Contains Nudity

Opening today in Los Angeles, an exhibition entitled Contains Nudity, is a retrospective of the nude fashion photography of Dazed & Confused Magazine co-founder Rankin. It includes some models with such household names as Kate Moss, Helena Christensen, Erin O’Connor, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Yasmin Le Bon and the former Mrs Seal, Heidi Klum. It will run for six weeks,until May 26th at the Rankin Gallery which is located at 8070 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, California.

Theater of the Street

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Since the invention of small hand-held cameras and faster films in the late 19th century, photographers have been fascinated with capturing everyday life in the urban environment. An exhibition of nearly 90 works will celebrate how photographers such as Harry Callahan, Bruce Davidson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Beat Streuli creatively pursued a new genre of street photography, capturing the diversity and rapid pace of modern life.I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938–2010 is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. from April 22 to August 5, 2012.  

Disco Angola

David Zwirner gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Stan Douglas, titled Disco Angola, Douglas has again assumed the fictional character of a photo-journalist, this time a regular in the burgeoning disco underground of the early 1970s New York. For Douglas’s alter-ego, the new scene offered a cathartic respite from urban grittiness in a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Evolving out of funk and soul, the disco lifestyle mobilized the gay community in particular, and its self-conscious embrace of glamour and fashion represented a departure from the previous decade’s counterculture. Disco Angola is on view at the David Zwirner gallery until April 28, 525 West 19th Street.

The Shaping of New Visions

Valie Export, Einkreisung (Encirclement) from the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations). 1976.

The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, on view this month at the MOMA in New York, covers the period from 1910 to today, offers a critical reassessment of photography's role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements—with a special emphasis on the medium's relation to Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art—and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as "New Vision" photography bore the obvious influence of "lens-based" and "time-based" works. El Lissitzky best summarized its ethos: "The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary art from April 18 to April 29, 2013.

Giverny

The Hole gallery in New York presents the exhibition Giverny, a collaboration between E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler. The artists created photographic works in the famous French gardens built and immortalized in paint by Claude Monet, and will be exhibiting them for the first time here on the Bowery. Playboy.com has generously funded this massive exhibition, for the duration of which the Hole will be transformed into a living, breathing garden—with a lily-padded pond traversed by Monet’s signature green Japanese arched bridge, and scattered with the indigenous plants he is famous for painting. The walls of the exhibition will be printed with the almost claustrophobically green willow trees that surround this historic French site, and your first step into the gallery will be onto grass. Giverny will be on view until April 24 at the Hole Gallery.

Naked Before the Camera

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Hermaphrodite, Nadar, 1860

"Tapping veins of mythology, carnal desire, hero worship, and aesthetic pleasure, depictions of the nude have...triggered impassioned discussions of sin and sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty. Controversies are often aroused even more intensely when the artist's chosen medium is photography, with its accuracy and specificity—when a real person stood naked before the camera—rather than traditional media where more generalized and idealized forms prevail." Naked before the Camera, on view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveys the history of this subject and examines some of the motivations and meanings that underlie its expression.

Robert Carrithers: The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited

Prague – On view now at the Fotograf Gallery in Prague: rediscovered photographs by Robert Carrithers of Basquiat, Haring, the New York scene in the 1980s and the infamous Club 57.“One staircase led to heaven the other to hell” says Robert Carrithers of a building in New York’s St. Mark’s Place Street, number 57. The building whose basement housed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Club 57 – a creative laboratory for all non-conformists and free-thinkers from the East Village – actually belonged to the central offices of the Polish Catholic Church. The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited will be on view until April 20 at the Fotograf Gallery in Prague, Školská 28, Prague 1.

The Nudes of Lord Lichfield

Thomas Patrick John Anson, 5th Earl of Lichfield (25 April 1939 – 11 November 2005) was an English photographer. He inherited the Earldom of Lichfield in 1960 from his paternal grandfather. In his professional practice he was known as Patrick Lichfield.  This above image, taken in 1990, features a model looking across Central Park from the balcony of Rock Hudson’s former flat. Lichfield was an internationally renowned photographer who worked  for all the major magazines, exhibited worldwide, and published several books during his career. The National Portrait Gallery dedicated a retrospective exhibition to the first  twenty years of his work in 2002. His great break was when he was summoned by Diana  Vreeland, the doyenne of fashion editors, to photograph the Duke and Duchess of  Windsor, and given a five year contract with American Vogue. In 1981 he was appointed  official photographer at the wedding of his cousin, The Prince of Wales, and  Lady Diana Spencer.  He is lesser known for his nude work which will be exhibited for the first time at the Little Black Gallery in London from April 24 to May 26.

Places, Strange & Quiet

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This April, the Falckenberg Collection will present an exhibition of photographs by the internationally renowned filmmaker and artist Wim Wenders (b. 1945). Bringing together almost 60 images, taken from 1983 to 2011, this show entitled Places, Strange and Quiet will feature many photographs not yet exhibited in Germany including several very recent works. On view from April 5 to August 5, 2012 at The Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg-Harburg.

Photos de Cinéma

“Photos de Cinéma: Images of the French New Wave by Raymond Cauchetier,” which includes production photographs from “Breathless,” is the first exhibition outside of Europe to showcase Cauchetier’s motion picture work.  On view will be 125 newly made, black-and-white prints from Cauchetier’s own 35mm negatives. The printing was personally overseen by Cauchetier, now in his 90s, at his preferred lab in Paris.  Other films represented in the exhibition include “Adieu Philippine,” “Baisers volés” (“Stolen Kisses”), “Jules et Jim,” “Lola” and “La peau douce” (“The Soft Skin”). “Photos de Cinéma” is open to the public through June 24 in the Academy of Motion Picture's Grand Lobby Gallery in Beverly Hills.