This last Wednesday I went to Boston’s NPR affiliate WBUR radio to tape an interview with Tony Penrose, director of the Lee Miller Archive and Roland Penrose Collection housed at Farley Farmhouse in Chiddingly, Sussex. The taping was for NPR’s popular show, Weekend Edition Saturday, which this week is being hosted by Jacki Lyden. I didn’t find out until after we finished that the usual listening audience is around 4 million.

To record the show we linked up studios in Washington DC, New York, Boston, and Brighton (UK, where Tony was), which was a completely new experience for me. Even in our technologically advanced times it’s pretty surreal to sit alone in a dark recording booth with headsets on, having a virtual conversation with interviewers hundreds of miles away. Originally, the interview was supposed to include the lovely Stephanie Browner, Administrator of the Man Ray Trust, but the logistics did not work out. I find it pretty interesting that the female artist in the Man Ray, Lee Miller relationship is today represented by a man (Tony is Lee’s son), while the man is represented by a woman (Stephanie is Man Ray’s niece).

We taped for about 50 minutes, which will be edited down to a short piece for Saturday’s show. I’m grateful for the opportunity but I can’t help but think there is so much we didn’t say; I just hope people who are interested will check out the book and the exhibition. We could have talked more about their creative partnership, and Man Ray’s attitude toward women, and there was much more to discuss about Lee’s powerful brand of feminism, her life in the fashion industry, and her refusal to be controlled by any man. There was also more we could have said too about the anguish Man Ray suffered when Lee left him, and the torment she experienced (on a completely different scale of course) as a war correspondent. Jacki asked a great question that I fumbled a little bit, about the amazing photograph of Man Ray and Lee Miller together at an opening at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in 1975, the year before Man Ray died, shown above. (Lee died the year after that.) What I should have said, if I’d been quick on my feet, was that this picture is one of those incredible things that’s hard to explain in words – somehow, magically, I swear you can see the spark between them, still visible more than 40 years after they ended their romance.

The truth is, if you’d given us a two-hour program we still wouldn’t have covered all the bases. Between them Ray and Miller created so much great art, and lived such incredible lives. As Jacki said, it has all the makings of a great Hollywood screenplay!

It’s pretty normal for us to have visitor comment books in exhibitions, and like most curators I check in now and then during the run of a show and read through the comments with great interest. If you ever wondered what happens when you leave comments at a museum, you can be pretty sure they are taken seriously. Here at PEM, when a visitor book is full, the contents are transcribed in full and circulated between departments in the museum. The hope is that these comments can help us do things better.

Of course we always hope to see nice comments, but we also want to find out if there are any errors or omissions that need to be addressed during the run of the show. The comment book for Man Ray Lee Miller is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, because lots of folks felt inspired to draw little eyes and lips, and the comments are more positive and heartfelt than for any other exhibition I’ve worked on. We even had a couple write to say that they had come all the way from Argentina to see the show and were not disappointed! But there is one issue that left several visitors puzzled. Why are none of Lee Miller’s photographs of the Second World War in Man Ray | Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism?

The first answer is, as powerful and important as those pictures are, they are beyond the scope of the exhibition. Both Man Ray and Lee Miller had long careers, but in our exhibition we only focussed on works directly related to their time together – things they did as a team, or in response to one another. Man Ray, for example, was well established by the time Lee met him – there’s nothing in our show about his time with Kiki of Montparnasse, his work as a Dadaist in New York and Philadelphia, or the time he spent in Los Angeles. Likewise, we didn’t put in any pictures from Lee’s New York studio period, wonderful as they are. They just didn’t fit the show, the same way the war pictures don’t. Lee did them independently, with no real connection to Man Ray.

But there’s another reason, that’s more personal. To me, to do the pictures justice, you really have to spend time with them. The things Lee saw and recorded are among the most brutal and repugnant acts ever recorded on camera. She photographed piles of dead corpses in the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, emaciated prisoners condemned to starve in railway cars, and the bloody retribution visited on Nazi guards when concentration camps were liberated (as in the picture above). These are not trivial, throwaway things. We have all become a little inured to the unbearable pain and injustice represented by certain photographs, from war scenes to images of natural disasters and famine. And part of the reason for that is how common these pictures have become. It would not be enough, in my opinion, to simply show a few of Lee’s war pictures in an exhibition and say, “oh, by the way, she had a terrible time during the war, look at these pictures.” The human suffering each picture represents cannot be dismissed so easily. Each demands explanation. The victims and perpetrators need to be understood, the messages digested.

So no, there are no war pictures in Man Ray Lee Miller. It’s not that the pictures aren’t incredible, amazing, and important. Instead, I’d say they’re too important to be made into mere footnotes in an exhibition about the relationship between two artists. Many of them can be seen online, if you care to look. But the best way to view them I think is in the extraordinary book, Lee Miller’s War, by Antony Penrose. It’s still in print. But if you get your hands on a copy, please be prepared to give it your attention.

I was just going through old notes and found some entries from George Bernard Shaw’s engagement diary, which I transcribed during a visit to the Shaw papers in the Archives of the London School of Economics some time ago. Below isn’t a complete copy of the diary, just a few things that I wrote down. At the time they just seemed interesting, but now they seem poignant to me.

Engagements Diary of 1922 26/21

Feb 6            Headache

16             “”

25            Press photograph

3/18            Headache

8/5            “”

9/26            “”

10/20            “”

12/20            “”

Diary 1923 26/22

1/17            Headache

2/5            “”

4/15            “”

6/22            Msr. David Low, Cartoonist, Sitting at 18:00

6/29            Headache

8/31            “” (shows)

10/26            Bath unveil Sheridan Tablet and speak in Pump Room

11/29            Headache

I also took note that he wrote down train times in his diary every time he had to travel (very organized), as well as all the meetings of RADA, the Stage Society, the Fabian Society, and the Society of Authors. Also listed were various lecture engagements and performances.

There was a fairly large collection of brochures and ads in his papers too; I suppose some of them were collected in a hope of curing the migraines. They included ads for nature cures, electrical cures, household electrification and plumbing, air conditioning, and “automatic ventilation systems.”

It may sound like a strange thing to say about such a legendary photographer, but Ansel Adams is something of a controversial figure among curators of my generation. People still love his work, but as the professional field has increasingly come to embrace a harder-edged, more conceptual brand of photography, Adams has lost some of his critical appeal. This is especially true in landscape, in which New Topographics and the so-called Dusseldorf school have held sway for decades. I love that work, but I’m interested in things that others overlook, and I’ve always felt Ansel was more interesting than people give him credit for. After all, this was a man whose career extended for almost sixty years, whose work is among the best known on the planet, and an active educator who had a direct influence on hundreds, possibly thousands of photographers. He was also a Modern Artist who had a distinct and reasoned position in the history of photographic art.

This is what makes the subject of water in Ansel’s art exciting to me. Especially in the 1920s and 30s (people forget how early the work was), he was already making sharp-focus, complex formal compositions composed in the camera – the best of his work easily rivals that of his friends Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham. However, while most (but by no means all) photographic modernists made pictures of carefully selected stationary scenes and objects (think Weston’s Pepper #30), Adams photographed shifting, evanescent things like waterfalls, sea spray, storms, rapids, and geysers.

Some of these things he couldn’t even see with his naked eye. Of course, he knew he was setting up to photograph, say, a waterfall. But the exact shape of it – its thunderous ebb, flow and texture, was impossible to anticipate. So in that way, every shot was a revelation. When he made this kind of picture, Adams didn’t really know what he had until he developed the film. This reflects an attitude to the omniscience of camera and lens that is quite Modern. And when he combined this with repeated views of the same or similar things – his famous Surf Sequence, for example, or his repeated views of Old Faithful erupting – he tapped into ideas about seriality and sequence that even the most conceptual contemporary artists can appreciate.

I’ve been contemplating these things as I work to refine the checklist for Ansel Adams: At the Water’s Edge, which will open at the Peabody Essex Museum in summer of 2012.  What I’ve been finding in my visits to places like the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona (above), where Adams’s archive is housed, is that pictures of motion and time are not so much the exception but the rule with Adams.

Next month (on June 11, 2011), Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism will open in the Peabody Essex Museum’s special exhibitions galleries. At the heart of the show is a love story – the failed romance that Ray and Miller shared from 1929-32, the devastating effect the breakup had on Ray when they split up, and the lasting friendship they built from the ashes. But it’s also one of those incredible stories in which two artists pushed, challenged, and inspired each other across a variety of disciplines. Their work changed the face of photography in the 1930s, with their joint perfection of solarization (also called the Sabatier Effect), and Miller’s pioneering Surrealist street photography, finding unstaged ‘surreal’ scenes on the streets of Paris. But it also had ripple effects in other fields. It shows the way in which media can be connected – photography, painting, sculpture, and book arts coming together in a synthesis of media.

The show reminds me how human, intimate, and even fragile art movements can be. Together and separately, Ray and Miller had a substantial effect on modern art and photography. And though you could argue that either artist would have been known even if they hadn’t met – Ray, for example, was already established when Miller met him – there is no doubting their relationship was decisive in each artist’s career, and that they, in turn, influenced countless others.

The show traces the white heat of their time together in Paris, the chaotic disintegration of their breakup, their reconciliation just before the Second World War, and the evolution of their relationship in the years that followed. Both married other spouses, and Miller slipped into a debilitating depression that haunted the rest of her life. Piecing the story back together through the limited correspondence that remains, but mostly through works of art, has been an art historian’s dream. The end result though, has been unexpected. The works speak on many different levels. The works address universal themes – love, loss, and the search for identity. Each picture is also a time capsule, providing a window into the lives of Miller and Ray, their compassion, determination and selfishness. They were hugely consequential people, wildly creative, passionate, and imperfect.

The catalogue will be published by Merrell Publishers in London.

I had the great honor and pleasure to be a guest of Ansel Adams’ son and daughter-in-law, Michael and Jeanne Adams, at their cabin in Yosemite last week. Michael and Jeanne are delightful people and wonderful hosts – we had a great time talking about their experiences of Yosemite (Michael was actually born there) and Jeanne’s forthcoming exhibition projects.

I was in Yosemite working on an exhibition that will open next summer, called “Ansel Adams: At the Water’s Edge.” The idea for the show came from looking at Ansel’s seascapes and shoreline views, most of which were taken in the Carmel/Monterey/Big Sur area, with a few from Glacier Bay, Acadia National Park, and Cape Cod. The more I worked on this idea the more I realized there is a lot more to the subject than I bargained for. Looking at the seascapes got me to look at pictures of rivers meeting the sea – from there it was a short leap to river rapids, waterfalls, geysers, storms, ice, and snow. So the show has grown to include different aspects of Ansel’s interest in water. It’s fascinating to me because it shows just how much life and energy there is in his pictures – arrested motion – and it reinforces in my mind what I’ve always known about him, that he was fundamentally a Modern artist. The photographs I’ve been looking at show how much Modernism there was in Ansel – his interest in stopping time, in sequential imagery, in form, and in what historically has been called the “omniscience” of camera and lens, photographing things that the naked eye can’t see very well. And his approach was distinctive. You would never mistake his work for that of his friend, Edward Weston, for example. As photohistorian John Szarkowski once noted, in a Weston picture you get the geology of the place, in an Adams you get the weather.

It was a great weekend to be in Yosemite, especially for this project, because there is no escaping the importance of water at this time of year. The snow pack, which is 175% of normal, has been thawing quickly and waterfalls are booming. They are everywhere – majestic – indescribable really (and not too many tourists yet). It was a good reminder of why Ansel photographed water so much – he was born near the ocean, and water was so much a part of life in Yosemite and the other places he visited.

Jeanne is an accomplished curator, who is developing an exhibition for Photokunst with the working title “Fragile Waters.” I saw a preliminary edit of the show and it looks fantastic – bringing together works by Ansel, Dorothy Kerper Monnelly, and Ernest Brooks. Nothing is final yet but I enjoyed the rhythm of the presentation – the three artists’ works are blended beautifully. Ansel’s work, of course, is well-known, but Jeanne has mixed some of his most famous pictures with beautiful, lesser-known examples. Monnelly’s works are in some ways more romantic – they remind me of the late nineteenth century photographer Peter Henry Emerson - but have their own unique look and feel. And Brooks is best known for his underwater pictures. His photographs of seals playing underwater are so intimate, and the moments captured so unbelievable, you would think they had been Photoshopped if you didn’t know Brooks is a seasoned diver, a friend of the legendary Jacques Cousteau, among others. Combined, the three bodies of work make for a really powerful presentation.

The picture above is not Ansel’s, obviously. Our show is in its early stages and we don’t have permission to use publicity images yet. So one of my snapshots will have to do.

I visited landscape photographer Alia Malley in Los Angeles. She has a beautiful studio behind her equally beautiful house, airy and full of light. She had pinned up a number of prints from her Southland series for me to see, which feature overlooked scraps of nature seen around the greater Los Angeles area. (She remarked, at one point, on how Robert Adams has found similar poignancy in his photographs of land on the fringes of developed areas). This is a body of work Alia exhibited at Sam Lee Gallery in Chinatown last year, which got a lot of buzz, but which I missed. Alia finds the places she photographs by car, and rarely uses maps, because she says that’s how most people experience the city. The results make me think of Dutch Old Master landscape painting – Ruisdael, Hobbema, etc. and British Romanticism – Constable and Gainsborough in particular. Suffused with golden light, they do look strangely like paintings and this is part of their appeal. I also enjoy the fact that they are so counter-counterculture – nothing could be more out of fashion at the moment than photographing Los Angeles with emotion and expressiveness. I’m always excited when artists strike out against dominant trends.

We talked a little about what it is like to be a female landscape photographer. Alia feels the reason there aren’t more like her is because it can be a little dangerous for women to be alone in nature, especially around urban areas, where they are especially vulnerable to being attacked or harassed. She recounted several harrowing stories of people accosting her as she photographed, including a homeless woman who defended her territory surrounded by feral cats, and a near escape with a threatening man that caused her to loop an extra mile out of her way to get back to her car. Lately she has been photographing Mexican men horse riding in the neighborhood of Lakeview Terrace – weekend warriors who ride around like cowboys with elaborately painted saddles. It’s a touching theme – escaping into a cowboy fantasy world as a leisure pursuit,  part-time, on weekends and holidays.

I just got back from Los Angeles where I had dinner with Arthur Tress at I Cugini in Santa Monica. His new book Skate Park has just been published by Birch Books and it’s stunning. Arthur told me he took many of the pictures from the bottom of a bowl in a suburban skate park, and while they are formally quite beautiful, they also give a strong feeling of being immersed in the action. The hardest thing was learning to anticipate a skater’s approach by sound, and quickly get out of the way.  For a 70-year-old man, it’s an impressive feat.

Arthur is working on a new project of photographs taken of Morro Rock, an island on the coast near his home in San Luis Obispo California. The pictures were inspired by Hiroshige’s Hundred Famous Views of Mount Edo, and they have the same quality of using the prominent landform to anchor a variety of views of people and animals living and working around it. Arthur has been collecting Japanese woodblocks since the 1960s and recalled giving a particular book to Henri Cartier-Bresson years ago. Cartier-Bresson loved it because the pictures were so experiential, and this was the same kind of thing he was interested in capturing with his camera. He always remembered Arthur for giving it to him.

We talked about Arthur’s early career too, and the male nudes he published in the book Arthur Tress: Facing Up, A 12-Year Survey in 1980 (it was published a little earlier in Europe). He only made one female nude in his entire career, an image of Twinka Thiebaud, Wayne Thiebaud’s daughter, which appears as the frontispiece in the recent book Naked: The Nude in America, by Bram Dijkstra. Although Arthur is rightly celebrated for his homoerotic nudes, he told me he was “a wall flower in the bathhouse scene,” and at times felt strangely alien to gay culture. Compared to Robert Mapplethorpe, for example, whom he knew and who celebrated gay culture, Arthur says he felt a little repulsed by the scene and his earliest pictures reflect his ambivalence about it. Later when he realized people preferred to see more positive images he lightened the tone a great deal and some of the nudes he is best known for were made after he decided to changed gears.

I am pleased to announce my book with Jerry Uelsmann, “The Mind’s Eye,” has been named one of the best photobooks of the year by Photo-Eye Magazine. This is a coveted recognition and a nice endorsement of the wonderful work done by the publisher, ModernBook in San Francisco. It’s also a well-deserved nod for Jerry Uelsmann’s important, but sometimes underappreciated work.

Culture24 lists my upcoming exhibition, Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio, and Street one of its Crystal Ball Best of 2011 exhibitions:

The National Portrait Gallery’s Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio and Street (February 17 – May 30) surveys the work of an often-overlooked master of early 20th century photography. E.O. Hoppé’s society portraits of the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Margot Fonteyn and Tilly Losch and photojournalistic studies were the benchmark of interwar photography.

I spoke at a press conference in London several weeks ago to announce the upcoming ‘Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio and Street’ at the National Portrait Gallery. It’s going to be an unusual show because it brings together two totally different bodies of work. E. O. Hoppé was well-known as a celebrity portrait photographer in the 1920′s, and some of those works have been exhibited before – the NPG did a Hoppé retrospective in 1978 that featured studio pictures. Recently, working with Graham Howe, director of the E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection in Pasadena, we discovered a whole new side to the artist’s work – street pictures, most taken in London, many with a hidden camera. It turns out many of these had been published in picture magazines at the time, but they had never been exhibited. We thought it would be fun to show both kinds of work together – the ‘high’ of celebrity portraiture with the ‘low’ of street pictures. A nice summary of the exhibition appeared in the Guardian newspaper on October 7.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue written by me and the Curator of Photographs at the NPG, Terence Pepper. It won’t come out until the show opens in February 2011, but I just got a PDF of the book jacket, attached at the top of this post.

When I was a curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the first photograph I bought for the museum was a landscape by Toshio Shibata. So when I was in Tokyo a few weeks ago it was a special treat to visit Shibata in his studio. He’s a warm and gentle man with an easy sense of humor, and it was great to catch up with him. We looked at pictures in the afternoon and swung by the Tokyo Met for an opening afterwards. The Tokyo Met is in a former brewery so we were inspired to go to a  German/Australian-themed (not a typo) Japanese pub called ‘Beer Station.’

Shibata made a name for himself as a black and white photographer, but in the last 5 years or so he’s been working mostly in color. It’s always interesting when a photographer moves into color for the first time and the recent works have a different feel. The subject matter hasn’t changed – he still features dams, erosion control barriers, retaining walls, and artificial lakes and waterfalls. In black and white these became abstract – through Shibata’s lens, shot from above, the patterns of engineering works in Japan look like origami. In color the same sort of subject matter has a more emotional feeling. There is more of a sense of atmosphere, the weather, of actually being in a place. I still love the black and white work, but the color material is exciting.

At the same time he has been exploring these new directions, Shibata has also been revisiting his early work. His book “Still in the Night” is stunning – it’s a collection of night views he made in the eighties. In contrast to the large-scale prints he has been making lately, most of the “Still” pictures are relatively small. A different feeling again, but beautiful like the rest.

Advance copies of The Mind’s Eye: Fifty Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann have just arrived from the printer, and they look terrific. Books should be available with the publisher, ModernBook in San Francisco, in mid-October. For two years from 2006-7, Jerry invited me into his studio and allowed me unprecedented access to his work. Working together, we came up with a completely new selection of the artist’s work, dating back to the 1950s. The result is a true retrospective, beginning with ‘straight’ photographs taken at that time, continuing up to the current day. It includes many of Jerry’s greatest hits, together with wonderful things never previously seen.

The project was more stressful than it should have been, and it is a great relief to see the book come out. About half way through the project, the museum that commissioned the book ran into serious financial troubles and canceled the project. Thankfully they relinquished copyright and allowed us to proceed with the book. It’s a testament to Jerry, his lovely wife Maggie, and the folks at ModernBook that we were able to see it through. It wasn’t always comfortable working without a clear budget, and all of us made sacrifices to arrive at the final product. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the book, which surely is one of the best books on Uelsmann ever done (and there have been a few). It includes a lengthy art historical essay by yours truly, an inspiring introduction by Allan Coleman, and reprints of texts written by Jerry in the 1970s. A national touring exhibition will launch next year.

Over a dinner of fresh caught lobster and striped bass prepared by my inimitable colleague Trevor Smith, a group of us gathered for dinner last night with the installation artist and painter Michael Lin. Michael and his partner Heidi Voet split their time between Shanghai and Brussels; Michael is here to talk about a possible collaboration with the Peabody Essex Museum curated by Trevor. Michael and I had a long talk on Wednesday about a group of glass-plate negatives he found, taken of his family and their home in Taiwan around 1900-1910. It’s a detective story because no one knows exactly who took the pictures or why. My hunch is they were made by a talented relative – there is such intimacy, warmth, and insight to them. But Michael thinks they may have been made by a local professional photographer who came to know the family well.

Michael is best known for the textile-like paintings he and his assistants make on architectural surfaces. During the Winter Olympics he famously mounted large painted panels on the exterior of the Vancouver Art Gallery. In the image above, a student works to complete a floor in the Hague. The large-flower patterns he often uses have a very specific meaning in Taiwan as they were traditionally given as wedding presents and would have been used to cover the matrimonial bed.

Michael has been visiting the DVD markets in Shanghai looking for rare and interesting films. His most recent discovery: Nagisa Oshima’s 1988 movie Max Mon Amour, starring Charlotte Rampling as a wayward wife cheating on her husband with a chimpanzee. The husband comes to accept the wife/chimp relationship, though he resents the tender touches the chimp gives the woman – the gentle caressing of her cheek, the stroking of her hair. As one would.

On Friday we hosted Karen Finley at the Peabody Essex Museum; she performed her one-woman show ‘The Jackie Look’ in which she takes on the persona of Jackie Kennedy (and at times Jackie Onassis) commenting on her (Jackie’s) treatment in the media. Karen focused on photography and the way photographs are viewed, interpreted, and distorted in reproduction, weaving in lots of references to the Avedon | The Kennedys show we have on at the moment. The audience was full and many were on the edge of their seats – it was a powerful performance and Karen has plenty of fans. It was not the sort of shocking, in-your-face material she is best known for – the stuff that got her named ‘Public Enemy Number One’ by the late Jessie Helms. For the ‘Jackie Look’ she stayed fully clothed throughout – none of the honey showers, smeared chocolate, or baked beans that were once her hallmarks. This, after all, is the woman who stripped off and jumped into a display window at JC Penny, squishing her breasts against the glass like some sort of back-talking soft-core mannequin. On Friday she told the audience not to be afraid. ‘I’m a dignified lady,’ she said, channeling Jackie, as she walked up and down the aisles, looking for fancy handbags to coo over.

The night had many highlights – her riff on Caroline Kennedy’s verbal tick ‘you know’ turned into a long, hair-raising primal scream – ‘You? No! You…. know!” But for my money nothing surpassed the dance bit three quarters of the way through. You simply haven’t lived until you’ve seen Karen Finley dressed as Jackie Kennedy dancing to a video of figure skater Johnny Weir shimmying to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.

I am in London today, mainly for meetings with colleagues and to attend events surrounding Tate Modern’s exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism Surveillance and the Camera which opened May 27th. But I carved out a few hours to visit the Library of the London School of Economics and view the George Bernard Shaw photography collection.

Shaw of course is the Nobel Prize winning novelist, playwright, art critic and political agitator best known for writing Pygamalion. But he was an avid amateur photographer who bought his first camera in 1898 and photographed for fifty years. Most of these photographs ended up at the LSE, as did the papers of the Fabian Society, the socialist club he supported. There are a few photographs at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin too, and Shaw’s diaries went to the British Library. But the LSE collection numbers around 7,000 pictures.

Not all of those are Shaw pictures; also included in the collection are pictures by many other photographers, and authorship is not always clear. There are portraits of Shaw by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Madame Yevonde, Yousuf Karsh, and Frederick Evans, along with lesser lights. Shaw was not shy about being photographed and the archive even includes a dozen or so pictures of Shaw sunbathing nude. They are a refreshing change from the trademark tweed jacket and short pants he habitually wore. He was rarely seen in anything else.

Some of the Shaw photographs have been exhibited in the past but this was the first time I had seen the whole unedited collection. There are lots of pictures of his travels in Algeria, South Africa, England, Ireland, and the United States, most featuring family and friends. It’s truly a collection of amateur photographs. Most are not too sharp, some badly discolored, the compositions not always very well thought out, and most are not enlarged. Still there is something magical about them. A series of cloud studies, or a group of pictures of the backs of his hands show him experimenting with the camera and learning to see photographically – there is a sense of discovery about them. They’re the kind of photographs any enthusiast could have made once photography opened up to ordinary people in the 1890s, after the invention of the Kodak camera. There are even Kodak film sleeves and a Zeiss light filter guide in the collection. But how many of his amateur brothers and sisters had access to such an extraordinary group of friends, and how many were able to travel to the four corners of the globe?

In a small side street in Kuramae, on the outskirts of the old neighborhood of Asakusa in Tokyo, is one of the most extraordinary exhibition spaces in the world. Called Ku Ren Boh gallery (Ku=nothingness, Ren=lotus, a symbol of beauty emerging from dirt and muck, Boh=study room), it may be the only photography gallery attached to a Chohuin Buddhist temple. Open since 2006, it is visible strictly by appointment, and just a couple of people can see it at a time. Last week I visited the gallery to see a Lee Friedlander exhibition, “Windows and Mirrors.”

The front of the complex is pretty non-descript; other than the wide open front gate and the extremely beautiful Japanese garden in the courtyard, you wouldn’t know you’re in the right place. In the back of the courtyard is a small entryway and a doorbell. Pressing the bell calls the Temple’s priest and curator, Akiyoshi Taniguchi. He is a terrific photographer himself, though he never exhibits his own work and his books are only displayed discretely in the entryway. Mr. Taniguchi does exhibit works from his own private collection though, which is extensive. If I remember correctly two of the works in the Friedlander exhibition came from his collection. The rest were borrowed from Friedlander, who is Mr. Taniguchi’s friend.

After he receives you, Mr. Taniguchi opens the temple itself, which is a house-sized building with a gleaming altar in one corner of the courtyard. The gallery is in a separate building adjacent to the garden. At first it’s not clear you’re looking at a gallery as Mr. Taniguchi points to a sliding black metal door about 4’ tall in the side of a white wall. Slide the door he says, walk down the corridor, and please remove your shoes.

The door slides, you duck your head and arrive in a narrow corridor with a smooth floor of gray rounded stones. At the end is a little ledge for shoes, and two pairs of wooden sandals to change into. Another duck through a low doorway to the side and you arrive in the gallery. It’s a silent, minimalist white cube, about 8’ square, with a circular straw mat placed in the center for kneeling meditation. The walls, ceiling, and floor all have rounded corners so there are no right angles in the gallery. This, Mr. Taniguchi later explains, is according to his interpretation of ‘Ku’ – he wanted to create a gallery with no beginning and no end.

There are only 8 photographs in the center gallery – 4 pairs of pictures. Each combines a single Friedlander stem picture (a series he did of flower stems in water, seen through glass vases) with a recent self portrait. The combination is stunning. The aging artist is shown dressed plainly with an absent look on his face, looking back towards the camera, holding a shutter release. The self portraits are frank and unglamorous, giving the stem pictures a special potency.

In a small (2-1/2’ wide?) adjacent gallery there is a single chair facing a wall with an older, 1970s vintage Friedlander of a shop window under a tiny skylight. On the adjacent walls there are several other pictures from the self portraits and stems series.

Seeing pictures in such an amazing place is unforgettable. The intimacy of the gallery and its design make pictures gives the pictures special importance. It makes the visitor slow down and think, heightening awareness.

Every few months Mr. Taniguchi changes the show. Last year he did an exhibition of Naoya Hatakeyama’s ‘Blast’ photos of a bird flying away from a mining explosion. Next year he is planning to show photographs by the British photographer Susan Derges.

The opening of each exhibition is accompanied by a Buddhist ceremony and teaching. For some shows he might have members of the temple debate the meaning of the photographs, for others he arranges small performances. Recently he has created a ceremony for all the shows in which he burns an original photograph, reflecting the fragility of works on paper, and the ephemerality of the things captured in photographs.

Everything about the gallery is inspired. There are precedents for the Buddhist contemplation of photographs, for example at the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts outside Tokyo which is maintained by a Buddhist sect and directed by the famous photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Still, Ku Ren Boh is in a class of its own. Mr. Taniguchi likens his gallery to a tea ceremony space. The leap of intellect involved in harnessing modern picture-making to the pursuit of ancient traditions is impressive. As Mr. Taniguchi writes: “The gallery aims to calm the mind of the visitor, to enable him or her to concentrate entirely on the art at hand, to wander mentally within the universe of the artist, and through this, to have a little of the kind of transcendent experience that, following another path, people have sought to reach through the disciplines of Buddhist meditative practice. “

The gallery is completely non-commercial. Among the artists who have shown here are Adam Fuss, Daido Moriyama, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The temple has become a magnet for Japanese artists and the community is growing.

On April 17th I opened The Kennedys | Portrait of a Family, Photographs by Richard Avedon in the main special exhibitions galleries at the Peabody Essex Museum. We’ve been getting terrific press such as this review from the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize winning critic, Mark Feeney, and attendance has been excellent. Between Avedon and the concurrent exhibition Maya and the Mythic Sea, visitation at the museum is up 50% on the previous year.

The Avedon exhibition features final prints and enlarged contact sheets from a single session Avedon had with the Kennedy family on January 3, 1961 — after JFK’s election but before his inauguration. The pictures are all vintage and were commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar magazine — a copy of the issue the images appeared in is included in the display. To give a flavor of the times we copied the typewriter-style font that Harper’s used in 1961 in all the exhibition graphics. And to give the show a period, Modernist look we used white walls with gray highlights, and hung the pictures with very regular spacing. I’ve never installed a show like this before but I think it works well.

What’s great about the exhibition, and the reason I wanted to do it in the first place, is that it shows how important editing is in the photographic process. The Kennedys were interesting in their own right and any photographs made in this period would be worth seeing. But considering the rarity of the images (they were the only formal pictures made between the election and inauguration), the high-profile publication that commissioned them, and how famous Avedon was at the time, they have a real weight of history about them. Shooting with a 2-1/4 x 2-1/4″ Rolleiflex, Avedon got 11-12 shots per roll of film. The exhibition shows them all, from the ones that were published to the ones that landed on the cutting room floor. The pictures that weren’t used were often pretty wonderful in their own right, but Avedon chose the pictures that most closely matched the way he thought the new first family should be seen. Sometimes the differences between frames are very subtle, like a slightly different position of the hands or tilt of the head. But Avedon knew exactly which ones he wanted. Visitors can also see cropping, retouching, and burning and dodging that went into making the final prints.

The exhibition is on loan to us from the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. It will be on display at PEM from April 17 to July 18, 2010.

My colleague Trevor Smith goes way back with the South African photographer David Goldblatt. In 1998, when Trevor was still at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, he invited David on a visit that resulted in him visiting the blue asbestos mines at Wittenoom, a project that helped sparked David’s interest in color photography. Or to be more precise, his interest in color photography for exhibition – as David pointed out, he has photographed in color throughout his career, though previously only for commercial work. I (but mostly Trevor) hosted David and his wife Lily at the museum this last weekend, and this afternoon he gave an informal talk to museum staff. David is one of those people who speaks with such intelligence and clarity of purpose, it is hard not to be moved by his words or affected by his work.

David believes a culture expresses its values in the structures it builds and the way it alters the landscape. The consumption of land in South Africa followed a unique trajectory, and David explained this is never far from his thoughts when making landscape photographs. During the Apartheid years he never felt free to photograph as Edward Weston did – making beautiful pictures of nature regardless of who owned the land it was situated on. Places were always politically charged, and ownership of the means of production was one of the supporting pillars of the Apartheid regime that David railed against.

Describing his work over the years, David said that in his opinion, black and white is better for expressing anger than color is, at least for his purposes. When I asked him what he meant by that, he explained that there is a kind of separation from reality, an abstraction, that happens in black and white that lends pictures a special vibrancy. Color, he said, has a tendency to be a little sweet, or at least, there is a sweetness in color photography that one can never fully escape. He went on to explain that South Africa has ‘Kodachrome skies,’ but that he doesn’t see it that way. So in his color prints he alters the balance to make the skies a little dirtier.

When I asked David if working in color meant he wasn’t angry any more, he said that in fact there is a lot he is still angry about. He is angry about the mining concerns in South Africa that he says murdered hundreds of thousands of people over the last century. He is angry about corruption in his country and failure to basic deliver services to the people who need them. He is angry about people who are still failing to get good educations. And he is angry about crime.

Though he joked with me that he would soon be ‘approaching his dotage,’ David clearly hasn’t mellowed much with time. Trevor and I are working on plans for an exhibition with David at the Peabody Essex Museum. When asked about his favorite photographers, David mentioned two in particular – Robert Adams, whom David described as ‘confronting many of the same questions and making similar decisions,’ and Ray Metzker, hugely underappreciated in his view, but who David pointed out, works in a completely different style.