The Eye of Photography Features Jeff Brouws’ Typologies

ROBERT MANN : JEFF BROUWS : TYPOLOGIES

Robert Mann Gallery presents Typologies, an online presentation of works by Jeff Brouws.

Practicing what the artist terms “visual anthropology,” Brouws, over the past thirty years, has persistently pursued a body of work that examines the evolving American landscape through its myriad cultural and industrial artifacts. Taking inspiration from the “anonymous sculpture” studies of Hilla and Bernd Becher, the New Topographics Movement, the deadpan artist books of Ed Ruscha—and with these latest series the topographic surveys of the 19th Century—Brouws has produced visual archives focused mainly on architectural and landscape forms that forge his own photographic territory. Without romanticizing his subject matter, the photographs ask us to consider the historic, economic or social forces that have shaped our built environment—from its initial development to its eventual demise to its rebirth.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES FEATURES JULIE BLACKMON

SPRINGFIELD, MISSOURI, IS THEIR MUSE

Working in their home city, the photographer Julie Blackmon and her daughter, Stella, a filmmaker, find some mystery in everyday life.

Julie Blackmon grew up in Springfield, Mo., a city of 165,000 people in the southern part of the state, and went to college there. She got married in Springfield and raised three children there. For much of that time, her home city struck her as “this generic town with a generic name, in the middle of the country, in the middle of nowhere,” she said. And then, about 20 years ago, she picked up a camera.

“All of a sudden I’m driving by Starbucks, and the guy that served me coffee every day is outside smoking a cigarette,” said Ms. Blackmon, whose third book of photographs, “Midwest Materials,” was published this month. “I remember thinking, ‘He’s got the most beautiful cheekbones when he inhales.’ He looked right out of a Balthus painting.”

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THE EYE OF PHOTOGRAPHY FEATURES JULIE BLACKMON'S MIDWEST MATERIALS

ROBERT MANN GALLERY: JULIE BLACKMON: MIDWEST MATERIALS

For her third monograph, Midwest Materials, Julie Blackmon has created a new body of work that sparkles with the wit, dark humor, and irony for which the artist has gained such renown. Finding insight and inspiration in the seeming monotony of her “generic American hometown,” Blackmon constructs a captivating, fictitious world that is both playful and menacing. “I think of myself as a visual artist working in the medium of photography,” Blackmon notes, “and my assignment is to chart the fever dreams of American life.” Midwest Materials follows on the sold out titles Domestic Vacations (Radius Books, 2008) and Homegrown (Radius Books, 2014).

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ROBERT MANN GALLERY FEATURED IN THE EYE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

ROBERT MANN GALLERY: FRIENDS + FAMILY

Robert Mann Gallery considers all the artists they work with family, and some actually are. Robert Mann Gallery presents their summer exhibition, Friends + Family. This exhibition features works by artists connected not only through the gallery that exhibits their work, but also through the strong ties built between artists sharing a craft. Many artists or thereafter their estates have been with Mann since the 1980’s. After 40 years this is certainly family!

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ROBERT MANN GALLERY FEATURED IN METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE

ROBERT MANN GALLERY

With over 40 years in the fine art photography market Robert Mann has played a key role in establishing an international market for both classical and contemporary photographs. Robert has been instrumental in launching the careers for many artists as well as enhancing the collectability and value of many established photographers. He has placed significant works in major museum, corporate and private art collections.

Robert began working with pioneering dealer Harry Lunn in Washington D.C. in the mid 1970’s, he then went on to direct the LIGHT Gallery in New York, one of the earliest public galleries established exclusively for the promotion of fine art photography. Striking out on his own in 1985 Robert launched his first public gallery from a townhouse space on Manhattan’s upper east side from where he exhibited artists such as Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, O. Winston Link, Richard Misrach and Aaron Siskind. In the late 1990’s Robert was the first photography gallery to relocate to the new art neighborhood of Chelsea, settling into a 6,000 square foot space. The exhibition program expanded to include large-scale contemporary artists and the gallery remained a fixture in Chelsea for over twenty years.

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MUSÉE MAGAZINE FEATURES HITCHHIKERS

EXHIBITION REVIEW: DOUG BIGGERT: HITCHIKERS AND A SANDAL SHOP

Doug Biggert shot the hitchhikers he encountered driving his green 1966 VW Bug across the state.

By Megan May Walsh

Strangers carry a certain allure to them. They each have a story, a story yet to be known or a story imagined for them by fellow strangers. Perhaps they are lost souls wandering the ends of the Earth to discover a greater purpose awaiting them or perhaps they are adventure-seekers hoping to discover a new marvel of the natural world. The possibilities and complexity are endless, and photographer Doug Biggert made it his project to collect the possibilities and complexities of strangers’ stories.

The George Adams Gallery with the Robert Mann Gallery are displaying the wanderlust-esque of Doug Biggert’s work. The exhibition consists of two great bodies of work by Biggert, Hitchhikers and Sandal Shop, each of which documents encounters over the course of years. Hitchhikers is a series of portraits Biggert collected on his travels along I 80 and Route 49 in Northern California beginning in the early 1970s. Sandal Shop is mainly portraits of patrons that frequented Socrates Sandal shop on West Balboa Boulevard in Newport Harbor, CA, from 1968-1972.

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VICE I-D ON DOUG BIGGERT

PHOTOGRAPHING HUSTLERS, HIPPIES, AND DRIFTERS IN 1960S CALIFORNIA

Doug Biggert shot the hitchhikers he encountered driving his green 1966 VW Bug across the state.

By Miss Rosen

By 1968, the Socrates Sandals shop in Newport Harbor, California, had become a favourite destination for Orange County's bubbling counterculture. Here, hippies, surfers, students, blue-collar workers, and radicals of all stripes found kinship in the otherwise conservative SoCal town. Driven to document the random encounters he had throughout the day, store clerk Doug Biggert began photographing customers with a Kodak Instamatic.

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MICHAEL KENNA POP PHOTO INTERVIEW

LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHER MICHAEL KENNA ON VIEWING OLD WORK WITH FRESH EYES, AND THE JOYS OF THE ANALOG PROCESS

By Kirk McElhearn

In March 2020, when COVID-19 led to worldwide lockdowns, Michael Kenna had a full calendar of trips and exhibits planned for the months to come. Instead, he found himself stuck at home with nowhere to go. Rather than taking new photos, he went back into his archive to look with fresh eyes at some of his earliest work. The result is Northern England 1983-1986, a book of photos from the area around where Kenna was born and grew up.

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COLLECTOR DAILY ON ZONE ELEVEN

MIKE MANDEL, ZONE ELEVEN

At the 1975 annual meeting of the Society for Photographic Education, as part of his remarks to the assembled crowd, Ansel Adams made an announcement that he had given his entire archive to the Center for Creative Photography. The newly formed organization, housed at the University of Arizona at Tuscon, opened later that year with five anchor tenants: the archives of Adams, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer, all of whom were still alive at the time. And while photographers (and their families) had been donating their archives to museums and libraries since the advent of the medium, this felt like something different. From the ground up, the CCP was designed to offer the potential for more in-depth study and engagement with its key (and growing) photographic holdings. The fact that Adams, the crowd-pleasing patriarch of environmentally-conscious straight photography, had contributed his vast holdings to this new effort was the ultimate sign of validation.

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