{exposition}
Ethan Levitas
Photography in The New Yorker

15 Avril-10 Juin 2012

“Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker” is an exhibition of more than one hundred works by some 65 photographers from across the globe. Although the photographs have been gathered from a wide range of sources – including studios, galleries, archives, and private collections – and range chronologically from 1890 to 2010, every image was published in The New Yorker between 1992 and 2010, a formative period in the magazine’s history. The work in this exhibition was selected by co-curators Elisabeth Biondi and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz exclusively for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Founded in 1925, The New Yorker magazine began to publish full-page photographs in 1992, with Richard Avedon’s iconic 1963 portrait of Malcolm X. This first example set a particular standard for how the medium of photography would evolve in this illustrious and informed weekly magazine. In the beginning, only a small group of photographers were commissioned to shoot on a regular basis, including Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Mary Ellen Mark, Gilles Peress, and Robert Polidori. The New Yorker eventually gathered a more diverse community of practitioners, including journalists such as Lynsey Addario, Carl de Keyzer, Benjamin Lowy, Samantha Appleton, and Ian Teh. Later, contemporary artists like Juergen Teller, Kahn + Selesnick, and Weng Fen joined the mix. Archival material was periodically interspersed with photographic series and essays, while the magazine’s esoteric approach to portraiture became established through the work of photographers like Ruven Afanador, Duane Michaels, Platon, Brigitte Lacomb, and Mark Leong, among others.

While photographs have heightened the reading experience for which the magazine is respected and treasured, they also have presented themselves as independent sources of information and inspiration, above and beyond that offered by the words on the page. As the source and genres of the magazine’s photography diversified, its role became progressively more idiosyncratic and potent, at once an illustrative medium of support for the articles and an independent medium for art. In a similarly collaborative fashion, the co-curators of this exhibition are both known for their work as publication editors, yet they come from different professional disciplines: Elisabeth Biondi from journalism as a 15-year veteran of The New Yorker and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz from art as a founding editor of the photographic quarterly Fantom.

As a result of this characteristic diversity and evolution, “Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker” is an exhibition experience in which each photograph enjoys the ability to stand alone and at the same time in consort. By extension, each photographer’s point of view is reinterpreted in the process of being viewed by UCCA’s unique audience.


ill.: Ethan Levitas, Cai Guo-Qiang (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2006)


http://www.ucca.org.cn/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2037&Itemid=39&lang=en


Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
798 Art District
No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu
Chaoyang District
100015 Beijing
China

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art