The best D.C. photography exhibits and photographic images of 2019
By Louis Jacobson
Here’s a look at the five best photography exhibits, and the five best single photographs, in the Washington, D.C., museum and gallery scene in 2009. I reviewed these shows in my capacity as photography critic for Washington City Paper.
BEST EXHIBITS
- “Nature’s Witness” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (On view through Feb. 28.)
“Nature’s Witness” offers some of the best submissions to the National Wildlife Federation’s annual photography contest — and what a sampling it is. The images offer seemingly endless drama: a brown bear chasing a flyinig salmon; a remote-camera image of a quizzical cougar at sunrise; green sea turtles mating in murky water; gemsboks gamboling over a Namibian sand dune; and seals lounging on a jagged ice floe.
2. Sarah Hood Salomon at Multiple Exposures Gallery.
Salomon creates delicate, sepia-toned images of woodlands, frequently with slight camera movement at the time of exposure. The resulting portrayals of silver-trunked trees and intricate brambles are ethereal, even ghostly — realistic, but dreamlike.
3. Frank Stewart at Gallery Neptune Brown (On view through Jan. 4)
Stewart is not a household name, but his retrospective “Time Capsule” makes a strong case that he should be. He’s proven his mettle in all types of settings — smoky café booths occupied by furtive lovers, streets populated with “gangster whitewall” tires and overstuffed clotheslines, dimly lit jazz sessions, and dusty African roads. In Cuba, he flipped the conventions of vintage-car photography by focusing solely on a single car hood’s mesmerizing, overlapping layers of blue.
4. Patricia Howard in the Photoworks exhibition, “Place and Displacement.”
Howard’s works are notable less for their imagery than their backstory. The photographer returned to the eight homes her mother had lived in between the 1920s and 1940s, all in Spencer, Indiana, pairing modern-day photographs of the homes with vintage family snapshots. Howard poignantly and deftly deflates of the American dream: In her clear-eyed text, she explains that “none of the moves represented an improvement.”
5. Gordana Geršković at the Foundry Gallery.
Geršković’s abstract photography documents pastel-hued wall surfaces in the Mexican city of Merida, where the Croatian-born artist lived for a year. Her modestly sized images show an impressively wide range of textures: delicately peeling paint, Pollockian speckles, tree-bark patterns, scattered pockmarks, and what could pass for a cracked desert floor stained an unnatural shade of magenta.
Some of my past top photography exhibit lists published by City Paper: 2004, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018.
BEST IMAGES
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
- Garry Winogrand, “John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles,” in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, “In Mid-Sentence.” (On view through March 20.)
Winogrand’s ingenious photograph of Kennedy’s 1960 Democratic National Convention speech features JFK from the back with the front of his face on a television screen, aligned but facing in opposite directions.
2. Gary Anthes, image from “Jersey Shore 2018,” in the Studio Gallery exhibition, “Snap Shot.”
Anthes’ nocturne from Ocean City, N.J., features light reflecting off rain-covered boardwalk planks as well as robust diagonal lines that converge boldly into the horizon.
3. Craig Nedrow, image from “Steel Mills,” in the Photoworks exhibition, “The American Dream Revisited.”
Nedrow’s crisp, smoke-dominated images of an unnamed steel town strongly echo Walker Evans’ photographs of 1930s Bethlehem, Pa.
4. Loewy et Puiseux, “Photographie Lunaire Rayonnement de Tycho — Phase Croissante,” in the National Gallery of Art exhibition, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs.” (On view through Jan. 5.)
This image is the finest of the exhibit’s sizable selection of telescopic photographs of the lunar surface, showing more detail than one would have expected from an 1899 image.
5. Mark Godfrey in the Photoworks exhibition, “Double Vision.”
Godfrey’s blue-hued, cameraless image of gauze is unexpectedly playful, depicting the fabric as it unravels and descends into chaos on its right edge.
Previous picks for top images of the year: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018.
