BE THERE
Eleven SeptembersPresented by Julie Saul Gallery September 5, 2006- October 14, 2006Reiner LeistThe Julie Saul Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of Germanborn photographer Reiner Leist's installation, Eleven Septembers. A 512 page book by the same name will be published by Prestel and released in September. Since 1995, Leist has photographed the view from his apartment on the 26th floor of a commercial building on 8th Avenue in New York. Using a nineteenth century full-plate camera with 8 x 10 inch negatives he has captured the architecture and life of downtown Manhattan. To the left is One Penn Station and the round structure of Madison Square Garden; in the center are the skyscrapers of the financial district, including the World Trade Center; to the right is the famed New Yorker Hotel. The foreground is framed by the window and objects of daily use in Leist's window sill. When in New York, Leist photographed daily, at no particular time, and in all weather conditions. He acquired a routine: placing the camera on the kitchen table, opening the window, focusing, measuring light, inserting the negatives and making the exposure. He also marked the date and time in a journal. Over the decade, roughly 2,200 exposures were made in this way. They show the everyday, a breathing Manhattan, and the big historical censure, the destruction of the World Trade Center. None of the images are the same, demonstrating the ever-changing view from the window. Eleven Septembers /Window is also being exhibited in its full form of every month of the entire eleven years in a massive installation at the Museum for Photography, Berlin from September 8, 2006-January 7, 2007. Leist's works are ongoing, long-term--often participatory--projects that examine the relationship between individual lives and societies, history, landscape and architecture. For South America/ Blue Portraits, he interviewed and portrayed 200 participants from highly diverse backgrounds in South Africa from 1989 until 1993. Since 1994, he has worked on the long-term project American Portraits, a collection of photographs and interviews of people from across the country that was shown at the prestigious German Historical Museum, Berlin, I.M. Pei Building. Leist continues work on projects in Japan and Vietnam, both of which combine photographs of the subjects and brief autobiographies and viewpoints. Leist has exhibited widely, with one-person exhibitions at the Fotomuseum München, Stiftung Moritzburg, Halle, Meridian International Center, Washington, D.C. and Musashino, Tokyo. He taught at the Visual Arts Program at MIT, Cambridge, Mass. from 2000 until 2003, and since 2003, has taught at Hunter College, City University of New York.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||
DIRECTORIES
