Summer Shows: Asako Narahashi, ‘The Good Life’

Yossi Milo’s current exhibition, “Asako Narahashi: half awake and half asleep in the water,” is an appropriately refreshing summertime show. As the title implies, a large part of each of the nine C-prints on display is taken up by water.Ms. Narahashi (b. 1959 in Tokyo) uses a commonplace Nikonos 35 mm waterproof camera and a set procedure. She floats chest deep in the waters of inland lakes or off the coast of Japan with the camera pointed toward the shore and shoots without using the viewfinder. There is, therefore, a good deal of serendipity involved in the resulting images, but also a fairly determined format. The bottom of each picture is taken up with water, the top with sky, and in between a glimpse of something solid. The prints in “half awake and half asleep in the water” are 35 by 53 inches, large enough so that at a comfortable viewing distance the viewer can imagine himself in the water with the photographer. Ms. Narahashi’s achievement is in the variety she realizes using this relatively simplistic technique.The water, for instance, changes its color and configuration from picture to picture. In “Zeze” (2005) the water is dark and seems adamantine; it swells up in a mound that towers over the photographer. The sky is a clear, pale blue, and to the left, through a trough in the water, is a bit of shore: some low buildings, one tall building, and a range of mountains in the distance. The water in “Iwasehama” (2004) is a deep green and calm. The sky above is again a cloudless blue, but to the left and right are the rocks of a breakwater, and on the horizon beyond a gap in the breakwater float five tankers. Floating on the water on either side of the picture is a bather in a colorful inflated tube.In “Kawaguchiko” (2003) the lake water is dark, dark blue, and the light playing off of it and off the drops on the camera lens creates a random array of bright white spots. Rising on shore in the distance is snowcapped Mt. Fuji, a perpetual subject of Japanese art, emblematic of eternal beauty. To the right of the image, a small segment of a bridge is just visible, testifying to the presence of man and his alterations to the natural world. In each of Ms. Narahashi’s pictures the water and sky are elemental, although both are in motion, constantly shifting. The man-made objects that litter her horizons seem more stable, but we know in the fullness of time the restless sea and the sky will still be there when the buildings and bridges are gone.The exhibition at Yancey Richardson, “The Good Life,” is another seasonal show. Of the 22 pictures in Richardson’s, seven are of activities involving water and another six are of people enjoying the outdoors in short-sleeved shirts. This is a group show, presenting many photographers looking at many people’s ideas of “The Good Life.” Slim Aarons is known for his pictures of celebrities enjoying themselves in plush surroundings. He is represented at Richardson by a comic image of the film producer Kevin McClory taking his wife, Bobo Segrist, and their family for a drive in an “Amphicar” across the harbor at Nassau (1967). The amphibious, red, convertible-like vehicle looks like it should sink, but there it is, scooting across the pale blue Bahamian water leaving a wake, McClory nonchalant behind the steering wheel, and Segrist sitting regally under a pink umbrella with three children in back.Photographer Marin Parr may be the most incisive sociologist in Britain.; his pictures do for his contemporaries what Dickens’s novels did for the Victorians. In “Ascot,” from the series “Think of England” (1995-99), the head of a man wearing a pale gray top hat is seen in profile while lower in the picture his hand is pouring Champagne into two flutes. He has a supercilious smile on his face. Behind him sits a woman in a very short pale blue pleated skirt with her knees crossed, a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other. We cannot see her face, which is hidden behind a wide-brimmed magenta hat, but the magenta hat seems to tell us all we need to know about her. Mr. Parr lets us see these are people of means, smartly turned out, but insubstantial.Tina Barney is another great social commentator, in whose meticulously put together images there is never anything superfluous. In “The Ancestor” (2001) a middle-age man of aristocratic European bearing stands at the head of a dinner table in a formal room dominated at one end by the full-length portrait of a forbearer. Behind him, his butler or valet stands in attendance. A bourgeois family would be embarrassed by the shabby leather on the dining chairs and would have had it replaced, but the man in the picture rests his left hand possessively on the back of one of the chairs. He knows how many generations it took to achieve that worn patina. As always with Ms. Barney, her deft handling of light is a story in itself.Lars Tunbjörk’s Scandinavians drink from a floating table in “Midsommar, Rattvik” (1988). Bill Owens determinedly middle-class suburbanites get ready to grill steak on the patio in a picture from his 1970s series on Livermore, Calif. Two sad old guys drink coffee and eat Dunkin’ Donuts while watching naked tootsies on television in David Hilliard’s “Hot Coffee, Soft Porn” (1999). For some, “The Good Life” is a better deal than for others.“Asako Narahashi: half awake and half asleep in the water” at the Yossi Milo Gallery until August 22 (525 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-414-0371).“The Good Life” at the Yancey Richardson Gallery until August 22 (535 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 646-230-9610).

Summer Shows: Asako Narahashi, ‘The Good Life’

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