PhotoNOLA

Eric Bookhardt, art critic for Gambit Weekly, reviews REVIVAL at Homespace Gallery and John T. Mendes: Dogs in My Life at The Historic New Orleans Collection.

Revival, a group show, and Dogs In My Life by John T. Mendes

Once, photographs were made with big, bulky cameras that used glass negatives. By the early 20th century they were rarely ever used, but a notable exception was John T. Mendes, who documented New Orleans from 1916 through the 1920s. A keen observer who loved dogs (the title was taken from a memoir he wrote), Mendes melded a pro’s techniques with a childlike sense of whimsy as we see in FEMALE IMPERSONATOR, 1919, a year Carnival was canceled but the drag queens came out anyway, or MISS LUCILLE NEWLIN AND MAYOR BEHRMAN WELCOME REX AT CITY HALL, FEBRUARY 1917, below. Aviators, dog circuses, floods, Mardi Gras and children’s parades are among the subjects that inhabit this charming view of the city, a refreshing survey from a local original who was totally unknown until these glass plate negatives were discovered in an Uptown attic. A striking 120 page catalog, published by the UNO Press, is also available.

Today, even as digital photography has made film cameras almost obsolete, there is new interest in even older, more archaic techniques. REVIVAL at the Homespace Gallery features tintypes, daguerreotypes, photogravures, cyanotypes and other 19th century processes employed by talented contemporary photographers. In their hands, the act of image making is transformed from a routine pastime to something far more poetic. Ordinary things like the thistle in a glass in Kevin Kline’s tintype, or the close-up of the extruded velvety innards of a magnolia flower in David Halliday’s Van Dyke print, are revealed in a fresh new light. One of the more dramatic images is Josephine Sacabo’s photogravure SLEEP WALKER, top. Photogravure is a complicated process that melds intaglio printing and photography, but some far less complicated yet no less dramatic images were made by some Louise S. McGehee School students, who used the old cyanotype process in playful new ways, for instance, FANTASMA by Sarah Miller, below. Curated by the Ogden Museum’s Richard McCabe, REVIVAL suggests that some traditional photographic processes don’t just get old, they sometimes–in the right hands–get better. ~Bookhardt

The original Gambit Weekly posting is here: bestofneworleans.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A67419
Bookhardt’s Inside Art New Orleans posting, featuring additional images can be seen here: www.insidenola.org/2010/01/revival-at-homespace-mendes-at-hnoc.html

Eric Bookhardt, art critic for Gambit Weekly, reviews Louviere + Vanessa’s “Folie A Deux.”

It’s been said that those who do not study the past are destined to relive it, but those who study it sometimes seem to relive it as well. Ray Donley’s paintings at Gallery Bienvenu hint at Carnival in Venice back in some distant, decadent, possibly Renaissance time, but their tone also reflects a slyly contemporary perspective. Louviere + Vanessa’s Folie A Deux show at A Gallery for Fine Photography mixes a romantic Victorian vision with elements of latter 20th century photography as well as conceptual art. The result is a series of light boxes that suggest what characters in a Jules Verne novel might have imagined the photography of the future would look like. What we see are images formed by rows of Super 8 mm filmstrips lit from behind. Each frame of each strip of film contains only a small, unrecognizable bit of the overall image, but seen from a normal viewing distance, they come together in much the way that the tiles in a mosaic come together to form a coherent whole.

??The images include a voluptuous lady in a lacy period corset in Rendezvous (pictured), skulls in ancient catacombs, and sailing frigates on stormy seas suggesting the era of Jack London, Alexandre Dumas and Toulouse-Lautrec. It is as if a time-traveling Victorian brought an 8 millimeter movie camera back from a visit to the 20th century, and then, not knowing what it was, used it to make photo-mosaics from filmstrips. But the technical tricks don’t end there. For each of these light boxes — dubbed “cinegraphs” by the Bywater-based husband and wife duo — there is a corresponding large format photograph, and if that sounds more normal, it’s really not, because each image is printed on a gold- or silver-leaf surface. It is almost too complicated, and all that fancy technique almost serves to obscure a vision that is both alchemical and poetic, a view of an imaginary neo-Victorian parallel universe, though a Bywater-based alternate reality. — D. Eric Bookhardt

The original Gambit Weekly posting is here: bestofneworleans.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A67002
Bookhardt’s Inside Art New Orleans posting, featuring additional images can be seen here: www.insidenola.org/2010/01/louviere-vanessa-at-gallery-for-fine.html