A series of Hugh Bell photographs, now on display at the Soho Photo Gallery, shows us great jazz musicians caught in moments of silence. Billie Holiday stands in her dressing room, squinting and holding a cigarette. Charlie Parker holds onto his saxophone and looks mournfully into the distance. These are intimate moments. The musicians here are not sacred figures but simply people, engaged in the business of living. One photo in particular stands out. Thelonious Monk sits at his piano in a cap and jacket, his face totally focused. But the photo cuts off the piano. All we can see is Monk from the shoulders up, so that he looks, really, like any working man concentrating on the task at hand.
If Bell’s exhibit shows us musicians without music, the David Monderer exhibit (downstairs at the same gallery) shows us New York City buildings without people. It’s not easy to take pictures of tenements. New York’s streets are too narrow to allow long camera shots, and the constant traffic obstructs our view. Monderer resolves this by taking a series of photographs and creating a composite picture of an unobstructed building. The results are striking. It’s not often that we look at New York buildings in isolation, the way we might look at a mountain, or a waterfall. Monderer’s pictures are a treat because they force us to see things in a new way: By largely removing these buildings from the teeming city all around them, he forces us to ignore the forest for the trees.
“99 East Broadway, New York, NY,” by David Monderer.
There are two other newly mounted shows at Soho Photo. Flying Eggplant Number 5 is a whimsical, rather endearing series by Richard Gardner. At Auschwitz: A Remembrance (by Wayne Parsons) is a set of moving, almost mundane pictures from the infamous camp. There are shots of empty gas canisters, a railroad tie from the platform where prisoners were sent on to their deaths. Some of the pictures remind us forcibly that Auschwitz is now a museum; one photo is captioned “sign indicating emergency exit for tourists at Auschwitz.” And so the story evolves.
Through July 3, Soho Photo Gallery, 15 White St., 212-226-8571.
