Leslie is off to points West and I’m spending a few days in New York City. I devoted some time to making the big museum circuit and have to call out a few interesting things.

At the Met, I checked out Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan.

Depth of Field was a broad selection works by moders photographers including Cindy Sherman, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Rineke Dijkstra, Adam Fuss and Thomas Ruff. I always enjoy the Bechers’ typological arrays, in this case 20 water tanks. In a very different vein was Adam Fuss’ giant photogram titled Now! of water being poured over photographic paper during exposure. It looked like a landcsape and an abstraction at the same time, and had detail you could get lost in for days. Taking up a large wall at the end of the gallery was Thomas Ruff’s Jpeg ny02, a tremendously enlarged JPEG image of the destruction of the World Trade Centers on Sept. 11, 2001. The scale of the piece makes all the artifacts of the JPEG compression clearly visible and forces you to squint and step back and forth to try and focus the image.

Also on view at the Met is Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks, which is worthy of a post all its own, but not today.

A few short blocks uptown I found myself at the Whitney Museum, currently in the throes of its Biennial. I dodged the crowds and made for the permanent collection on the top floor, where I’m always happy to view paintings by Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. I lucked into small show of Demuth called Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster. Although some seem to take a Freudian view of Demuth’s chimney compositions, I like to view them alongside the Bechers’ work, as documents of a type. Also interesting, I saw some of Demuth’s sketchbooks and learned that the prismatic lines that cut across his paintings appear more or less fully realized in the sketches, and were actually incised in the fiberboard he painted on.

A mile or two downtown, not far from the NY Public Library, lies ICP, currently showing The Collections of Barbara Bloom and Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Bloom’s work is hard to categorize, and is a good example of ICP stretching the bounds of “photography.” ICP presents a retrospective of Bloom’s multi-media work and archives of indescribable paraphenalia, much of it stamped with her name, logo or likeness. Downstairs has been completely taken over by Archive Fever, which I will describe by way of quoting ICP’s web site:

Organized by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art will present works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists’ shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You have to see it - experience it - to understand.

To make a long story longer, I have to note that big museums, like verything else in NYC, are far from cheap. The Met suggests a donation of $20 (although you can get in for less if you don’t mind a dirty look), the Whitney’s rate is $15 (includes free audioguide to the Biennail - you’ll need it), and ICP comes in looking cheap at $12. But, members of the Photographic Resource Center and other allied institutions can get in to ICP at the low price of zero, thanks to the little-known Connections Program.

Free admission for Connections members can be had at ICP, The George Eastman House, The Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. Additional benefits are available at the rest of the 20 or so member institutions. I’d say that’s quite a deal.