The Brooklyn Rail

Dawn Kim and Phil Chang’s concurrent exhibitions at Penumbra could not be more dissimilar: color versus black and white; social portraits versus idea-based work; intimate, representational images versus monochrome prints that reflect on their own making. These obvious differences hide what unites the work, as both artists are committed to a photography that is direct and honest.

Dawn Kim’s More than I could ask is her first solo exhibition in New York City. Her twenty-one 12-by-15-inch (some are 15-by-12-inch) color and black-and-white inkjet prints are primarily portraits interleaved with a few still lifes. Small groupings of framed photographs run in a single row around Penumbra’s front gallery, which faces out onto 30th Street.

More than I could ask begins with Kim approaching a portrait subject with her own ask: “May I photograph you?” Apart from two images of friends, Kim’s photographs at Penumbra focus on strangers she encounters in America, from New York to Bentonville, and in Europe, from Oberammergau to Ojdula (Ozsdola). Kim started her portrait project with the friends—at the opening she showed me a print of two classmates from Yale—but discovered that by photographing strangers she eliminated the problems that attach to familiarity. As such, each of her varied and surprising portraits presents an on-the-fly solution to the problem of taking a photograph of an unknown person (or persons) you just convinced to sit in front of your camera.

Kim uses a lightweight 4-by-5 field camera on a tripod and exposes 400 speed color negative film. Astonishingly, she makes just a single exposure of each subject. Her high-speed film allows her to capture outdoor settings crisply with good depth of field. Kim, unlike Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra or American An-My Lê, whose retrospective just closed at MoMA, doesn’t use a “fill” flash to boost her portrait exposures. As a result, in some of the indoor portraits, Kim must set long-ish shutter speeds, from a quarter of a second to a few seconds, and these lengthy exposures occasionally render her subjects blurry or soft. In photography, “soft” can be a disparaging term. However, in Kim’s work the slight softness of some of her images tells us that the subject is vivacious and alive.

The first photograph of the show, Between debates, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2023) establishes the spatial template Kim favors for her portraits. In Between debates an adolescent debater wearing an ill-fitting suit stands about seven feet from Kim’s camera. We see his youthful frame and get a glimpse of the space surrounding both Kim and her subject. This relationship between camera and subject, subject and surrounding space is finely calibrated according to each location. In Vic by the Seine, Paris, France (2023) and Men on Vacation, Vienna, Austria (2023) Kim moves close to her sitters. In Landscapers, Loveland, Ohio (2023) and Horticulturalists under Bourgeois, Bentonville, Arkansas (2023) she backs away.

My favorite image, Finn and Luka after school at the mouth of Battery Park, New York, NY, (2023) combines both near and far in a very strong photograph. The subjects in this portrait, two high school students, balance on a red Jersey barrier placed along Battery Place. Finn and Luka turn toward the camera and glare at it. Their faces and a patch of trees behind them in Bowling Green Park are lit up dramatically by richly saturated afternoon sunlight. The boys are perhaps fifteen feet from the camera and the trees and buildings beyond some hundred yards away. Kim deftly articulates these near and far spatial elements.

Vic by the Seine and three other photographs are marked by what are known as “light leaks,” orange, red and blue flashes of pure color that accidentally struck the negative. Light leaks are unrelated to camera optics and occur for a variety of mysterious reasons. Ninety-nine percent of the time photographers deep-six negatives that are light-struck. Because Kim exposes only one sheet of 4-by-5 film per portrait, she’s stuck with her leaky exposures—luckily, as it turns out. Light leaks are photography’s autograph and the flickering edges in Kim’s four light-struck prints, all hung next to each other, are as rare as a halo around the sun.

Meanwhile, down a narrow hall, a different photographic universe awaits. Phil Chang’s Process, Object, Residue is a new chapter of a photographic “performance” that began in 2012 when Chang first exhibited unfixed 8-by-10-inch photographs that, in a few hours’ time, faded under the opening night lights of the gallery. I’ve seen two of Chang’s fourteen fading photograph performances and I find them poignant, even tragic, as Chang’s portraits, still lifes and landscapes all slowly turned purplish gray.

To produce his unfixed, fading photographs, Chang uses an 8-by-10 negative that he contact prints on Kodak black-and-white photographic paper to create what is known as a “printing-out print.” Chang makes his prints with an ordinary desk lamp and a long, ninety-minute exposure. (Long discontinued, printing-out paper by Kodak was designed to be exposed rapidly in sunlight.) The fillip in Process, Object, Residue is that the exhibition will be produced at Penumbra during the run of the show. Two prints a day will be exposed and placed in a light-proof box. These boxed, unfixed prints will be displayed between April 25 and 28 at the AIPAD art fair at the Park Avenue Armory, and there they will be allowed to fade to monochrome.

When all the prints are revealed at the Armory, viewers will be able to observe the quirky collection of subjects that Chang works with: portraits, landscapes, seascapes, street scenes, the rear ends of cars, museum exhibition wall texts, and computer screenshots. As I read this list of subjects Chang emailed me, it seemed he was trying to corral “photography” into a collection of generic types, a desire that ironically and surprisingly recalled Bernd and Hilla Becher’s systematic recording of industrial typologies.

Apart from the desk lamp exposure unit and packages of Kodak paper, there’s not much to see in the exhibition. In place of prints on the wall Chang has installed acrylic wall pockets with laminated photocopies of supporting materials for viewers to read and contemplate—correspondence relating to earlier iterations of the fading out process, artist statements, essays on photography and abstraction, and receipts for film and paper used in Process, Object, Residue.

Chang’s desire to make work that can be fully encircled by documentation recalls the programmatic paintings made in the late 1960s by the Paris group BMPT, who reduced painting to a set of written parameters. As it turns out, Daniel Buren, one of the members of BMPT, was friends with Los Angeles conceptual artist and educator Michael Asher, who Chang studied with for two years as a graduate student at the California Institute for the Arts. In his writings and work Asher endeavored to describe and make accessible all the materials and decisions that went into his projects. At Penumbra, Chang extends this discursive tradition by similarly annotating his materials and artistic decisions.

Pairing these two photographers of adjacent generations and radically different practices is a strong curatorial move. After walking through both shows and thinking about the work when I returned home, similarities emerged. Both work in a no-nonsense manner, direct and honest. Kim’s one-shot practice, light leaks and all, counterintuitively aligns with Chang’s full disclosure, fading-out print process. Kim and Chang are united by a deep awareness of how best to deploy both the strengths and limitations of the medium, and both artists make photographs that are simultaneously prosaic and moving, emotional and analytic. This combination of temperaments is a great example of an exhibition that takes photography and its audience seriously.