(c) Gundula Friese, 2011

VIEW YORK - Nine Perceptions
New York bietet eine geradezu unerschöpfliche Inspiration für den „Betrachter“.
Diese Ausstellung zeigt die Sicht internationaler Fotografen und Autoren, die sich als New Yorker fühlen. Einige von ihnen leb(t)en dort, manche sind immer wiederkehrende Passanten, die mit diesem Ort ein heimliches Einverständnis pflegen.
Mit ausgewählten Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1954–2010 - vintage, sowie erstmals veröffentlichte Motive - bietet VIEW YORK neun persönliche Einblicke in das Wesen der Supermetropole.

Fotografien von LEONARD FREED, GUNDULA FRIESE, ERICH HARTMANN, GUY LE QUERREC, ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN, INGE MORATH, HALLY PANCER, KLAVDIJ SLUBAN und PATRICK ZACHMANN.

Zur Ausstellung erscheint im Kerber Verlag ein 136 seitiger Fotoband mit Texten
der Fotografen, von Arthur Miller, Ruth Bains Hartmann und Anna -Patricia Kahn.

Eröffnung am 15.09.2011, um 19.00 Uhr
In Anwesenheit von Hally Pancer und Gundula Friese

Die Ausstellung ist zu besuchen bis 22.10.2011,
mittwochs bis samstags von 15.00 - 19.00 Uhr und nach Vereinbarung.


VIEW YORK - Nine Perceptions
As a world stage, New York seems to provide an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration to photographers from a wide variety of backgrounds. This exhibition reveals the views of international photographers and authors who feel like New Yorkers. Some of them live or have lived there, many however are just passers-by, who have cultivated a secret pact with this city as they return over and over again.

Photographies by LEONARD FREED, GUNDULA FRIESE, ERICH HARTMANN, GUY LE QUERREC, ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN, INGE MORATH, HALLY PANCER, KLAVDIJ SLUBAN und PATRICK ZACHMANN.

In addition to the exhibition Kerber Verlag came up with a 136 pages publication that contains all illustration and furthermore texts by the photographers, Arthur Miller, Ruth Bains Hartmann and Anna-Patricia Kahn.

You can visit the exhibition till 22th october 2011, wednesday - saturday, 3 - 7 pm.

The first known photograph, or rather “half-plate daguerreotype”, of the city of New York is thought to have been taken in 1848. It shows a pretty white house with a portico in a bucolic, rather isolated, setting—Bloomingdale Road on the Upper West Side, Manhattan. This rare image was bought at auction two years ago but its owner has not been able to discover what the anonymous photographer’s intentions were. Was he a traveler, charmed by the beauty of the place? A geographer, who preferred not to rely on his haphazard recall? A bashful lover or, more probably, an obsessive historian? Our maker-of-images has gone for good. For its part, his photo has joined the constant flood of images that nourishes our fragmentary knowledge of and infinite imaginings about New York.
Anyone who says “NY” finds himself suddenly using hyperbole, saying more, saying too much. However, one of the reasons why this metropolis has become a mythical city has nothing to do with exaggeration. It is that, unlike other great cities, New York is strangely familiar to us. Even if we do not live there, even if we know very little about it, it belongs to us, somehow. To talk about it, to show it, is to display a selection of its multiple facets. As for photographing New York, this is a subtle and individual process of appropriation, which tells us as much about the person who releases the shutter as about the city itself.
So we have rechristened our New York, photographed by the photographers in this book: VIEW YORK—Nine Perceptions.
Approaching the city the way another glimpses it, is how we wished to engage with it, how we wanted to share it with others; adjusting our pace to another’s stride, as Guy Le Querrec put it; following as they walk about. So here we are, in Central Park at the height of summer, or in the streets of Chelsea. It is so hot and humid, and the water, with which the passerby is spraying himself, is a joy that will endure for longer than a season. Turning these pages we discover that we can pass from the twenty-fourth story, from where the limousines look like toys, to the street, where sirens and horns are king, without growing giddy. In that sense, looking at Le Querrec’s photos helps us to grasp even more clearly what he is saying about jazz and telling us about “New York, my upside-down town”.
To allow oneself to be guided by another’s eyes makes for a special travel guide. Erich Hartmann does so with the elegance of a man who is perfectly conscious of the poetry of everyday things: his umbrellas open like flowers when the rain pours onto the street. A man greets us from the entrance to an apartment block, and straightens his hat with both hands. Hartmann, a New Yorker, who was born in Germany, shows us the World Trade Center in its most graphic mode. He has approached the architecture from close up, recomposing its steel lines to create an image of something that has disappeared for ever. He traces the sunlit outlines in an apartment right at the top of a tower block. He knows how to look from afar and close up at this city, which was his home base. Who better than his wife, author Ruth Bains Hartmann, to tell us about the diverse nature of his work, and how passionately he felt about his job as a photojournalist?
Ten years ago, after Hartmann’s death, the world was appalled by 9/11. Ashes and tears rained onto the city of New York, which seemed to have lost some of its splendor. The prophets of doom were rubbing their hands. They had often described this city of lights as arrogant and cynical. The images of the catastrophe were relayed interminably: from newspapers to TV news channels, from floods of emails to pages of hardened bloggers. Those who felt passionately about what had happened merged with voyeurs, the better to describe, analyze, comment on and often fantasize about the event.
We did not want to provide space in this exhibition for the horror that has been seen and seen again, not because of a reluctance to face horror, but through choice and a sense of responsibility. Alain Rey wrote: “The sociologists have declared that humanity has been propelled since the last century into the era of the image.” Our chosen guidelines are to select what is beautiful, without ever forgetting what is execrable.
Thus, Inge Morath’s Beauties open the View York ball. Do they appear nostalgic and unfashionable with their curled chignons? Take another look at the lascivious glances cast in all directions. The flirting that is consciously ephemeral conveys the true grandeur of Inge Morath’s elegant ladies. She takes us for a ride in a carriage, with tenderness and irony. And it is a white beast, Linda the Llama, who reminds us that the greatest circus in the world is the street.
It is often dark in Hally Pancer’s city because what she sees is often quietly tragic. She makes you keep your eyes on things you would rather not see. And what does she say about these sad and circumscribed lives? She notices them, does not avoid them and even finds unexpected joy there, as in these swimmers at Coney Island, and in the intense beauty of the children’s gaze.
Andrew Lichtenstein’s city dances and sparkles and we catch ourselves feeling sorry for a Homeless Man and His Kitten. But Andrew Lichtenstein does not just deal in pity, always a dangerous thing. He does not spare us social contrasts. He deploys them uncompromisingly before our eyes, not to shock, nor to preach. Faced with these voiceless images, each with cleverly enlarged details, we find ourselves suddenly smiling at the vanity of the anonymous passersby.
Patrick Zachmann’s images of the “suitcase city” provide a foretaste of the subjects he deals in, or rather those which he knows how to cherish. In order to make migrants, the nomads of the New World, visible, one must calculate and observe the right distance from the subject. Zachmann knows, as only a few do, how to keep the ne-
cessary distance between his subject and himself.
Is New York black and white, or in color? As far as Gundula Friese is concerned, it has the colors of the earth: her reds are grey, her blacks glitter. There is a sensation of floating, a feeling of all the water that flows around her, through her streets, along the buildings, and, if we listen, we might even hear the rain falling in her images.
A city may be populated in many different ways and by numerous, equally invisible inhabitants. This is what Klavdij Sluban shows us as he conjures up the demons, fairies and other residents of New York. In the emptiness of these photographed spaces we catch glimpses of much-loved shadows. Klavdij does not just do photography, he also “writes” it. Here he gives us an entire unpublished series of his journey to New York in 2008.
Leonard Freed was born in Brooklyn and is probably more of a New Yorker than all the rest of the contributors to VIEW YORK. Some of his photos are better known than others, as is the case with the passerby who is smoking between two other passersby. The little black boy who opens this series is a silent star, known by the name of “Muscle Boy”. He often features in profile, flexing his biceps under the friendly gaze of Leonard Freed. Here, Freed has shot him facing the front, holding his breath and containing his energy. He looks stubborn and tenacious. In his innocence he could be a brother to those little Orthodox Jewish school children, who watch the photographer curiously but shyly, as he watches them. Between these childish gazes, Freed’s camera has moved freely, reducing the spaces, shortening the distances, questioning without taboo not only the people he sees but those who look at his images.
VIEW YORK is like the city itself—an urban cosmos re-created by the gaze and the narrative of each of these photographers. Bon voyage.

Anna-Patricia Kahn