Soho Photo Relocates Again, This Time to Chelsea, and First Exhibition There Is Aptly Titled: ‘Move/Moving/Movement’

Soho Photo, a cooperative gallery dedicated to the art of photography, hasn’t been in Soho for more than half a century. The venue got up-and-running in 1971, squared away in a loft at the intersection of Prince Street and West Broadway. This was back when the area south of Houston Street was populated by — no, not high-end hotels, luxury boutiques, and scads of tourists but struggling artists, scrappy galleries, and bars offering bottomless libations that didn’t cost an arm-and-a-leg.Soho Photo moved out of Soho a year after its establishment for reasons less related to the vagaries of real estate, as one might expect, than to photographers taking out their checkbooks: Membership skyrocketed and additional exhibition space proved a necessity. The gallery packed its bags, moved to 13th Street, and spent five years at Greenwich Village advocating on behalf of photographers the world over. The need for more walls warranted another move, this time to a cavernous, old-school Tribeca venue that had once been an egg storage facility.After 45 years on White Street, Soho Photo is on the trail again, traveling uptown and going new-school in the process — to the extent that the Chelsea area of Manhattan remains a hub of the international art market. The soon-to-be-opened gallery on West 23rd Street is sleeker than the old digs, and you’d best believe the jerry-rigged charm of the White Street space will be missed. What, a regular visitor can’t help but wonder, will be the fate of its fabled restroom?The debut exhibition at Chelsea, aptly titled “Move/Moving/Movement,” retains Soho Photo’s promise to provide a forum where “serious photographers could exhibit their personal work and exchange ideas, learn and grow as artists.” The members of the cooperative are a scrappy lot, having strained their backs plastering, painting, and otherwise putting together the new venue over the past few months. The gallery scene is often perceived, and not without reason, as crass and commercial. Labors of love are few-and-far-between. Soho Photo is one of them. Randy Matusow, ‘Untitled.’ Via the artist and Soho PhotoWhich isn’t to say that the photos aren’t for sale. Organized by a veteran curator and photography consultant, Julie Grahame, “Move/Moving/Movement” includes one work each from the gallery’s 80-some members. As might be expected of a medium that’s undergone notable convolutions since its advent in the early 19th century, the exhibition is as manifold in technique as it is in vision. The digital era is present and accounted for, as are “alternative processes,” but so, too, are traditional, point-and-shoot methodologies. A mixed bag is guaranteed.As a result, the surreal bumps up regularly against the documentary, as in an introductory gallery where pictures of subway riders, the Cyclone, and other New York City vignettes are juxtaposed with blurs of movement, half-glimpsed scenarios that take hold of the ephemeral. Case in point: an untitled black-and-white photo by Randy Matusow in which two children — or, perhaps, the same child framed at separate moments in time — traverse what looks to be a museum of contemporary art. Superimposed reflections of nature as seen from outside add to the ghostly ambiance.Elsewhere, Elliot Schildkrout channels 19th-century exoticism in picturing the bizarre environs of a “Cambodian Circus,” while Laura Dodson navigates an aquatic dreamworld, at once fairy tale and midnight reverie, in which the Manhattan skyline appears as an omen hovering over a child’s bicycle. Water and childhood also figure into Nathalie Rubin’s “Floating,” wherein an adolescent girl is caught in a meditative mood, mesmerized by a drift of bubbles.Nathalie Rubens, ‘Floating.’ Via the artist and Soho PhotoHumor is also in the house. Neil Lawner’s “Gravity Defying Fish (And Hair)” is a delightful confluence of natural phenomena — it’s the kind of thing Henri Cartier-Bresson dubbed a “decisive moment” — while Norm Borden’s “Moving” juxtaposes the glamorous and the mundane with the concision of a New Yorker cartoon. Nature’s resplendence is honored — in terms of process, most enigmatically in Laurie Peek’s gritty and ambiguous “For Mary” — as is the human form, whether it be in the angular contortions of Michael Miller’s “Breaking Good” or the ruminative poetry of Bruce Hooke’s Magrittean paean to aging flesh, “Crossing Over.”Evidence of “the transformative magic of a lens” is in ample abundance on West 23rd Street. New Yorkers will likely need more than one visit to glean the peculiarities and pleasures of “Move/Moving/Movement.”“Move/Moving/Movement” opens on April 17 with an opening reception between 6 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. Soho Photo, 539 W. 23rd St., Manhattan.

Soho Photo Relocates Again, This Time to Chelsea, and First Exhibition There Is Aptly Titled: ‘Move/Moving/Movement’

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