More recently, Mattis
obtained a 1925 print of Weston’s Pear-Shaped Nude. The image shows a nude woman
from the rear, her head bent over, her body suggesting a ripe pear or a gourd.
Mattis thinks of it as Weston’s first fruit and vegetable still life—taken four
years before he began his series on peppers. In his Daybooks, Weston himself
called it “one of my most perfect photographs,” and Mattis had patiently
negotiated for more than three years with the model’s family, finally convincing
them to part with it.Mattis also collects lesser-known 20th-century
photographers, among them Larry Fink, an artist he considers hugely undervalued
and ripe for a revival of attention. Photographers from the 1960s and 1970s such
as Fink, Todd Papageorge and Frank Gohlke are, in Mattis’s estimation, among the
best of the postwar street photographers who have not achieved the fame of Arbus
or Eggleston—yet. Fink and Papageorge, not to mention Robert Frank, captured the
gestures of ordinary people in images with broad sociological sweep.
Photographers such as Richard Misrach, Joel Sternfeld and Mitch Epstein, who
began working in color in the 1970s, located the harmony and beauty in the
mundane and pedestrian and established the particular visual poetry of color
photography. As the flurry of winter exhibitions in New York showcasing this
work suggests, these artists are attracting more interest as well.
According
to Shelbyville, Ind., dealer Lee Marks, the show Taken by Design: Photographs
from the Institute of Design in 2002 at Chicago’s Art Institute brought renewed
attention to people such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Art Sinsabaugh,
postwar photographers who combined an experimental and documentary approach.
“There are people left to be discovered,” says Marks. “Not too many, it seems,
but there are some photographers who have not been given their due, and people
are recognizing them.”
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