Art Review | Every Picture Telling Stories
Rare Photography Survey at Sullivan Goss Eyes the Human and Celebrity Condition
Sullivan Goss recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, marking a noble and highly notable life as an important West Coast gallery. From its reliable perch on Anapamu, launched by Patricia Sullivan Goss and her husband, Frank Goss — originally with a delightful café attached — and now run by owner Nathan Vonk, the gallery has become a staple cultural fixture and model of how to “gallery” (as a verb).
Although its staple artforms and stable of fine artists revolve around the classic arts of painting and sculpture, photography is having a showcase moment in the space, for the first time in nearly two decades. Fittingly, the exhibition on the power of photography is more of a friendly and broadly spun survey than a crisply focused affair.
Welcome to the world of photography of Los Angeleno collector and dealer Peter Fetterman, from whose vast collection of images this show is drawn. Rather than veer off into more abstract or esoteric corners of the medium, this affable and historic selection deals primarily in human and celebrity landscapes, generally delighting more in stolen moments than aesthetic imagination.
Visual sight-gagging specialist Elliott Erwitt livens up the mix with his 1956 image “California Kiss,” a romantic image with an optical twist: A couple parked at the beach are seen delivering the kiss in question, but only as espied in the car’s rearview mirror.
Musical stars are aligned in the show, from different eras and genres. Andrew Kent’s “David Bowie — the Thin White Duke” (1976) evocatively captures the majestic pop artist in his “duke” period, cutting a lean figure in a backlit scene, silhouetted in nocturnal ambience. Famed jazz photographer Herman Leonard represents Bowie with a clever scene within a scene, view Ella Fitzgerald from a club-stage-eye-view, in the adoring gaze of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman in the front row.
A timely Bob Dylan moment — amidst the hoopla of the biopic A Complete Unknown — shows up in the form of Don Hunstein’s extremely well-known image “Bob Dylan and Suze,” better known as the cover shot of Dylan’s iconic career-launching The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album. In another Dylan reference, once or twice removed, Santa Barbaran turned New York art icon Edie Sedgwick — a sometimes Dylan female interest, but mostly Andy Warhol “factory girl” — appears in all her lean, airy glory in Burt Glinn’s “Andy Warhol with Edie Sedgwick and Chuck Wein.” The catch: Warhol appears as if emerging from a manhole in an N.Y.C. street, literally a man in the street, flanked by the beautiful people factor of his models/props.
The mostly black-and-white exhibition briefly dips into the realm of vivid and living color in a medium that didn’t accept color photography as art until the 1970s. A rainbow palette of fashion models becomes the centerpiece in Corman Gigli’s large print “Models in the Windows” (reminiscent of the urban building window matrix of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti cover) and color itself, as designated by shimmering fashion designs, speckles and percolates in Sabine Weiss’s “Yves Saint Laurent, Premiere Dior Collection.”
By contrast, faint notes of minimalist subtlety wriggle into the glitzy and fun-loving survey, if briefly. Famed photographer Paul Caponigro’s “Two Pears” is a mutedly luminous still life study in dark/light visuals. Similarly, the balance of light and dark informs George Tice’s “Country Road, Lancaster, PA” (1961), one of the quietest and deepest images in the gallery. Tice creates a sense of visual poetry in an image of a lonely Pennsylvania road, its fuzzy light swipe of winding road and a bulbous vintage car enveloped in moody dark tones.
My humble conclusion: Photography, a medium that has had a checkered history of committed Santa Barbaran gallery spaces over the decades, plays well in this space. More, please.
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