JUNE 25rd - SEPTEMBER 12th, 2009

GALLERY HOURS: TUESDAY-SATURDAY 11-5
T. 212.223.1059
Wall Street Journal Review, AUGUST 1, 2009

Throckmorton Fine Art is pleased to offer an exhibition of photography portraying the stark beauty of deserts. In some photographs shown, the desert itself is the subject. In others, the desert frames such subjects as the female nude. What brings the desert to the fore—drawing the attention of so many talented photographers—is its brilliant, even over-powering, light. Photography is sometimes said to be “all about light.” Nowhere is this assertion truer than in the desert. Indeed, there is so much light in the desert that it is an obstacle for photographers. Successful images are elusive. However, when success is achieved, the resulting image is sublime. The surface of objects, from jagged rocks to prickly cactus to soft flesh, just shimmers.

The exhibit includes the work of a number of photographers who have been attracted to deserts: Edward, Brett, and Cole Weston, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Martin Chambi, Lucien Clergue, Elisabeth Sunday, Dirk McDonnell, and Marilyn Bridges. Photographs in the exhibit range from the early part of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Despite the variety of images included in the exhibit, they are united by more than their setting in the deserts of North and South America, and North Africa. The powerful light of the desert makes for bold contrasts, giving every photograph, even those of the human figure, an abstract quality—and so an aura of modernism.

Where There's Sand Without Surf
by WILLIAM MEYERS, Wall Street Journal, AUGUST 1, 2009

Why endless stretches of barren sand should make a strong appeal to our imaginations is a bit of a mystery, but the first picture in this exhibition does just that. In Marilyn Bridges’s aerial photograph “Desertscape, Death Valley, CA, 1991,” the undulating dunes look like folds in a rumpled bed sheet. The bird’s-eye view from an indeterminate height deprives us of our sense of scale, and an area that may be many square miles becomes an expressive abstraction until the discovery of some recognizable objects in the lower right corner restores the image to the real world. Edward Weston’s “Oceano, 1936” presents the desert’s dunes from ground level as they recede in diminishing waves into the distance.

The intense desert light turns the plants in Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s “Organ Cacti, Mexico, 1929-30” into alternating patterns of black and white, with their delicate needles appearing particularly sharp. The light lets us see the plant in Marina Yampolsky’s undated close-up “Columna Salomonica/Salomonic Column, Sierra de Puebla” in minute detail. Elisabeth Sunday has three statuesque full-length portraits of robed figures of the Sahara Desert, and Andre De Dienes litters the sand with a nude. Graciela Iturbide and Brett and Cole Weston are represented by studies of geology and desert flora.