Out of the Books, Onto the Walls at Cohen Amador

Photo books are Paul Amador’s first love, so he organized the Cohen Amador Gallery’s summertime group show to reflect his enthusiasm. “Original Books” features the prints of five contemporary photographers, taken from recent books of their work. The photographers come from five different countries, and in most cases they took their pictures in what for them were foreign countries. But one thing their books have in common is that all five are currently out of print, a testament to their success.Morten Andersen was born in Oslo in 1965, but the cities pictured in his book, “Days of Night,” are New York (where he studied at ICP) and Tokyo. Actually, the city in the book is more a generic end-of-the-20th-century international urban environment than any one particular place, and it could just as well be a movie set as a real city. There is a distinct film noir cast to the six pictures by Mr. Andersen that are on display at Cohen Amador, and the title of his book alludes to the “day for night” filter used in the early days of filmmaking that made it possible for a nighttime scene to be shot during the day. The pictures, identified by number rather than title, are very stylish, ambiguous, and fraught with foreboding.Like all the prints in the gallery, Mr. Andersen’s “#25” is black-and-white; it is a grainy portrait of a white, mid-’60s Coupe de Ville, which emerges as a sculptural form from a totally black background, as if a Cadillac was all that was necessary to make a world. “#38” was shot in a subway station with the camera close to the ground, so it is sighted along the legs of a man lying on the platform, possibly drunk, possibly dead, or maybe just sleeping. “#40” was shot over the heads of two pigtailed Japanese girls looking down from a high window onto a scene of massed, anonymous, modern office buildings. The girls wear school uniforms with sailor-style collars, and this playful touch of innocence sets up a tension with the banal architecture.The sites from Gabriele Basilico’s book “Porti di mare” (1990) are presented in his six magnificent prints with great specificity. Mr. Basilico (born 1944) trained as an architect, and has an Italian’s sense of the relationship between natural and built environments. In 1984-85, he photographed landscapes and cityscapes of the coastal towns of Northern France for the regional planning authority that was investigating geographic identity and change. The studies Mr. Basilico provided them with are not routine documentaries, but beautifully poised works of art.“Dunkerque” (1984) has the clarity of a painting by Canaletto, although the buildings are typical of the North. The stark, frontally lit brick façades of warehouses, some of them painted white, are seen across a wide expanse of cobbled street. A set of railroad or trolley tracks runs across the bottom of the image, parallel with the frame. No people disturb the aura of quiet, calm, and orderliness. In “Boulogne Sur Mer” (1984), the bathers and surfers on the beach in the foreground are set against the silhouette of an industrial complex on the horizon, and all of it exists under the massive cover of lowering clouds that take up the upper two-thirds of the image. The hull of a ship in a dry dock becomes part of a refined abstract composition in “Le Havre” (1984).Like Morten Andersen’s “Days of Night,” Jens Liebchen’s “DL 07 Stereotypes of War: A Photographic Investigation” means to subvert the reputation of photographic images for truthfulness. Whereas Mr. Andersen relies on ambiguity and innuendo, Mr. Liebchen resorts to outright falsification. Or, at any rate, he sets up the viewer to misinterpret his images, which was what I did when I first saw them. The pictures appear to be reportage from a war zone — they could easily be passed off as photojournalism from Russia’s incursion into Georgia last week — but, in fact, Mr. Liebchen took them in Tirana, the capital of Albania, a city at peace.Mr. Liebchen was born in Bonn in 1970; that is to say, in a Germany still divided by the dynamic of the Cold War. He must have grown up with the notion that all the world is a field of combat. For instance, the picture that is labeled “002” shows an unremarkable, shabby, two-story concrete building with some construction scraps in back, but the presence of a helicopter hovering in the sky above the building is ominous. If you think the picture was taken by a combat photographer, the supposition is that it is a military helicopter, possibly on the prowl for targets to attack. If you know the picture was taken by a tourist in Tirana, then the chances are that the helicopter is civilian and benign.There are visual tropes that recur as our contemporary images of war, and Mr. Liebchen skillfully exploits them. Picture “007” incorporates a commonplace cliché; a neighborhood is seen through the shattered windshield of a car. The meaning of the picture depends on how you think the windshield was shattered. There are two teenage boys in “017,” one staring angrily at the camera, the other seen only from the neck down holding a machine gun. But look carefully and you notice the gun is a toy, and therefore the boys are not juvenile militiamen. The point of “DL 07 Stereotypes of War” seems to be that war is so ubiquitous, the pictures from one conflict are pretty much interchangeable with those of most others. In some ways, Mr. Liebchen’s work is more terrifying than pictures of actual warfare.“Original Books” also has up prints from John Gossage’s “There and Gone,” and from Keizo Kitajima’s “A.D. 1991.”Until September 6 (41 E. 57th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-759-6740).

Out of the Books, Onto the Walls at Cohen Amador

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