N.Y. OVER THE TOP, by Max Kozloff.
25/09/2013.
Book and exhibition. 12/09 - 19/10/2013 [N.Y.] U.S.A.
metalocus, CANDELA OLIVA
metalocus, CANDELA OLIVA
Max Kozloff is a prominent art critic and historian who decided to switch into an artist in the 1970s. It is also said that he is a Chicago native “transplanted” into New York… And it is impossible to deny his fascination for the great metropolis: his photographs lead us through a city that offers the paradox of everyday situations that are somehow extraordinary .
Cooks, Little Italy, 2001. Photography © Max Kozloff. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. Click above to see larger image.
Mime in SoHo, 1983. Photography © Max Kozloff. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. Click above to see larger image.
"New York Over the Top", Walking In The Rain, St. Mark's Place, 1985. Max Kozloff. Courtesy of Contrasto Publishing. Click above to see larger image.
Umbrella Madness, #2, 9th Avenue, 1983. Photography © Max Kozloff. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. Click above to see larger image.
Pensive Girl, West Indian Carnival, 1993. Photography © Max Kozloff. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. Click above to see larger image.
Young Man with Sunglasses, Coney Island, 1997. Photography © Max Kozloff. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.
Cambodian Restaurant, Brooklyn, 2000. Photography © Max Kozloff. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.
Contrasto Publishing is the editor of New York Over the Top, Max Kozloff’s first photographic monograph, introduction by Marvin Heiferman (Contrasto, 2013). A collection of 20 color prints, drawn from over 35 years of Kozloff’s New York photography, will be exhibited at Steven Kasher gallery until de end of October. The Art Institute of Chicago is also preparing an exhibition: Max Kozloff: Critic and Photographer, running October 5th through January 5th.
Max Kozloff walks down the streets of New York and offers to the viewer his pearticuliar vision of a colorful, multi-ethnic, and multi-faceted city. A series of pictures that can surprise and drive the viewer in a curious path in one of the most photographed places in the world.
Kozloff photographs his fellow citizens with an urban eye. He does not see them as legendary creatures, but he often makes them out to be fabulous presences, glimpsed at carnivals and festivals. He is especially enchanted with that he has called “the music of faces”, a spectrum of moods at variance with the consumerism or ethnicity of circumstance. Statues, effigies, or teddy bears seem to offer internal witness to what he calls New York Over the Top.
Repetitive forms appear and sweep across these pictures in waves: decorative patterns created by fences and barriers; the syncopated angles of the elbows and knees of those who walk by, crowd together, or stand in place; the stripes on a pair of pants. ‘Color for me,’ Kozloff has explained, ‘is a form of tenderness.’ And so, paradoxically, while high-key chromatics spark much of this work, it is an unexpected gentleness that clings to and distinguishes these sneaky complex photographs.
Text: Contrasto.
Credits of the book
Publisher.- Contrasto Publishing.
Size.- 28 × 21.6 cm.
Pages.- 100 pages.
Hardcover
ISBN.- 978-8869653995
Exhibition
Place.- Steven Kasher Gallery - 521 West 23rd Street. New York, NY 10011.
Date.- From 12th September to 19th October 2013.
More information
Max KOZLOFF
Max Kozloff continues to be a prominent New York writer on photography after his tenure as Executive Editor of Artforum concluded in the 1970s. He has published three volumes of his collected essays on the medium, as well as New York: Capital of Photography and more recently, The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900. Simultaneously, and with equal zeal, he has developed a career as a practitioner of color negative street photography. The Art Institute of Chicago is recognizing his achievement with a retrospective of his whole career .
