I had a great night gallery hopping in Los Angeles earlier this moth. Started out at the Leica Gallery and then went over to Fahey/Klein Gallery to meet my favorite contemporary photographer, Julie Blackmon.
Leica Gallery - Los Angeles is incredible. The bottom floor is a camera store with a selection of books by photographers who use Leica cameras. Upstairs is one of the most beautiful private gallery spaces I have ever seen, 8,000 square feet. It has a balcony lounge, an insane amount of liner wall space, plenty of room to move about and a grand stairway leading up to it. Located in West Hollywood near the Beverly Hills city limits it definitely brings in the West Side crowd. The work on the walls was great and the people in the gallery equally interesting. I went to support Nick Ut who had a few prints up on the walls including his Pulitzer Prize winning image “Napalm Girl” shown below.
AP’s Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph: Nine-year-old Kim Phuc, center, runs near Trang Bang, Vietnam, after an aerial napalm attack on June 8, 1972.
Fahey/Klein Gallery - Julie Blackmon: Midwest Materials and Geof Kern: Midtown Exit - ends June 10th
Julie Blackmon and William Karl Valentine at Fahey/Klein Gallery - Los Angeles
I first saw Julie Blackmon’s prints at Robert Mann Gallery in New York about six years ago and immediately loved her work. The prints are beautiful and have so many layers of information to them. Every time I see them there is always something new and interesting, I take away from the images. This was the first time I had seen Geof Kern’s work and I liked it. Interesting content and well-crafted prints.
Fahey/Klein’s flat file room is amazing.
I picked up two more books at the openings, Brad Mirman’s “Street Life” (Drago Publishing 2021) and Julie Blackmon’s “Midwest Materials” (Radius Books 2022). This is the second Blackmon book now in my library, I had purchased “Homegrown” (Radius Books 2014) at Robert Mann Gallery in NYC. I had Julie sign this book for my daughter Alyssa, Brad’s book came already signed. Julie’s work is so detailed it works best in large prints, but Radius does justice to her work with the size of these books and good print quality. I was not familiar with Brad Mirman’s work but bought the book because some of the subject matter, specifically the portraits of LA area gang members. In preparing this post I looked up Brad and found he is an established writer, producer, and director in the film industry. He is almost 70 years old now and splits his time between Paris and Los Angeles. His portraits are well crafted, and he obviously is willing to go to the hard areas to photograph some dangerous people, I totally respect that ability. He is not shy about putting on a wide-angle lens and getting close to those people and that really makes his images powerful. The images work better individually or in different groupings than they do in the editing of the book though. There seems to be several portfolios in this book, and they aren’t tied together well. I think there are also a few poorer images, where he tries to photograph on the street but misses, most the photographs of LAPD are weak. I feel if he would have done one book with portraits of LA gangsters and a second book on LA women it would have worked better or divide this book like that and edit out the other photographs that don’t tie in to those two groups. The images are also printed too dark. I know it is for a powerful visual effect, but they lose shadow details with that, with the ability of today’s presses that shouldn’t happen. Brad is a decent photographer and individually there are lots of valuable images in this book still.
