Landon Nordeman’s series, “Canine Kingdom,” takes us inside the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, now running for 138 years. To mark the exhibit’s opening March 12, photography curator Elisabeth Biondi will discuss Nordeman’s images at The Half King in New York.
Landon Nordeman began shooting The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in 2004. The project is ongoing. In addition to photographing personal projects, Nordeman is a contributing photographer for The New Yorker and Saveur. He shoots for commercial and editorial clients around the world. His photographs have been exhibited at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC; The Houston Center of Photography; The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing; and are in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
Photography curator, Elisabeth Biondi, has influenced all of us through her powerful career at four of the most influential magazines in the world. Biondi joined The New Yorker Magazine as Visuals Editor in 1996, just a couple of years after photography had first been introduced into the 75-year-old magazine. From her background at Geo, Stern, and Vanity Fair, she brought her masterful eye to The New Yorker, helping to create their award winning use of photography.
Biondi and Nordeman will screen a slideshow, and talk about the stories and context of Landon’s images, for the opening of his upcoming exhibition. I spoke with Elisabeth about working with Nordeman, her career and her little dog, Boris.
Elizabeth Avedon: How did you first become involved with Landon Nordeman’s “Canine Kingdom” series?
Elisabeth Biondi: The art critic Rick Woodward, who writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal, lives in my building above me and we are friends. He suggested I meet Landon.
After seeing Landon’s pictures, my first assignment for him was of the black border collie, Coby, for the Susan Orlean story “Lost Dog,” published in the February 14-21, 2005 double issue of The New Yorker. The dog was stolen in the back of a car, and over a few weeks was eventually rescued. I wanted to see the relationship between the dog and his owners. He photographed that dog for almost 24 hours straight.
Next I assigned him to do the The Westminster Dog Show for the opening of the “Goings On About Town” section for the magazine. The opening picture was always about events in New York. The pictures were always horizontal, lively, surprising, entertaining. Landon had a special knack of injecting wit into his images, which is extremely hard to accomplish. He became one of five regular contributors to that section of the magazine.
Dog Show images are a dime a dozen and I thought it was impossible to make pictures that could surprise me. Landon proved me wrong. He showed me his witty images, they were fun, not nasty or condescending, and well crafted. He looks at the dog/master relationship, often reversed, obsessive owners, over over-the-top grooming.
Landon has had over sixty photographs published in The New Yorker assigned for the Goings On About Town section beginning in July 2006. He continued to photograph in different parts of the world. We stayed in touch after I left; I helped him edit his images to get them ready for proposing to book publishers.
EA: Have you ever been to the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show or been involved with any Dog Shows?
EB: Alas, no, but I have watched it on TV. I grew up with dogs in Germany. Everyone in my family had, and still has, dachshunds, short, long, and wire-haired. I’m definitely a dog person, and always knew that one day, when I did not spend the week in an office, I would have a wire-haired dachshund (Dachshund translates to “badger dog” in German. They were used for hunting badgers in their dens). After I stopped working at The New Yorker, I quickly got little Boris, a wire-haired dachshund, from a kennel in Woodstock. He was one of six born during Wimbledon Week and all the puppies got tennis player’s first names. Mine is named after Boris Becker, so of course he had to be mine. He is funny, sweet, and stubborn; loves, children, other dogs and does not have a mean bone in his body.
EA: You’ve had a very illustrious career. Where did it begin?
EB: I started out as the assistant Picture Editor at German GEO Magazine based in New York. After two years there was a big upheaval and I was named Picture
Editor. At Geo, Thomas Hoepker was the Executive Editor, in charge of visuals and layout, and my training came from him. He is a Magnum photographer now, and I learned a certain basic understanding and rules from him.
I went from German GEO to Vanity Fair, then edited by Tina Brown. I was there for seven years and then returned to Germany in 1991 after leaving Vanity Fair. I was Photography Director of STERN Magazine and stayed for 5 years. STERN was a weekly magazine, news as well as features, well known for its photography, especially documentary photography.
EA: When did you return to the U.S.?
EB: In 1996, I returned to New York to work for The New Yorker, where Tina Brown then was the editor-in-chief. Tina had decided to introduce photography in the magazine, first with Richard Avedon as the only photographer. When I came we expanded both photography and the photographers with whom we worked, creating ‘New Yorker Photography’ with a number of staff photographers; Martin Schoeller, Robert Polidori, Ruven Afanador, Mary Ellen Mark, Gilles Peress, Steve Pyke, Max Vadukul, and Platon.
It was challenging to develop a visual vocabulary for a famous word magazine, but exciting to work with portrait, art, journalistic photography, and historic images for various stories. Tina was a dynamo, demanding, volatile and it was exciting to work for her. David Remnick succeeded her successfully steering the magazine into a more steady direction.
EA: After leaving The New Yorker, you curated a museum worthy exhibition at the Howard Greenberg Gallery. How did that come about?
EB: Howard Greenberg invited me to curate an exhibition and we decided it would chronicle the history of photography in The New Yorker. I focused on images initially published with text, now presenting them separated from text. In “Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker,” I selected those photographs that worked as images on their own merit. An expanded version of the exhibit traveled to the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
The Half King Photography Series is dedicated to showing exceptional documentary photography. Its curators are Anna Van Lenten, writer and editor, and James Price, Photo Assignments Editor at Getty Reportage.
Exhibition
Canine Kingdom
Photographs by Landon Nordeman
March 12, 2014 – May 11, 2014
505 West 23rd Street
New York, New York
USA
http://www.halfkingphoto.com
http://elisabethbiondi.tumblr.com
http://www.landonnordeman.com
