Samuel Field

Reel to Reel, Stretham

1992

Photographed in the British Recording Studio that in the 1980's recorded music by Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes and the Stranglers. It was the he...

Chrome, from the Heidler & Heeps Tape Collection. The Heidler & Heeps collaborations are creative representations of Natasha Heidler and Richard Heeps’, personal past and their perso...

Mercedes Jelinek (b. 1985) is an American artist and photographer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Specializing in black and white photography, Jelinek often transforms the photog...

Ian Gittler’s Motor Art series-photographs of century-old engine parts, gears, sparkplugs, and brand tags-offers respite from the digital fetishism, overexposure and one-hundred-forty-character bursts of communication that seem to define our era. Gittler is no luddite, he loves his iPhone. But these images, often obscuring the objects beyond identification, take unsentimental pleasure in elements of weight, ground, volume and permanence that are more closely associated with a bygone heyday of industrialization. These photographs are about a tangible physical experience, about moving parts. Gittler’s expert printing-his ability to see the potential in a frame and employ the techniques necessary to articulate that vision on paper-brings the work to life. There’s wit in the brand iconography and a documentary component, but Gittler resists prescribing interpretations, saying subtext isn’t the point. His use of extremely shallow depth of field, intense contrast and exploded grain is muscular and poetic. But subtext is relevant. Although Robin Rice first approached Ian Gittler about his vector-based art on photo paper, the gallerist challenged him to create a series of photographs with that kind of machismo. As a native New Yorker who was marched through the halls of MOMA as a toddler, Gittler’s inspiration-his idea of macho-has less to do with cowboys and racecar drivers than with Franz Kline brushstrokes and modernist design. For Gittler, macho means the maximum amount of black ink that can lie across a sheet of photo paper. That kind of force. He narrowed his field of view for this series-often to a centimeter or two-in order to achieve a purely visual, visceral response. Gittler titled the work Motor Art in tribute to the 1934 Museum of Modern Art exhibit, Machine Art. Upon its sixtieth anniversary, Phillip Johnson wrote of the show (and of his own essay for its original opening), “The thrust was clear: anti-handicraft, industrial methods alone satisfied our age; Platonic dreams of perfection were the ideal.” Ian Gittler photographs, draws, writes, and makes music. He has created album covers for Willie Nelson, Roy Hargrove...