Howard Greenberg Gallery

NEW YORK— Howard Greenberg Gallery will present a viewing room exhibition of work from Pieter Henket’s Congo Tales, which explores cultural mythologies of the local inhabitants of the Congo Basin, containing some of the largest tropical rainforests in the world. The 2017 series has rarely been exhibited, and this is the first time the work is on view through a U.S. gallery. A renowned portrait photographer, Henket achieved acclaim for his work with Lady Gaga, Eddie Redmayne, and Mary J. Blige, among others. Drawing on his mastery of lighting and mise en scène, Congo Tales presents the personal and collective stories of the people living in the Mbomo region of the Congo Basin in central Africa. The stories, which have linked generations together, have been translated into imagery for the first time by Henket who worked closely with the villagers and a team of researchers and conservationists. The project was spearheaded by the environmental activist group Tales of Us, which broadens global awareness of the cultural diversity of the most ecologically vital regions on the planet. The book Congo Tales was published in 2018 by Prestel. The Congo Basin, the second largest tropical rainforest in the world next to the Amazon, has never occupied a prominent position in the global debate about climate change. Tales of Us attempts to correct this deficiency of awareness by drawing attention to both the importance of the Congo Basin itself, the persistent threats it faces via deforestation, and to the people who call the forest home, for whom it is a source of deep collective meaning. In 2015, shortly after agreeing to collaborate with Tales of Us, Henket travelled to the Mbomo region to find his bearings and to develop some understanding of what working in that landscape would entail. Alongside Eva Vonk, a Dutch producer; Steve Regis “Kovo” N’Sondé, a Congolese artist and philosopher; and his brother Wilfried N’Sondé, a Congolese writer and musician, Henket developed relationships with the people of the region, collecting and organizing stories, which, historically, had only been communicated and passed along through oral tradition. Once the selection of stories had been made, Henket and the team worked with the villagers to determine which scenes and details to emphasize most in their photographic re-telling. Over a period of 17 days in November of 2017, Henket, with the villagers as the actors, created multi-image representations of their stories, which communicate cosmic meaning and situational morality in equal measure. Whether needing to work in a remote terrain or deep in the rainforest, the stories were all treated with great sensitivity, and re-created through Henket’s intricately structured and richly-lit photographic tableaux. Stories once confined to a single family’s history have been connected with those from other families, and those with the village and region as a whole. With the despoiling of the Congo Basin an omnipresent threat, the urgency for those living near the forest to stay and defend it has never been greater. About Pieter Henket Born into a family of artists, Henket’s early fascination with film and photography was bolstered when he moved to New York City in 1998 to enroll in a three-month documentary filmmaking course at New York University. Soon thereafter he began interning for the director Joel Schumacher, where Henket learned staging and production. Time spent experimenting in the studio and doing portraits of friends and strangers in equal measure resulted in editorial work for magazines such as Esquire. His photograph of Lady Gaga was used for the album cover of “The Fame” (2008), which sold over 15 million copies worldwide. The photograph was included in the exhibition American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2010. In 2012 he photographed the Carnaval de Rio, a Brazilian carnival taking place every year in San Luis, a city in the mountains of Argentina. The work, Stars to the Sun, resulted in a book and several exhibitions, which led to a relationship with the environmental activist group Tales of Us. Henket is the author of The Way I See It (Uitgeverij de Kunst, Uitgeverij Waanders, 2013); Stars to the Sun (Lannoo Publishers, 2014); and Congo Tales (Prestel, 2018). Henket’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum de Fundatie in The Netherlands, and the Museum Barberini in Germany. His work is held in the collection of the Rijksmuseum.

Beginning in 2006 Mary Ellen Mark began what would become a four-year project encompassing thirteen different high schools across America. Using two 20×24 Polaroid land cameras – a massive apparatus almost six feet tall and weighing 240 pounds, of which there were only five in the world – Mark photographed hundreds of teenagers on their prom night, an event that so often symbolizes the beginning of the transition into adulthood. Having already developed an interest in photographing proms, with an eye towards emphasizing their socioeconomic and personal registers (she had, prior to this project’s beginnings, shot several proms using medium-format and 35mm cameras), Mark expanded the scope of her interest in the event by casting a wide, cross-country net, and by employing the aforementioned Polaroid camera, which was itself a kind of reflection of the subjects it so vividly rendered. The Polaroid 20×24 produces a unique image, one with no negative from which future alterations may be made. As Mark discussed in the preface to her book on this work, Prom (2011), the entire process of properly calibrating the camera for each sitting was an onerous and challenging one. The results, however, were deemed more than worth it: large and richly detailed prints, the immediacy of which seemed to match that of its subjects. Mark and her team worked to select students who would, collectively, represent a wide range of backgrounds and personalities. This diverse approach to selecting subjects was rooted in the expansive selection of schools in which she photographed: from public and private, to religious and single gender. This diversity of setting, coupled with Mark’s sensitivity towards her subjects, produced a many-layered portrait of American youth full of that unique mix of self-certainty and anxiety that our teenage years are so often characterized by, one that Mark, reflecting on her own prom, encapsulated so well: “The world was ours—or so we thought.”

This exhibition brings together a selection of Leiter's iconic color street photography, where reflections and abstractions so often reign supreme, with his rarely seen paintings and collages, work that he produced alongside his photography for the entirety of his life. Together, they illustrate the depth of his visual experimentation and curiosity, neither of which could be satisfied by the limits of a single medium.

As the consequences of the Great Depression, unemployment, poverty and the effects of the Dust Bowl ravaged the country in the 1930s, government programs such as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) were established. American photographers were employed to document the dire conditions. At the same time, Lewis Hine was hired by the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) National Research Project (NRP) to show the modernizing accomplishments of the nation’s factories, in the years prior to WWII. His efforts focused on the country’s reorganized workplace that fueled industrial growth and drove out the Depression. The powerful work of these photographers under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs ushered in an unprecedented new era for the medium: across the entire nation photography was communicating what words could not. One-Third of a Nation: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration Imbued in the nation’s social consciousness, the images that illustrate the history of the Great Depression originated in presidential action. In his second inaugural address, Roosevelt poignantly stated, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” In establishing the Resettlement Administration in 1935 – later renamed the Farm Security Administration in 1937 – Roosevelt created a robust response to help America’s poor farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers. Roy Stryker, an economist, was hired to document the situation and quickly developed an extraordinary roster of young photographers. One Third of a Nation: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration presents more than 50 photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, David Robbins, Arthur Rothstein, Peter Sekaer, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott. From 1935 to 1943, the photographers of the FSA shot nearly 80,000 photographs traveling the country on assignments that could last for months at a time. Their touching portraits of children, concerned parents, struggling workers, and difficult living situations are regarded as some of the finest examples of modern documentary photography. The images proved in no uncertain terms that the nation needed to act.

NEW YORK—The first U.S. solo exhibition of Paris-based photographer Harry Gruyaert (Belgian, b. 1941) will be on view January 23 through March 14, 2020, at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Well known in Europe for his street photography, his work is admired for its extraordinary use of color much like his American contemporaries Joel Meyerowitz, Saul Leiter, Stephen Shore, and William Eggleston. Gruyaert has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1982. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, January 23 from 6 to 8 p.m. The 2018 documentary Harry Gruyaert Photographer illustrates how Gruyaert’s life was saved by color. Born to the repressed and grey background of a traditional Catholic Flemish family, Gruyaert later discovered the lights and color of Europe. Driven by the irresistible desire to be a photographer, he became a pioneer in European color photography. Gruyaert says “For me, photography is not only about composition and color, it has to say something about the time and the place.” With an eye for idiosyncratic juxtapositions, Gruyaert has traveled the world finding bewildering beauty, complex constructions, and touching solitude. The exhibition covers his work in France, Spain, Belgium, Morocco, Japan, India, Russia and the U.S. Spanning four decades from 1981 through 2017, his photographs range from street scenes to seascapes, all punctuated with his unique, saturated approach to color. Often a lone figure can be found in his photographs, at times faceless or viewed from behind, evoking a loneliness of modern life or simply the serene banality of the quotidian. “I am interested in that strange magic that occurs when things come together. I look to form a connection to a place. I have to be moved by something,” said Gruyaert recently from his studio in Paris. In an introduction to his recent book, Edges (Thames and Hudson, 2019), the American artist Richard Nonas notes, “He photographs the boundaries that hover just beyond our sight…the shadows of an actual reality too blurred, too confused, too nuanced for any language to hold. He captures it whole. He holds it. As powerful art. As heart wrenching beauty. As the overwhelming mystery of ungrammatical silence.” A forthcoming book, Harry Gruyaert: Last Call, will be published in the U.S. in April 2020 by Thames & Hudson. About Harry Gruyaert Born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1941, Harry Gruyaert studied at the School of Film and Photography in Brussels from 1959 to 1962. He moved to Paris to pursue a career in photography, while also working as a freelance director of photography for Flemish television between 1963 and 1967. In 1969, he made the first of many trips to Morocco, which led to a Kodak Prize for his Moroccan work in 1976. From 1970 to 1972, he lived in London. By the end of the 1970s, Gruyaert had made significant bodies of work in North Africa, the Middle East, the U. S., Europe and India, where he refused stereotypical exoticism in favor of a deeper aesthetic. Around the same period he also photographed his homeland Belgium. In 1982, he joined Magnum Photos. A number of solo exhibitions of his photographs have been held in Europe recently including the Fondation d’Entreprise Hermes, Paris, and the FOMU, Antwerp. He continues to travel the world, most recently to Japan in 2019. His work is the topic of nearly 20 books including: Made in Belgium (Delpire, 2000); Harry Gruyaert: Rivages (Textuel, 2004); Harry Gruyaert: TV Shots by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (Steidl, 2007); Harry Gruyaert by Francois Hebel (Thames & Hudson, 2015); Harry Gruyaert: East/West (Thames & Hudson, 2017); Harry Gruyaert – Roots (Editions Xavier Barral, 2018); and Harry Gruyaert: Last Call (Thames & Hudson, 2019). Gruyaert’s photographs are held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Foto/Industria, Bologna; Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo; Deutsche Börse Foundation, among many others.

NEW YORK—Renowned actress Jessica Lange will present an exhibition of her photography at Howard Greenberg Gallery from November 21, 2019 through January 18, 2020. The exhibition, Highway 61, presents a tribute to the storied route which Lange has traveled countless times since her childhood in Northern Minnesota. Highway 61 originates at the Canadian border, near Grand Portage and runs 1,600 miles along the Mississippi River though the American Midwest and South, rolling through eight states, down to New Orleans. This is Lange’s second exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery. The exhibition coincides with the publication by PowerHouse of her fourth book Highway 61. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, November 21 from 6-8 p.m. Over the last seven years, Lange has revisited Highway 61 many times to photograph the historic route. Her photography series reveals the thoughtful and powerful connection Lange continues to maintain towards the people and places in this part of America. Lange has noted that "long stretches of 61 are empty, forlorn, as if in mourning for what has gone missing — the hometowns, the neighborhoods, family farms, factories and mills." “It’s a great counterpoint to filmmaking,” Lange has said about photography, “because it’s a private, solitary experience. It’s like writing or painting; it’s something you can do on your own. Acting is a co-dependent art form, and the actor is not in control. And filmmaking definitely informs the decision to photograph something. I’m drawn to situations with a dramatic feel to them as far as lighting or backdrop or people’s presence, the way someone stands.” About Jessica Lange Born and raised in Cloquet, Minnesota, Jessica Lange studied photography at the University of Minnesota after winning a scholarship to study the arts. Her photographs have been exhibited at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, 2009; Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 2014; Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, 2015; and Centro Cultural de Cascais Portugal, 2015, among others. She was the first recipient of the George Eastman House Honors Award in 2009. Lange’s previous books include her debut monograph 50 Photographs (PowerHouse, 2008), In Mexico (RM, 2010) and a children’s book It’s About A Little Bird (Sourcebooks, 2013). Lange began making photographs in the 1990s when her partner of 26 years, the late playwright and actor Sam Shepard gave her a Leica camera as a gift. She dedicated her book Highway 61 to Shepard. An Academy Award-winning actress, Lange is well known for her roles in King Kong, Tootsie, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Frances, Blue Sky, and Grey Gardens. She is the 13th actress in history to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting, having won two Academy Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, one Tony Award, one Screen Actors Guild Award and five Golden Globe Awards. She can currently be seen in The Politician on Netflix.