JESSICA CRAIG-MARTIN: AMERICAN SUMMER
Greenberg Van Doren

KOHEI YOSHIYUKI
Yossi Milo

Jessica Craig-Martin Cancer Benefit, Southampton 2006 (Party Animals) 2007
C-print, edition of 3 + 2 AP, 48 x 72 inches
Courtesy Greenberg Van Doren Gallery

Kohei Yoshiyuki, from the series The Park 1971
silvert gelatin print
Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery

COVER September 2007: Jessica Craig-Martin Cancer Benefit, Southampton 2006 (Cosmo) 2007
C-print, edition of 5 +2 AP, 33 x 50 inches

With photography, one perversion can segue to another. Voyeurism focuses such attention on where the photographer could possibly have been placed, or what they could have been doing at the moment of surreptitious capture that in the very attempt to achieve transparency, the agent becomes the essence of the image. It is precisely through efforts to become invisible that the person behind the camera takes center stage. Thus voyeurism begets a certain narcissism.

Two new shows that dramatize the photographer as absent presence in images of candor and intrusiveness open this week: Jessica Craig-Martin’s “American Summer” at Greenberg Van Doren is the first New York show since her 2001 exhibition at P.S. 1 of this internationally fêted society photographer (she works at Vogue and Vanity Fair). Kohei Yoshiyuki, by contrast, has remained invisible for quarter of a century. “The Park” at Yossi Milo Gallery, a body of work from the 1970s and documenting casual sexual encounters in three Tokyo public parks, was shot at night using infrared-sensitive film and filtered flashbulbs. This work is being shown for the first time since 1980, and marks the artist’s American debut. 

Their prints constitute an essay in contrast — hers, in gaudily opulent color, are as oversized as the glitzy, self-conscious set whose lifestyle she documents, whereas his are grainy, black-and-white, and kind of dingy in their half-tones, almost as if offering themselves in as undercover a manner as that in which they were shot. Where Ms. Craig-Martin has made the monied Hamptons social circuit her locus, Mr. Yoshiyuki’s subject is a sexual underclass, whether self-selected or forced towards social margins. 

What unites these artists — despite such distinct production values — is the way each documents a specific, historical, and peculiar — yet in some ways ubiqutious — scene. Like Dante or Boccacio, it is through attention to particulars of time and place that they are able to conjure vices that transcend them.

Drastic cropping is a defining characteristic of Ms. Craig-Martin’s work. Image after image amputates or decapitates her revelers, homing in on torsos, legs or feet, or a snatch of mouth. In each case, the viewer’s mind oscillates between possibilities of what this strategy means as violently as the eye seems to tip and lurch around the party. Sometimes, for instance, there is the kind of exactitude of an anthropological specimen: “Cancer Benefit, Southampton 2006 (Brooks Brothers Weiner)” (all 2007) links the sewn logo on a waiter’s pink T-shirt to the last remaining canapé on a tray of grass. Other times, it is more as if to say “This is what I could get away with.” The cropping is highly functional, homing in on the only details that matter, sparing individualizing features that would distract. 

With “Cancer Benefit, Southampton 2006 (Real Wasps),” however, in which the lower halves of a poolside couple — he in chinos and a blue blazer, she in a cocktail dress and waxed, bronzed legs — are shown, the intentions behind the cropping are more ambiguous. The image might be saying that half tells all — that their individuality is superfluous. Or it might be saying that the grounded, animal side of their personae are more apropos to the party mode than their higher selves. Or perhaps the cropping conveys coyness about identifying individuals, introducing an element of fear or awe towards the satirical victims. 

The best images, such as “Cancer Benefit, Southampton 2006 (Air Kiss)”, where the smooched face belongs uniquely to a named individual, Ms. Denise Rich, instill ambivalence about whether the photographer is a skilled paparrazo or was herself as happy-go-lucky partygoer who made sense the next morning of what her wayward camera cropped. Whether or not this is true, the images imbue this sense of nonchalance. The focus is crystalline and the printing pristine, but vertigo can imply a drunken lense.

The less successful images are ones where there is no sense of speed or intrusion. In “Real Estate Brokers, Southampton 2007 (Peace/Cannabis Loafers)” for instance, the shoes that take a starring, each embroidered with an instantly recognizable sign, seem worn to have been photographed, the signifiers over-determined. . Whereas “Watermill Center Benefit Gala 2007 (Town Car to Tent)” in which a pocketbook swings aimlessly by its wearer’s thin, muscular legs is a stolen moment, a gesture caught between expectation and tedium, a quiet, subtle image.

The cumulative effect of Ms. Craig-Martin’s merciless cropping, sumptuous color, emphatic scale, and pristine focus is, despite its power and clarity, to add another layer of ambiguity to her work, this time between visceralness and artifice. In this strange duality the artist comes to resemble the painter Alex Katz, for whom she has often posed. 

The odd angles, a sense of snapshots taken on the sly, the fragmented body parts, make the action seem present tense, unmediated, all the more real. Flesh is captured in ruthless precision: Too much information outbids too much money to emphasize that even the rich have sweaty pores, scars that can’t be disguised, bodies that age. But the photography takes dancing, posing, dolled-up bodies in another direction: toward flattened-out, abstracted shapes, colors, and textures. 

Mr. Yoshiyuki’s nocturnal forays culled both homosexual and heterosexual activity in three Tokyo parks, with straight couples his focus in the early 1970s, gays in 1979. It could be argued, however, in view of the crucial role played by onlookers, that the sexuality in both instances was pansexual — that the where of sex was more important than the with whom.

Sometimes the viewer senses people turning around and acknowledging the camera, perhaps as the filtered flash from a previous image captures their attention.In an interview published in the book that accompanies this show, Mr. Yoshiyuki explains that he could not photograph situations where the woman took the top position because the man on the ground would notice the camera, an admission that raises more questions than it settles.  

But even without evidence that lovers are literally posing for a camera, there seems little point in describing the relations depicted in terms of intimacy.  Often the onlookers are as much the subject as the primary participants; their stalking of the couples entailing more bodily energy than those furtively engaged in actual intercourse. Even the term “onlooker” is dubious when a hand from one is plunged into the woman’s crotch.

The thrill and squalor of these images reflects far more on the act of taking them than the actions captured. The lovers are bizarrely coy, remaining mostly dressed and opting for the simplest erotic transactions. The crucial ambiguity in Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work isn’t in his subjects’ libidos but his own. Who is out there behind the camera each night: an anthropologist, an artist, a sexual deviant, a free love advocate, a blackmailer? 

The grainy, soft texture of the images, meanwhile, has more to do with the constraints of surreptitious night photography than with aesthetic intentions, but the result is a strangely wistful fusion of prurience and poignancy. 

Craig-Martin until TK (750 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212 445 0444)

Yoshiyuki until October 20 (525 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 414 0370)

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