The Howard Greenberg Gallery has paired the exhibition of Sid Grossman’s work with a selection of photographs by his friend and disciple, Sy Kattelson (born 1923). Designed as a retrospective, the exhibition offers a sweeping overview of Kattelson’s work from the 1940s through the 1990s, while the parallel between the two photographers brings their mutual influence into focus. In Kattelson’s early images we recognize the trembling, out-of-focus quality that underscores their spontaneous character, even though most of his street portraits are carefully composed and elegant. The subjects are often daydreaming and absent-minded, and Kattelson loves playing with the contrast between the calm introspection of the people he photographs and the dynamism of the city. The 1949 image Man on Broadway shows a young man who, for a split second, scans the crowd as if searching for someone or perhaps is simply lost in thought. All the portraits featured in the gallery play with this contrast.
Some photographs are more formal and seek to capture the play of lights and mirror reflections. Lines shatter, the vision is clouded, and human figures blend with the backdrop. Certain aspects of these images taken in the late 1940s and early 1950s return in Kattelson’s experiments in the 1990s: his penchant for close-up and detail (a hand; trousers tightly hugging plump buttocks; a shadow), interplay of lights and reflections, and the effects of superposition and juxtaposition. A few of the pictures from the 90s take the form of diptychs with pithy titles (Hand and Man’s Shadow or Street and Shadows) or of rather simple collages whose unpolished style is nevertheless quite charming.
Hugo Fortin
Hugo Fortin is a New York-based writer specializing in photography.
Sy Kattelson
From January 12 through February 11, 2017
Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022
