Viviane Sassen @ Danziger Projects

March 4 - April 10, 2010
Opening Reception March 4 6-8pm

Over the past several years, Viviane Sassen has emerged as one of the freshest voices in European photography. Already an acclaimed fashion photographer whose work appears regularly in magazines such as French VOGUE, Purple, V, and i-D, in 2001 Sassen began regular trips to Africa, where she had lived as a child. Her work there moved away from fashion and documentary and towards an ongoing body of collaborative portraits.

In this work she has established a visual vocabulary that is stylized, symbolic and mysterious. Her aesthetic combines a sense of childhood memory, where scenes are crystallized and highly saturated with color with a photographer's sensitivity to the body and surface. The strong presence of shadow and darkness in Sassen's images provokes more questions than answers. If there is such a thing as magical realism in photography, these photographs embody it.

This exhibition, Sassen's first American showing, draws on work from three series -'Die Son Sien Alles' (The Sun Sees Everything), made in South Africa; 'Flamboya', made in Zambia and East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania); and the series 'Ultra Violet', made in Ghana. These portraits combine the spontaneous with the staged, and often come out of ideas that Sasson carries in a sketchbook of inspirations for future compositions. These ideas are shared with her subjects as the starting point for each photograph. Critic Vince Aletti commented, "Her photographs tease convention but with witty and unexpected results, partly because her subjects are all young Africans who seem to have enjoyed collaborating with her. She tends to treat the body as a sculptural element — a malleable shape that combines with blocks of shadow and bright color in arrangements that sometimes read like cut-paper collages, bold and abstract but full of vibrant life."

Danziger Projects
534 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

W. Eugene Smith at the New York public Library Lincoln Center

The Jazz Loft Project at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center through May 22, 2010.

Photographs by W. Euegene Smith

In the early 50's Smith moved into a loft building on sixth Avenue, which had already become a hangout for artists, writers and especially jazz musicians, who rehearsed and jammed there. Among the visitors to the loft: Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, Steve Swallow, Robert Frank, Salvador Dali, Norman Mailer and Diane Arbus and more. he shot over 40,000 frames on 35mm and recorded thousands of hours of music and sounds between 1957 and 1965.

This book is a stunning mix of New York history, jazz and photography. Check it out, there will be more than 200 images, several hours of audio, and 16mm film footage of Smith working in the loft. It's well worth a glimpse into history.

excerpt from the book:

January 29, 1960

W. Eugene Smith sits at the fourth-floor window of his dilapidated loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, New York City, near the corner of Twenty-eighth Street, the heart of Manhattan’s wholesale flower district. He peers out at the street below, several cameras at hand loaded with different lenses and film speeds. His window faces east from the west side of Sixth Avenue. The dawn light begins to rise behind the Empire State Building and other Midtown skyscrapers looming over the modest neighborhood. Three musicians stand together on the sidewalk below talking and laughing. One holds an upright bass in its case, another has a saxophone case slung over his shoulder, and the other is smoking a cigarette. It is six o’clock in the morning; the temperature is a moderate thirty degrees. The musicians are going home after a night-long jam session. Smith snaps a few pictures.

Willie Graff

Thank you Dj Willie Graff
www.myspace.com/williegraff




The song included in the video below is courtesy of Willie Graff.
"When The Sun Goes Down" (Original) by Willie Graff & Tuccillo