The Goethe-Institut exhibition, which presents all but one of the winners of Germany’s 2010-11 annual graduate photography competition, reveals an academic taste for the sober and the conceptual. Some of that preference reflects Europe’s grim 20th-century history. The pictures in Helena Schatzle’s series, “The Time In-Between — 2621 KM Memory,” revisit her grandfather’s 1946 escape from a Russian POW camp; small portraits of now-elderly eyewitnesses are overwhelmed by large images of gray-skied Romanian industrial landscapes.
The big-versus-small format is also key to Andre Hemstedt and Tine Reimer’s portraits, in which expressionless young people seem to audition for a place on a Kraftwerk album cover, and color aspires to black-and-white. The latter tendency is pushed to abstraction in Stephen Tillmans’ ”Luminant Point Arrays,” which capture the patterns made by CRT televisions at the instant they’re switched off. These pictures, with their deep blacks and bluish and pinkish whites, are real images of artificial phenomena, and are mounted under heavy glass to more closely resemble TV sets. Clever and impeccably realized, Tillmans’ photos are coldly beautiful, but reductive to a fault.
(Courtesy Andre Hemstedt and Tine Reimer/Goethe-Institut Washington) - HANDOUT: Andre Hemstedt and Tine Reimer, \"Constructing Motion,\" 2010, on view at the Goethe-Institut's \"gute aussichten\" photo exhibit.
Still all aglow
As digital photography burgeoned, the death of Kodak’s best-loved color film was inevitable. To longtime users’ chagrin, the last roll of Kodachrome was developed in January of this year. “Kodachrome,” at Glen Echo Park’s Photoworks gallery, is a wake for the color film professional photographers consider the sharpest ever made. Naturally, it’s a brightly hued one.
The first photo in the exhibition shows what Kodachrome could do: Frank van Riper’s “Uptown” is a long-exposure, sharply angled shot of the cinema’s marquee, whose glow seems to be turning the whole world red. Other pictures showcase vivid blue skies, a goldfish in a plush white casket, dark green cactus fronds in front of a bright red trailer and — in the closest thing to an abstract image — a slash of red in one of Michael Horsley’s close-ups of the Joyce Motors garage.
Not all these images are labeled with dates, but they reach back at least as far as 1967. Many were taken overseas, with Paris and Moscow — not among the world’s more sunlight-dappled cities — the most frequent international climes. Joanne Miller’s “St. Basil’s Cathedral” views the illuminated, onion-domed Moscow landmark at night and in the deep background, framed through a window. This witty composition reveals that Kodachrome was as well suited to chiaroscuro as to vivid primary colors.
Mark Jenkins is a freelance writer.
Photo 11
On view through Sept. 11 at Artisphere, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. 703-875-1100. www.artisphere.com.
Gute Aussichten: New German Photography
On view through Sept. 2 at Goethe-Institut, 812 Seventh Street NW. 202-289-1200. www.goethe.de/
ins/us/was/enindex.htm.
Kodachrome
On view through Sept. 18 at Glen Echo Park Photowork, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. 301-634-2274. www.glenechophotoworks.org.
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