Recently, the photographer Adam Bartos has taken an interest in darkrooms and garage sales. This month Bartos is at the Gitterman Gallery with a surprising series on stock cars. Bartos visited dusty racetracks in New York, Florida and New Mexico, where stock cars owners compete for pleasure, glory and a (very) small sum of money. Twelve medium-format photographs show engine parts: motors, wheels, radiators, bucket seats, steering wheels, helmets, flooring and bodywork. These still lifes are original, carefully composed, sometimes abstract and often suggestive, with a single dominant color in each image: red, blue, pink and of course metallic gray.
By playing with the elements in this way, by leaving them partly hidden, by giving the center of the photograph over to accessory parts, Bartos makes his photographs both rich and subtle, and is able to address multiple subjects instead of a single one. The spectacular world of racing, with its cars and drivers, has never been glimpsed at this way. More evocative than descriptive, it is there to be discovered through fragments of invisible stories, to be almost wholly imagined in these nighttime photographs that resemble painting more than anything. Who knew that the rust and dust of old cars could be such a wonderful photographic experience.
EXHIBITION
Adam Bartos
April 3 – May 31, 2014
Gitterman Gallery
41 East 57th Street, Suite 1103
New York, NY 10022
USA
T: 212.734.0868
