Did you by any chance tell him we're underage?

Last week we went to a few more gallery shows for out next photo crit paper on intention (which I should be writing right now... actually) and we got to see some pretty cool artists and read what they have to say about themselves. First we saw Aaron Siskind, who for a very formalist photographer was fascinating. Each of his pieces was very close, but very felt, and you could see almost a new world and a new figure and a whole array of emotion in a one image. They were very delicate, but with some grime on the coating, and they were great. 

Then we travelled on down the road to see Wolfgang Tillmans work at the Andrea Rosen Gallery. Right of the bat I hated his stuff. Nothing seemed interesting about it, and the more I got to know about the guy the more I realized that's his schtick. He is constantly changing his style to have no style and to never appease anyone. I can respect that, but I didn't see anything appealing to my aesthetic at all. Then I kept looking and I realized he's actually really fucking amazing. Not only are his images extremely easy to get into, but, avoiding all traditional design or formalism in any sense, they are completely alive, which make the lack of formalism ok. You can look at each picture and really truly feel the life of each one. It was strange, because you would think that most images can do that, but in actuality they don't. His pictures have breath and a beating heart. However my terrible phone photos aren't going to do them any justice, so check out his website instead

oh, and they also have humor. Plus!

Lastly we went to see the Alex Prager show at the Yancey Richardson Gallery. Apparently Alex is an entirely self taught photographer from California who believes that woman are always acting. 

This show was also interestingly paired with a few selections from Garry Winogrand's "Women are Beautiful" series, in which he states "Whenever I have seen an attractive woman, I've done my best to photographer her. I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I know that the women are beautiful in the photographs." And all the world's a stage.