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Email PagePhilip Trager Retrospective
November 30, 2006- January 13, 2007
Reception: November 30, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Philip Trager
John Stevenson Gallery
338 W 23rd StIn 2008 the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. will present a major retrospective exhibition of works by Philip Trager, one of the most important contemporary photographers of architecture and dance.
This exhibition was inaugurated last March at Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center, Connecticut, and then shown at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. It will travel to Oberlin College next Spring, before settling into to the magnificent spaces of The Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress.
Midstream in this course, a selection of these images will be shown and offered to collectors in our gallery’s upcoming exhibition, November 30 – January 13. The 60 photographs will be a highly distilled cross section of key works which have been acquired by the world’s museums. Moreover, the prints offered by us will be Trager’s vintage prints of these images, very rare and desirable, and never released to collectors before.
About the Artist
From Philip Trager’s evocative photographs of New York City in the 1970s to the elegiac portraits of the villas of Palladio in the 1980s and the ever-changing face of Paris in the 1990s, he has captured the subtleties of our built environment with singular nuance and skill. His distinctly personal photographs of buildings are regarded as landmarks in architectural photography and have become standard documents for architectural and art historians. As noted by Peter Schjeldahl in his introduction to Legacy of Light, “the place-portraiture of Philip Trager’s Palladian villas [is] . . . as beautiful, it seems to me, as any photographs I have ever seen.”
Since the 1980s, Trager also has collaborated with contemporary dancers and choreographers to photograph the most evanescent of arts — dance. His expressionistic photographs of dancers in outdoor settings capture the essence of many of the best contemporary choreographers and dancers, causing the viewer to rethink the field of dance photography. His photographs of dancers constitute a survey of avant-garde and contemporary dance in America, including the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Ralph Lemon, Eiko and Koma, Arthur Aviles, and the Mark Morris Dance Group.
Trager’s photographs are held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, just to name a few.
The images in our exhibition were first seen in ten monographs of Trager’s photographs, which have been published to exceptional critical acclaim. In his first major project, Photographs of Architecture (1977), Trager recorded a survey of archetypal Connecticut architecture. Next he focused on the rhythms of urban architecture in Philip Trager: New York (1980). In The Villas of Palladio (1986), he captured the genius of place, the drama of landscape and sky in which the sixteenth-century villas of architect Palladio rise. Returning to the urban landscape, he traced the course of the River Seine, revealing fresh perspectives on that most photographed of cities, in Changing Paris (2000). The explosion and joy of movement is celebrated in the book Dancers (1992), which The New York Times Book Review acknowledged, “invented its own means to capture the spirit of dance in stills . . . movement is almost secondary to psychological theater.” The recently published FACES (2005) focuses intently on the individual performers and reveals dramatic portraits, described by Library Journal as “photographic sculptures . . . startling in their theatrical composition . . . each image as a single work of art.” The newest book, titled Philip Trager and published by Steidl, coincides with his retrospective exhibitions —over 200 illustrations chronicle Trager’s 40 years of extraordinary work.
Philip Trager (born 1935) lives in Fairfield, Connecticut. He will be present at the gallery for the opening reception of his exhibition, November 30, 6:30-8:30 pm; and again on December 9, 2:30-4:30 pm, for a booksigning.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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