the Met, for instance, saw its social media engagement increase by 95 percent on Instagram, 64 percent on Twitter and 17 percent on Facebook. Today the museum boasts over 11 million followers, many of whom may never see its art in person or post photos from its world-famous galleries.
For art businesses, becoming a cultural brand offers ambiguous rewards. Galleries, auction houses and art fairs, once reliant on a small coterie of moneyed collectors, now attract millions of online followers. But they’re unlikely to convert many social media users into buyers, given the high price of art. While followers may share content about an exhibition or a sale, cultivating desirability and consensus around the artworks, their impact on the bottom line is indirect at best.
Why, then, are so many of the art world’s major players angling to become cultural brands? For one, they likely sense financial opportunity. Last year Louis Vuitton’s profit margin was around 50 percent, whereas Sotheby’s had a profit margin of just 1.7 percent in 2019 (the last year it was publicly traded). LVMH reported about $86 billion in revenue in 2022 — considerably more than the $67.8 billion generated by the entire global art market.
At the same time, these art organizations see the potential to have a greater influence on the culture writ large. As they emulate and partner with industries like fashion and luxury, they court a broad public, promote art that privileges accessibility over criticality, and embrace commercial tie-ins. The art world, long the province of an elite in-crowd, is becoming less insular and more inclusive.
This pivot is not without cost. Art is not like most consumer goods, even the most sumptuous. Handbags gain meaning when they’re stamped with a logo. They take on the resonance of the brand, acquiring a multiplicity of associations. Artworks, once subsumed by a brand, lose some of their potency, idiosyncrasy and subversiveness.
For Calvin Klein’s Spring 2018 collection, designer Raf Simons applied imagery from Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series to leather totes, tank tops, and gauzy dresses. Warhol’s source images — photographs of a lone electric chair in an empty room or a gruesome car crash, with bodies strewn among the wreckage — disarm and shock. Repeated in his screen-printed paintings, they enact the inuring effect of mass media. It is a powerful indictment of the press and its lust for tragedy. But taken out of context and printed on clothing, they register as edgy decorative motifs, in service — and thus subordinate — to Calvin Klein’s commercial agenda.
Context is a major part of what makes art art. Artworks can be many things — from found objects to performance, involving no objects at all. What distinguishes art from non-art is its intention to be understood as such. Its context helps signal that it should be seen as having meaning beyond ornament or decoration, whether that be personal expression, commentary or criticism. Recontextualization muddies this intention and risks drowning out the story an artwork tells with another story: the marketing narrative.
The biggest threat, however, is not that art is overpowered by its commercial context, but that its understanding of its own nature and purpose changes. In drawing closer to fashion, art abandons the pretense that it exists independent of commerce. Yet this pretense has historically allowed it to reject normal rules and metrics of success. The point of art has never simply been to attract an audience or accrue value. Rather, it’s seen itself as serving a unique role in culture: registering complaint, critique and protest; exploring realms of experience beyond transaction or exchange; realizing what the market could not or would never think to.
When art ties its fortunes to profitable enterprise, something vital is lost. The commercial realm is incapable of accommodating the full range of art’s potentialities — the politically sensitive and the staunchly anti-market being among them. Art must abide by the brand’s rules, and brands cannot afford to unnerve or offend consumers. What does art become when it can’t, either?
Natasha Degen is a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and author of the forthcoming “Merchants of Style: Art and Fashion After Warhol.”
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