FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

IN THE ZONE, a century gathering of  black & white photographs

by past and present masters

 HENRY GREGG GALLERY in DUMBO 

May 13 – June 27, 2010

Opening Night Reception Thursday June 3 from 6-9pm

“All will be yesterday,” as the young Hungarian photographer Balazs Turay has observed. Therefore, “nothing has changed, and nothing needs to change, the photo itself will tell its own tale to generations to come.” adds curator/gallerist Henry Andre' Martinez-Reed. “All the photographs in this show, dating from as far back as the 1920s, exemplify the single most important quality to me in a work of art, what the Italians call sprezzatura, an apparent nonchalance, the ability to conceal the careful, conscious effort behind a difficult achievement.” Also a musician, Martinez- adds, “In assembling this show, I wanted to have the feeling Duke Ellington must have had when he assembled his orchestra, mixing the ages and styles of his players to generate the tension and passion that guarantees a knock-out performance.”

HGG’s new show deftly mingles iconic photographs by Robert Frank, Gordon Parks and Russian avant-gardist Aleksandr Rodchenko with sepia-tone masterworks by Georgi Zelma (1906-84), the pioneering Russian photojournalist of the “Eastern Front” school alongside dramatic contemporary Roman cityscapes with crackled surfaces by Balazs Turay. and classic Americana views through the lens of Jim Megargee,  professor, author, master printer and documentarian; portraits of New York visual artists from Peter Bellamy’s monograph, The Artist Project (1981-1990) and of the city’s street life by Brooklyn’s Anthony Almeida. New Yorker Robert Herman also focuses on the city’s streets. His digital prints, particularly of a near-empty 70s-era subway car, stripped and striped in colored light as it crosses a bridge, are as bravura an achievement as Professor Doug Schwab’s gum bichromate nudes and Cornelia Van der Lin’s pinhole nudes in their evocation of eternity. Czech scientist turned poet and fine art photographer, Igor Malijevsky, focuses on city life across Europe while North Carolina’s Bryce Lankard combines old and new photo technologies in photographs of New Orleans. The photomontagist Mark Blanchette conjures surreal visions layering multiple negatives. Of particular note are photographs by the father and son, both known only as Istvan Soltesz: The father was self-taught and never exhibited, much less celebrated, until his son, by then a professional photographer, assembled a posthumous show of his father’s loving pictures of daily life in their Hungarian village. The renowned freelance photojournalist Peter Essick braves impossible conditions the world over, often for National Geographic, to illustrate immediate challenges facing humankind.

“The camera heals us of our separateness,” says co-exhibitor Carole Elchert, native of Ohio and longtime chronicler of village life in the Himalayan Mountains. IN THE ZONE endeavors to prove her point.

             
   Georgi Zelma

 




 Georgi Zelma

 
Robert Herman, Armond Assante and André


 

Gordon Parks





​Robert Frank - Panqnirtunet 1992
 

Robert Frank - Self Portrait At 55


 

  Georgi Zelma