“I’ve often said that a good print requires 5% knowledge, 95% logic, and lots of patience.”
Sid Kaplan is a printer. When his friends wonder at how he can spend hours in a darkroom developing photographs, he responds, in the documentary by Harvey Wang: “Everything happens there, from my childhood up to now.”
Since he was ten years old, camera in hand, he has roamed the streets of New York, documenting a day in the life of the city, its transformations, its stunning views and changing light. His geometrical and abstract views of long New York avenues at sunset, black-and-white images where the buildings stand out against a dull white sky, are for Kaplan traces of a bygone time: “I couldn’t take pictures like that today. Now the streets are all lined with trees.”
His photographs offer a glimpse of the different ages of New York, from the Jewish and working-class Lower East Side to evenings in the local cabaret, The Treaty Stone Bar, where he met with his friend and neighbor, Eugene Smith. Among his loyal clients and friends: Robert Frank, Edward Steichen and the man he fondly refers to as “Uncle Weegee.”
The walls of the gallery are organized by theme: travel, the road, spaces, architecture, portraits, all full of little stories of technique and society. There is a certain poetry to his photographs, as in one of the lifeless body of a bird resting on the edge of a lake, at the foot of an immutable mountain range that evokes the cycles of life.
Laurence Cornet
Sid Kaplan: The Last of a Vanishing Breed
Until May 12th, 2013
25CPW Gallery
25 Central Park West (at 62nd St)
New York, New York 11231
USA
Tél. : +1 212 203 0250
