Norwegian photographer Morten Andersen participates in the Cohen Amador Gallery's summer group exhibition “Original Books” in New York, showing through September 6, 2008.
In addition to Andersen, the exhibition features a selection of black and white photographs from Jens Liebchen, Keizo Kitajima, Gabriele Basilico, and John Gossage. Culled from unique photo-book projects, the styles and subject matter of each series varies dramatically; however by using the format of the photo-book as an art tool each photographer has come to fully articulate their ideas visually.
Challenging Conventions in the City
In Morten Andersen's "Days of Night," he assembles a furtive, noirish series, which constructs a tense and emotionally heightened, fictional cityscape. Through photos of every day life in Japan and New York, Andersen utilizes photographic conventions to create a universal sense of drama and tension.
Engaging in photography’s visual history, Jens Liebchen explicitly demonstrates the manipulative characteristic of photography in his book DL 07 Stereotypes of War. Images from Tirana, Albania during a time of peace show helicopters, men with guns, abandoned buildings and smoke-filled skylines. Posing as conventional war photos, Liebchen’s images challenge traditional clichés and visual signifiers.
Approaching the Individual
The stunning street photography in “A.D. 1991” by Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima compliments the conceptual projects of Morten and Liebchen by focusing on the individual in urban society at the end of the 1980s. Kitajima’s unyielding, individualized documentation contrasts with Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico’s broader and more purely documentary look at coastal towns and landscapes of northern France.
Like Basilico, the photographs from Gossage’s book, “There and Gone,” often focus on the sea. Gossage complicates the photograph’s legibility by adding words and intentional marks onto the photo matte thereby creating unique artworks and altering photography—lauded for its reproducibility—into an object of strengthened individuality with a unique identity of its own.
When: July 16 to September 6, Monday through Friday 11am to 6pm
Where: The Cohen Amador Gallery, Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street, 6th floor.
Info: (212) 759-6740, or info@cohenamador.com