Passing through

Saw a few interesting exhibits at the New York Public Library recently. Went primarily for Treasured Maps, which had about 50 maps spanning the last few hundred years. It's always neat looking at maps, and imagining what it'd have been like to live in the time period and space depicted.

Outside the exhibit was a smaller one, New York Street Photography. There wasn't much of a curatorial element to this one, which literally was hung in the hallway; but more so than the maps, a few images really stuck in my mind. Unfortunately, the library's website has hardly any of them....

I have no idea what the story is behind the interracial couple walking around the zoo with their chimpanzees; based on the exhibit, I concluded Garry Winogrand just has a knack for being in the right place at the right time, and knowing it. His photos jump out at you in person, if you look at them--it's a quality hard to capture online or in books. There's always something unexpected going on, sometimes more obvious than other, often something that makes you smile, and/or brings to mind something socially relevant.

I also liked the works of Joel Meyerowitz, of whose exhibited photos the library's website says "share a similar irony with Winogrand’s work from the same period". His seemed a bit more stagey, not in the sense they're not authentic, but there's an almost-composed quality to them. He strikes me as someone who'd wait for hours to get just the right light and angle and confluence of events. I liked his New Year's Eve, NYC (Kiss Me Stupid), 1965 photo, and his photo of a woman outside Rockefeller Center, taken in 1970.

Afterwards, saw an okay exhibit, French Book Art. It was about how french artists from different genres collaborated on various books over the past century. Not sure what was notable about the exhibit topic--after all, Persian artists, for one, have melded art and literature for centuries (the Met had a good one just recently about works done in India under Persian influence). A similar point was made in a New York Sun article on the exhibit. At any rate, the exhibit was okay, kindof zipped through it and didn't really see much that caught my eye. My friend really liked 'Liberty, I Write Your Name', were it not for her translation of the poem I'd have had no appreciation for it.

John Seller's "A Mapp of the World", 1682 via NYPL.

Central Park Zoo, New York City by Garry Winogrand via Getty Museum

1953 Liberte jecris ton nom, or Liberty, I Write Your Name, by the poet Paul Eluard and artist Fernand Leger from the Associated Press via Yahoo's Spanish language news feed.