Michael Eastman: Havana 2010

March 4 – April 30, 2011

NEW YORK- Barry Friedman Ltd. is pleased to present Havana 2010, Michael Eastman’s most recent series of large-scale digital C-prints taken during his 2010 trip to Havana. This marks the internationally acclaimed American photographer’s 4th trip to Cuba since the late 1990s. The exhibition will open with a reception for the artist on Friday, March 4, from 6 – 8pm.

Cuba has historically been one of Michael Eastman’s most successful series. Faded aristocratic mansions and architectural facades carry an atmosphere of neglect and decay, while maintaining the vibrant tones of the Caribbean. Eastman’s photographs maintain a painterly quality with rich colors, dramatic lighting, and lavish details. He has been referred to as a contemporary urban alchemist magically transforming everyday common objects and surfaces into precious and profound photographs.

A purist to his 4x5 camera, negative film, and natural light, Eastman does not believe in digitally altering his photographs. Doing so, he claims, would alter the historical significance of the finished product. Vivid and jewel-like tones come from long exposure and natural light, not RGB or CMYK, and far reaching visual clarity comes from a wide-angle lens and depth of field, not digital manipulation.

In a feature article in ARTnews (summer 2010), critic Ivy Cooper writes, “Eastman’s interiors whether shot in New Orleans, Italy, Memphis, or Cuba, combine a strong formal composition with a distinctly poetic sensibility and carry the echoes of human present.” [Eastman explains] “Someone once said to me, ‘I like your interiors because they feel like someone just entered, or just left,’ … I look for that, that trace of humanity.”

Michael Eastman’s photographs have been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Life Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and on five covers of Time Magazine.

Los Angeles Times Art Critic, Leah Ollman, writes, “Walker Evans' legacy is evident throughout Eastman's work: a love of the vernacular, a consistent, frontal approach, and a fondness for…time and neglect. Photographs keep a subject alive and at the same time mark its passing. The friction between a photograph's perpetual now and its memorial then can saturate an image with poignancy…This dynamic plays out powerfully in Michael Eastman's photographs.”

His photographs are included in numerous public and private collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection, New York; The George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, New York; The International Center of Photography, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Missouri; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum Of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; and The White House Art Collection, Washington D.C.

Michael Eastman is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and currently lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.

For visuals or more information please contact Carole Hochman or Karen Gilbert: 212-239-8600.

MICHAEL EASTMAN - INTERIORS

May 7 – June 30, 2009

NEW YORK- Barry Friedman ltd. is pleased to present Interiors, an exhibition of digital C-prints by the internationally acclaimed American photographer Michael Eastman. This exhibition, Eastman’s first at Barry Friedman Ltd., will debut his new series of historical architecture, Italy. Also on view will be photographs from 3 other series Cuba, Vanishing America, Urban Luminosity, each encompassing themes of architecture, historical preservation and monumentality. The exhibition will open with a reception for the artist on Thursday, May 7 from 5:30-8:00p at Barry Friedman ltd., 515 West 26th Street, New York City. Accompanying the show is Eastman’s hardcover book “Vanishing America,” available for sale at $39.95. Eastman will be available to sign the book at the opening reception.

Shot primarily in Milan and Venice, Michael Eastman’s Italy series depicts grand interiors that still retain original Italian Renaissance decorative motifs. These homes, which have remained in the hands of the same families for centuries, have been virtually untouched. The interiors are essentially historical reliquaries of past generations. Trompe-l’oeil ceilings recall mannerist churches from the Renaissance, while other interiors are filled with pietra dure marble flooring and Baroque and Neoclassical elements such as ornate chandeliers, pilasters and marble sculptures.

The photographs that comprise the Italy series express the same painterly qualities found in Eastman’s critically acclaimed Cuba series, and the interiors have a similar atmosphere of neglect and state of decay. Indeed, Eastman says, “I’ve often been accused of being more of a painter than a photographer. I used to think it was a criticism, but I have recently realized that is who I am.” Even the architectural elements seem to prefigure the Neoclassical Revival in the Cuban aristocratic mansions Eastman photographed. The Neoclassical elements of the Italy series elicit a similar grandeur, and yet the colors are more subtle and muted. Whereas Cuba’s interiors are vibrant and bold- paralleling the colorful flora and fauna of the Caribbean island, the earth tones of the Italian interiors are much more subdued. In the image Reflections, headless torsos that mimic the caryatids from the Porch of the Maidens on the Acropolis decorate the interior, and the fading paint on the walls resembles Roman frescoes at Pompeii, or the color block paintings of Mark Rothko. The wooden moldings on the walls are in a mature state of decomposition, revealing the brick infrastructure of the building. Moreover, the mirror on the wall and the repeated pattern of pilasters and sculptural torsos add a sense of infinity to the work.

Urban Luminosity exemplifies architectonic alchemy. Reflections on metallic brick walls, warped perspectives on a storefront window and dramatic façade lighting encourage us to examine our relationship with our man-made environs. The union between common elements of the city with their sensuous surfaces, lights, and colors combine to form a “skin” in which we find ourselves encapsulated.

Leah Ollman, Los Angeles Times art critic, says of Eastman’s work, “… obsolescence has a seductive patina, and Eastman exploits it well… [Eastman] pictures streets emptied of pedestrians and businesses devoid of customers, reinforcing the mood of abandonment. Mainly, though, he composes images with gorgeous precision, an acute sense of color and deep affection.”

Eastman’s photographs are included in numerous public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Michael Eastman was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1947. Originally a commercial photographer, Eastman has had a fine arts career for more than thirty years. The range of his oeuvre is diverse, including such themes as horses, sublime landscapes and urban and European architecture. His photographs are featured in Rainer Maria Rilke’s book Auguste Rodin, published by Archipelago Press, as well as Horses, published by Knopf. Eastman has been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant, and has been published in Time, Life, and the New York Times.

Click here to view a npr.org article about the book Vanishing America:

Praise for Vanishing America:

"...a liberation from the glaring rat race of American life." ~LA Times

"Eastman's photos of fading American kitsch...are like a post-apocalyptic stage set for lost mid-century dreams." ~Print

"Texture, variety, human scale--these are what we stand to lose when these places disappear. Consider it a call to arms." ~National Geographic Traveler

"The careful excision of human life forces us to focus on what might otherwise seem unremarkable, sweeping aside the dust to expose the archaeological strata of US society that still lie there beneath the modern." ~World of Interiors

Los Angeles Times

At the end of the road

By Douglas Brinkley  May 04, 2008

In my time, I have journeyed through many small towns across America. Recently, I spent some time in Jordan, Mont. -- the Garfield County seat -- which prides itself on being the lonesomest town in the world. Blessed with no natural resources or historic tourist sites, located 175 miles from the nearest airport and 115 miles from the nearest rail depot, Jordan has very little to offer except solitude.

The county population density is 0.3 people per square mile. Perhaps because modernity has left Jordan alone, you can gaze at a forlorn bank building and tiny grain elevator and see faded storefront advertisements for Sioux City Sarsaparilla and the long-defunct Sellman's Motel. "No Loitering" signs are posted from long ago, when the cattle drives from Texas to Montana used to let off right here at Big Dry Creek.

Appearances aside, Jordan is not really a ghost town. And there are in fact thousands of similar offbeat places that have just receded from national consciousness. Chances are that each one of us holds a place like Jordan in our distant memory. Though photographer Michael Eastman has never been to Jordan, his images evoke its spirit for me just the same. Though each of the photos in his forthcoming book, "Vanishing America," shows a specific town, all of the photos evoke that same particularly American loneliness.

Virtually in all 50 states, cobwebbed symbols of our small-town past lurk behind the shiny newness of our fast-food junctions and interstate exits. The sheer thrust of American dynamism has left Main Street unloved. But if your eyes gaze at these neglected roadside monuments long enough, you can be transported back to the time when Main Street was the epicenter of most communities.

Eastman captures the hard-core essence of blue-smoked architectural loneliness better than any new artist I've encountered. I feel qualified to make this claim because loneliness has been my niche since youth. Where some might find gloom in these anti-Rockwellian photographs, I find a liberation from the glaring rat race of American life. In Eastman's images, a scent hangs in the air like that before a thunderstorm -- a time when another Chapter of Life is being closed with the slam of a screen door. Darkness is falling, but a red-brick afterglow lingers in Eastman's work so you can still marvel at another crumpled calendar page being tossed away, just as Thomas Wolfe and Edward Hopper would have liked it.

Photographs like these may someday be taken in downtown Los Angeles or the Vegas Strip or Suburbia U.S.A. Nothing lasts forever. But visages don't fade away without a fight.

Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, is the author of numerous books, including "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast." He also wrote the introduction to Michael Eastman's book of photographs, "Vanishing America," which is being published by Rizzoli this month.

From the Los Angeles Times

AROUND THE GALLERIES

Michael Eastman captures the eternal present at DNJ Gallery

By Leah Ollman

Special to The Times

June 20, 2008

Photographs keep a subject alive and at the same time mark its passing. The friction between a photograph's perpetual now and its memorial then can saturate an image with poignancy -- the reprieve of preservation tempering a wrenching sense of loss.

This dynamic plays out powerfully in Michael Eastman's photographs of "Vanishing America." DNJ Gallery's selection of 16 large color prints from an extensive series shot over 3 1/2 years across 40 states makes for a moving, piquant and beautiful show. It reads as a tender ode to a bygone social and architectural landscape, an environment consisting of the idiosyncratic, particular and human-scaled.

Eastman's pictures of small-town main streets, old movie theaters, motels and restaurants invite nostalgic retrospection, maybe even a little romanticized idealizing. Those brick facades and hand-painted signs seem to describe a landscape built of earnestness, especially compared with the big-box stores and strip malls we patronize now.

Obsolescence has a seductive patina, and Eastman exploits it well. He shoots many of his subjects under stormy skies, as if to amplify the threat the sites face. He also pictures streets emptied of pedestrians and businesses devoid of customers, reinforcing the mood of abandonment. Mainly, though, he composes images with gorgeous precision, an acute sense of color and deep affection.

"Guadalupe" is an impeccable example. Eastman photographs the brick side of a building on a commercial street. On the left half of the wall is painted a map of California with a hand pointing to the town's location on the central coast. The state is rendered in flat white and the Pacific vivid turquoise, rhyming with the equally vibrant blue cover on a car parked in the scrappy lot beside the wall. To the right of the map, the brick wall is unpainted but for a fading ad for Gold Medal Flour that further engages with the layering of time. "Eventually," the ad reads, "Gold Medal Flour. Why Not Now." Beneath the sign stands the lot's only other car, a rust-colored van that echoes the tones of the exposed brick.

Eastman credits Rothko with teaching him about color, and the lessons were well learned. Beyond their documentary value, the photographs have an independent energy derived solely from their chromatic relationships. Golden fall leaves dust the ground around the little "Le Happy" cafe, painted mustard with black trim. Metal outdoor chairs painted in combinations of pumpkin and forest green set off jazzy syncopation standing against a coral house trimmed in teal.

Eastman is equally attentive to clean, architectonic structure, carefully orchestrating balance and rhythm. In a picture of a boarded-up old theater, for instance, he includes the street's double yellow lines within the frame, not just to offset the building's dingy white facade, murky teal boards and crisp aqua sky but to underline the scene, doubly and in highlighter, signaling significance and urgency.

Walker Evans' legacy is evident throughout Eastman's work: a love of the vernacular, a consistent, frontal approach, and fondness for signage -- hand-lettered, misspelled, dotted with errors caused by time and neglect. Above the sign for the mint-green, still-in-business Club Che-Ches hovers another, embossed in the original architecture, whispering "FANTASY." A rundown facade on Commercial Avenue in Cairo, Ill., announces its own lost currency with a sign reading, "If it new DOTTY has it! (sic)"

Eastman, who lives in St. Louis and has also shot the faded splendors of Cuba, has a close contemporary in Jeff Brouws, a fellow photographer of the overlooked and obsolete. Eastman's subjects are vanishing, and he has diligently raced to record their shabby charm. His project sings plaintively of loss but itself is an act of progress and affirmation.

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