Contrasto Publishing is the editor of New York Over the Top, Max Kozloff’s first photographic monograph, introduction by Marvin Heiferman (Contrasto, 2013). A collection of 20 color prints, drawn from over 35 years of Kozloff’s New York photography, will be exhibited at Steven Kasher gallery until de end of October. The Art Institute of Chicago is also preparing an exhibition: Max Kozloff: Critic and Photographer, running October 5th through January 5th.
Max Kozloff walks down the streets of New York and offers to the viewer his pearticuliar vision of a colorful, multi-ethnic, and multi-faceted city. A series of pictures that can surprise and drive the viewer in a curious path in one of the most photographed places in the world.
Kozloff photographs his fellow citizens with an urban eye. He does not see them as legendary creatures, but he often makes them out to be fabulous presences, glimpsed at carnivals and festivals. He is especially enchanted with that he has called “the music of faces”, a spectrum of moods at variance with the consumerism or ethnicity of circumstance. Statues, effigies, or teddy bears seem to offer internal witness to what he calls New York Over the Top.
Repetitive forms appear and sweep across these pictures in waves: decorative patterns created by fences and barriers; the syncopated angles of the elbows and knees of those who walk by, crowd together, or stand in place; the stripes on a pair of pants. ‘Color for me,’ Kozloff has explained, ‘is a form of tenderness.’ And so, paradoxically, while high-key chromatics spark much of this work, it is an unexpected gentleness that clings to and distinguishes these sneaky complex photographs.
Text: Contrasto.
Credits of the book
Publisher.- Contrasto Publishing.
Size.- 28 × 21.6 cm.
Pages.- 100 pages.
Hardcover
ISBN.- 978-8869653995
Exhibition
Place.- Steven Kasher Gallery - 521 West 23rd Street. New York, NY 10011.
Date.- From 12th September to 19th October 2013.
