Spinning (Winter, from a series) / Girando (Invierno, de una serie), 1974. Thirty black and white gelatin silver prints mounted on museum board 26 x 32 in.
Natural History at Henrique Faria Fine Art
A small, exquisite exhibition of vintage photographs from the 1970s by Leandro Katz affords us a view of this little-known body of work. The artist’s small gelatin silver prints feature a series of trees, waterfalls, and alphabet constructed with images of the moon. Katz’s photographic investigations are informed by his interest in man’s interaction with and perception of the natural environment. The title for the exhibition, Natural History, is an explicit reference to Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedic work on geography and natural phenomena.
Spinning 1 (Fall), Spinning 2 (Winter), Spinning 3 (Spring), Spinning 4 (Summer), all from 1972-1973, are the earliest works on view at Henrique Faria Fine Art. The series features thirty-six images taken while the artist moved—as if spinning— under the trees with his camera pointed at the treetops, capturing glimpses of the cloud formations and light in different seasons. The Spinning series, together with other photographs, effectively produces a certain spatial disorientation, effected, in this instance, by the radically up tilted view. Following Fall and Winter, Katz began time-lapse photographs of small waterfalls that he looked for on the back roads in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. In places no longer remembered, with the guidance of maps that are no longer in his archive, he photographed Indian Falls (10 seconds) of 1973 (Ill. 2), Diagonal Falls / La Caída Diagonal of 1976 (Ill. 3), and The Fall (23 seconds) / La Caída (23 segundos) of 1975 (Ill. 4).
Indian Falls (10 seconds) / Caída del Indio (10 segundos), 1973. Nine silver gelatin prints, 26 x 37 in. each (66.3 x 94 cm cada una)
Diagonal Falls / Caída en Diagonal, 1976. Nine silver gelatin prints, 32 x 40 in. overall, unframed (81 x 102 cm).
The earlier photographs feature ten shots of the same view taken every second for ten seconds, and the later ones, the same view taken every second for twenty-three seconds. In addition to locating sites suitable for his photographic purposes, the artist’s central concerns were expressed through the second-by-second sequencing that challenges the viewer to grasp the almost imperceptible changes in the movement of water captured in each frame.
Katz was clearly not inspired by the majestic falls of Niagara or Iguazu, on the border of Argentina and Brazil, or even Tequendama, in Colombia, which in the 19th-century attracted both North and South American landscape artists. If we fast-forward, we recognize the differences between Katz’s encapsulation of an immediate experience in a private area and Olafur Eliasson’s grand, public art project of 2008, New York City Waterfalls. In contrast, Katz attempted to capture, in sequenced shots, a small body of water measurable in human scale, proportionate in size to its particular setting, and in constant flux like life itself.
The quiet, almost deadpan approach to photographing falls over a short sequence of time has an almost mesmerizing effect on the viewer. Subtle differences from print to print are enlivened by the compositional design in which they are mounted: some in circles, The Fall (4-second circle) / La Caída (4 segundos en círculo) of 1977 (Ill. 5); others in stepped sequences, Jungle Falls / Caida en la Selva of 1978 (Ill. 6); others, such as The Fall (6-second diagonals) / La Caída (6 segundos en diagonals), of 1977. [Ill. 7]
The Fall (23 seconds) / La Caída (23 segundos), 1975. Twenty-three silver gelatin photographs individually mounted on museum and then mounted on four museum board panels, 38 x 33 in. each panel (96.5 x 84 cm cada panel).
The Fall (4-second circle) / La Caida (4 segundos en cículo), 1977. Silver gelatin print, 32 x 32 in. (82 x 82 cm)
Jungle Falls/ La Caída en la Selva, 1978. Thirty-two silver gelatin photographs individually mounted on museum board and then mounted on three panels; 41 x 27 in. each panel (104 x 68.6 cm cada panel).
The Fall (6-second diagonals / La Caída (6 second diagonals), 1977. Silver gelatin print, 26 x 37 in. (66 x 94 cm)
The better-known works in this selection include the photographs from the Lunar Alphabets series: The Genitive Eye, 1978-79 (Ill. 8); Phrase #2 - A Bellshaped Conjecture / Frase #2 - Una conjectura en forma de campana (Ill. 9); and White Rushes Tied to a Cluster of Mulberry Shoots / Oración #2, Juncos blancos atados a un mano de brotes de mora, both of 1979 (Ill. 10); and three studies. The project began in 1976 with two films and continued into the mid-1980s with photographs, drawings, and installations. The photographs here feature phases of the moon in horizontal lines like phrases or sentences punctuated by a hyphen and/or a period, as in The Genitive Eye or paired with twenty-seven letters, including an ñ from the Spanish alphabet, as in the three studies. The work is informed by Precolumbian art and history, semiotics, and film. The structure of language defined by a lunar vocabulary strikes us as being at once both familiar and unfamiliar, and alternately near and far. Katz has successfully carried forward the Duchampian legacy, which in part takes a common, everyday object out of its familiar context and makes it something more.
We look forward to becoming acquainted with more photographs from the 1970s in Katz's archive, so we can better contextualize his art in that decade.
The Genitve Eye, 1978-1979. Silver gelatin prints from a series.
Phrase #2 - A Bellshaped Conjecture / Frase #2 – Una conjectura en forma de campana, 1979. Silver gelatin prints, 21 x 33 in. (53 x 84 cm).
Sentence #2 - White Rushes Tied to a Cluster of Mulberry Shoots / Oracíon #2 – Juncos blancos atados a un ramo de brotes de mora, 1979. Silver gelatin prints, 28 ½ x 42 ½ in. each (73 x 108 cm cada una).
Julia P. Herzberg©
The review of Natural History was posted online: Leandro Katz, Arte al día Internacional, (2010).
Courtesy of Henrique Faria New York and the artist.
Photographs © the artist.
Artist’s website http://www.leandrokatz.com