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11/4/2012

Chip Simone - Vivian Maier

Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Chip Simone

Steven Kasher Gallery is honored to present Chip Simone, the first exhibition by the artist outside of the American South in over 20 years. The exhibition presents over 40 digital color photographs made in the last decade. It follows the extraordinary 2011 exhibition The Resonant

Simone’s work is a unique confluence of two traditions, the American modernist photographic tradition epitomized by his teacher Harry Callahan, and the new digital street photography that has only recently burst out. Simone brings together the studied constructedness of the mid twentieth century New Vision with the nanosecond quick captures made possible by the digital photographic revolution. He is one of the first photographers to make wholly satisfying digital prints, prints both monumental and full of quicksilver 21st century perceptions.

Simone is a street photographer. He describes his method: "I explored the city. Sometimes I walked, but more often I rode a bicycle and traced eccentric routes through the prosaic urban landscape hoping to see it for the first time. I lurched along, trusting happenstance and serendipity, wishing for epiphanies and praying for the sliver of light or queer shadow that fell just so and transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary."

Simone describes his roots: "I grew up in an Italian-American community known as Shrewsbury Street, a working class neighborhood of three-decker tenements in Worcester, Mass. I mention this because Shrewsbury Street profoundly influenced how I see and what I photograph. Surviving on the street called for sharp reflexes and a quick wit, which was excellent preparation for becoming a photographer. Shrewsbury Street was filled with eccentric Runyonesque characters that talked with their hands and their fists: laborers and bookies, wise guys and butchers, with names like Teddy Rags and Nicky Show-Show. Men wore fedora hats and topcoats and hung out in front of all-night diners. Women cussed like men. They waited tables or did piece work in necktie factories. They wore seamed nylons, cheap perfume and furs that were sometimes stolen. It was a vulgar and textured place, full of broken language and rough edges. These were the people who I saw on the street every day, the ones who taught me how laugh out loud and to see with all my heart, and I still celebrate them in my pictures."

Since 1966 Simone’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in France. His photographs were exhibited at the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. In 1985 The French Ministry of Culture exhibited his work at the Chapelle De La Sorbonne in Paris, The Refectoir Des Jacobin in Toulouse and The Centre D’Action Culturelle in Angouleme.

Simone’s photography can be found in scores of museums and private collections worldwide. Simone’s work currently resides in the permanent collections of High Museum of Art, Sir Elton John Collection, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC, Worcester Historical Museum, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities and more

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Vivian Maier
Unseen Images

Steven Kasher Gallery is delighted to again present the recently discovered work of Vivian Maier. Vivian Maier: Unseen Images features 35 black and white prints. When Maier died in 2009, she left behind more than 120,000 negatives and 2,000 undeveloped rolls of film. Last year, a couple hundred of these rolls, shot in the 1960s and 1970s, were finally developed. A selection of these images make their debut in this exhibition.

Maier, whose day job was as a nanny, made over 100,000 distinctive street photographs, mostly in New York City and Chicago. What is known about Ms. Maier is that she was born in New York in 1926, lived in France (her mother was French) and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex camera. She did not share her pictures with others. Many of them she never saw herself: she left behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.

A large collection, including 12,000 negatives and 70 homemade movies, is in the hands of Jeff Goldstein and his collaborators at Vivian Maier Prints. The first boxful of Maier’s negatives was acquired for $400 at an auction in 2007. They had been in a commercial storage locker whose contents were seized for non-payment. After being posted on Flickr they received accolades, and have been featured in numerous exhibitions and publications worldwide.

Quotes about Vivian Maier from the New York Times:
‘‘That rare case of a genuine undiscovered artist, she left behind a huge trove of pictures that rank her with the great American midcentury street photographers. The best pictures bring to life a fantastic swath of history that now needs to be rewritten to include her.’’ Michael Kimmelman, New York Times Magazine, February 16, 2012

“Vivian Maier, evidently one of America’s more insightful street photographers, has at last been discovered. The release of every fresh image on the Web causes a sensation among the growing legion of her admirers. Ms. Maier’s streetscapes manage simultaneously to capture a redolent sense of place and the paradoxical moments that give the city its jazz, while elevating and dignifying the people in her frames — vulnerable, noble, defeated, proud, fragile, tender and often quite funny.”
David Dunlap, New York Times, Lens Blog, January 7. 2011

“Even to those who knew her, Vivian Maier was a cipher. To the children she took care of on Chicago’s wealthy North Shore, she was Mary Poppins, if Mary Poppins carried an old Rolleiflex. To the amateur historian who unearthed thousands of negatives at an auction in Chicago in 2007, she was a revelation: an undiscovered Diane Arbus, whose work captured the grit and elegance of city life. Maier died unknown in 2009, but her work has since attracted a fervent following.”
Julie Bosman, New York Times Magazine, February 16, 2012

“The images are wonderful, with a keen but unvarnished empathy for their subjects, who include children, women, the indigent and the elderly...they may add to the history of 20th-century street photography by summing it up with an almost encyclopedic thoroughness, veering close to just about every well-known photographer you can think of, including Weegee, Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, and then sliding off in another direction. Yet they maintain a distinctive element of calm, a clarity of composition and a gentleness characterized by a lack of sudden movement or extreme emotion.”
Roberta Smith, New York Times, Art in Review, January 19, 2012

Opening Reception: April 12th, 6-8 PM

Steven Kasher Gallery
521 W. 23rd St., New York
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm.
Admission free

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