PhotoEphemera: Odds and Ends

This is a gallery announcement for a show of Bernd and Hilla Becher's work at the Nigel Greenwood gallery in London in 1973. Nigel Greenwood had one of only four galleries in London in the early '70s that showed contemporary European art. One interesting thing about Greenwood is that he didn't produce catalogs for his shows but had the artists do a limited edition "artist's book" instead, like Ed Ruscha's books, so people who couldn't afford an unique work of art could still own an "original." He actually had a show devoted to Ruscha's books early on and in 1972 mounted a seminal show called Book as Artwork. Not sure if there was an artist's book for this show. He died in 2004.

One side

The other side

This item isn't a gallery announcement (though I wish I had one) but an invite to a private opening of the 1946 Museum of Modern Art, NYC, show of Edward Weston's work. Not sure who's invite this was or who wrote on it but I like the idea of cocktails in the penthouse with Ed after the show. I wonder if he was a fun drinker.

This was the Weston show organized by Nancy Newhall that produced the relatively common catalog pictured below, which if nothing else, has a grandly heroic photo of Weston taken by Ansel Adams on the title page. I have two copies of the hardback and while as the color is the same on both the cloth used to bind them is very different. Of course with a print run of 11,000 copies, you're going to get a variation in the cloths used to cover the boards.

Hardback with dj, without dj, paperback

And finally, here's a gallery announcement for an Eggleston show in 1993. I seem to recall that they had relatively inexpensive editions of some of the works, including this image, but at the time, "relatively inexpensive" was still too expensive. You'd think that I picked Eggleston because of the dust-up created on 5B4 by the review of the book from his Whitney show, but in fact I included this for no other reason than this image would qualify as my favorite photograph.

One side