L. Parker Stephenson Photographs specializes in avant-garde and classic photographs of the 20th century. They also work with a select number of contemporary artists and estates in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Today, the gallery presents three prints from their booth (#216) at the AIPAD Photography Show 2015 : Kikuji Kawada, Scott Hammond and Jacques Sonck.
1. Kikuji Kawada
A Crescent, Poplars and Moon Trailing, Tokyo, 1987
Gelatin silver print, printed 1988
Kikuji Kawada (b. 1933) is a prominent figure in the history of Japanese photography. His book titled, The Map, was published in 1965 on the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and is the work for which he is best known in this country. This series represents Japan’s post WWII consciousness as its citizens wrestled with the implications of the destruction of its cities, the loss of the war, the spirit of a nation whose emperor had been forced to renounce his divinity, and the American occupation.
The Last Cosmology, the series represented in the booth, dates mostly from 1980 -1999. It is part of the artist’s Catastrophe Trilogy and links the drama of the skies with the ending of earthly eras – one being the Showa era (with the death of the emperor) and another, the millennium.
Kawada explains: There was a great war during my boyhood and then I lived during the period of reconstruction and growth and now I slowly approach the evening of life. Through these photographs the cosmology is an illusion of the firmament at the same time it includes the reality of an era and also the cosmology of a changing heart.
The Last Cosmology has just been published by MACK and will be available for sale at the booth.
2. Scott Hammond
North Tucumcari, NM, 2004
Polaroid
Scott Hammond’s small and unique Polaroids capture the vernacular, the mundane, and the precious moments made on the way to no where in particular.
An Ohio based photographer, Hammond traveled around the country 2001 – 2010, making pictures with his grandparents’ Polaroid 660 instant camera. In this digital age, Scott Hammond’s work resonates with the prevalent urge for the quick snap, the selfie, proof that I Was Here . However, in contrast to the infinitely reproducable non tangible 1s and 0s of the digital file, the Polaroid camera and film (discontinued in 2008) offered a pocket sized unique artifact of a time and place. There is nothing particularly special about the subjects Hammond chooses, yet, out of an admitted compulsion to collect, along his trips he gathers and accumulates bits of the rural and suburban American landscape; a small moment or sight he feels is worthy of being preserved. He calls it “idealizing the ordinary”.
He continues in the lineage of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, as well as other iconic American photographers. In Hammond’s case, the Polaroid’s saturated colors and grainy images coupled with his humorous, odd or totally banal subjects, pre-framed in a small square format, present a singular vision that is simultaneously retro and contemporary in flavor.
3. Jacques Sonck
Untitled (Ghent), 1986
Gelatin silver print, printed later
Belgian photographer, Jacques Sonck, has been making portraits since the mid 1970s. The subjects in Sonck’s photographs vary in age, size, gender and style. They face the camera alone, in pairs or in groups of three. They are often presented in a manner that references classical composition, yet they always remain approachable, even familiar.
While the images from Sonck’s 40 years of portraits hint at the influences of August Sander and Diane Arbus, they are subtle and multi-layered belying first appearances. His focus on individuals as well as relationships among them is done with tenderness, humor, poetry and respect. Sonck presents the uniqueness of each sitter and in doing so puts into question the meaning of an “archetype”.
INFORMATIONS
AIPAD 2015
16 – 19 April, 2015
The Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065
USA
http://www.aipad.com
L. Parker Stephenson Photographs
20th and 21st Century Avant-Garde and Classic Photography
764 Madison Avenue
New York 10065
United States
http://www.lparkerstephenson.com
