At the M + B Gallery in Los Angeles, a new exhibit by Joseph Szabo:
MARCH 10 – APRIL 14 , 2007

TEENAGE

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© Joseph Szabo – Priscilla

How did you react to seeing a very young girl with a defiant cigarette in her mouth ?

If you can’t make it, check out the image gallery..

Ahhh the power of the internet allowing a global showing.

Now Larry Clark looked at a more brutal side of this coin, but Joseph Szabo captured this reflective time capsule in a more accessible and more timeless manner than you imagine

From the release:
M+B is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of work by renowned photographer Joseph Szabo in Los Angeles. As a high school teacher on Long Island, New York for more than two decades, Szabo used his rare gift for capturing the spirit of his students at Malverne High School perched precariously between puberty and adulthood–no longer children, but not quite adults. For 25 years he recorded their sensitivity, pretensions, passions and confusion in this series of extraordinary images. Taken in the seventies and eighties, these photographs represent a remarkable evocation of that period, and yet there remains something timeless and compelling about Szabo’s portrait of the almost grown.

The backdrops for Szabo’s photographs are hallways, classrooms and the parking lots of High School. Some of his subjects are sweetly self-conscious, whilst others are self-assured beyond their years. Szabo captures the pathological significance of clothes, the stylistic necessity of cigarettes, the heavy mascara, the convertibles, the longing, the blossoming sexuality, the confusion and the time spent just doing nothing. Szabo has no agenda, and the fine line between intimacy and exploitation that other photographers sometimes approach is simply not in evidence.

Szabo’s first book Almost Grown published in 1978 by Harmony House was acclaimed by the American Library association. The book faded somewhat into obscurity until it became a cult classic amongst a generation of young British and American fashion photographers and film directors, including Sophia Coppola and Cameron Crowe. In 2003, Greybull Press re-made and expanded his earlier book as Teenage , which is a poignant chronicle of Szabo’s work spanning two decades and includes an introduction by Crowe.

JOSEPH SZABO TEENAGE

M+B Gallery
612 NORTH ALMONT DRIVE
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90069
TEL 310 550 0050
FAX 310 550 0605
TUE-SAT 10-5

And for our friends in Detroit:
Ansel Adams
@The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), one of the premier art museums in the United States

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© Ansel Adams

March 4 – May 27, 2007

From the release:
The DIA presents more than 100 black and white photographs made by Ansel Adams throughout the course of his career featuring familiar images and others that are little known and extremely rare. Included are early works from Yosemite ca.1917, soft-focus and romantic Pictorialist photographs from the 1920s (including his first serious landscape series, photographs of Pueblo Indians, and mountain views of the Canadian Rockies), large-format photographs from the 1930s, and Western landscapes of the 1930s through the 1960s. Lesser known works featuring urban and architectural views as well as portraits of his friends Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, and Edward Weston are also included. This is a ticketed exhibition. For ticket information call the DIA Box Office at 313.833.4005.

There you go. A couple of things to do this weekend.

Meanwhile we will be on the floor at PMA , looking for the best of the new tools to make you the next featured artist.

Cheers!
Damon Webster