New Photography 5: Vincent Borrelli, Thomas Florschuetz, Mike Mandel

Oct 26, 1989–Jan 9, 1990

MoMA

Michael Mandel (American, b. 1950). Emptying the Fridge. 1984. Silver dye bleach print, 15 7/8 × 19 7/8″ (40.6 × 50.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Family of Man Fund

This is the fifth in a series of exhibitions introducing contemporary, original work in photography. It presents three photographers, Vincent Borrelli, Thomas Florschuetz, and Mike Mandel, who are using color at this time, each with a different expressive intent. This selection highlights the broad possibilities that current color technology offers photographers, and reveals the wit and strength of some fresh points of view.

Not long ago, Vincent Borrelli (American, born 1960) left his position as a financial analyst in Massachusetts. Since last year, he has recorded the architectural and domestic environments of folk artists throughout the rural United States. Several of these photographs were taken at Bible theme parks and in homes transformed into private shrines. Borrelli compresses symbols of the American past, such as a tepee and a covered wagon, in densely detailed images that reflect the collector’s instinct often present in folk art. He enhances the magical dimension of these photographs by using strobe lights to heighten color and flatten space. In his work there are echoes of Walker Evans, who made the vernacular interior a rich subject for American photography in the 1930s. But Borrelli rejects the stylistic reserve of Evans’s work, and closes in on his subject, not only to produce a compelling picture, but to uncover the spiritual inspiration behind these folk art environments.

Mike Mandel (American, born 1950), from California, uses photography to investigate its most banal application: the deadpan commercial document. He recently completed a ten-year project of time-and-motion photographs inspired by Frank Gilbreth, an American engineer and efficiency expert who, beginning in the 1910s, photographed workers while they performed tasks, in order to examine how their productivity might be increased. In Mandel’s study, published in his book Making Good Time (1989), he has recorded contemporary genre scenes with protagonists wearing colored lights on their bodies that blink at intervals and, in the pictures, track time and movement together. Although the technological purpose of the process is to analyze action in descrete [sic] moments, the lights, extending like brilliant graffiti over each task depicted, seem to defy their role as measuring codes. Any nod to scientific rigor in this work is undone by chaotic color and pattern; the matter-of-factness of the activities provides ironic counterpoint to their whimsical portrayal. Such scenes as watching television or having a talk—specifically sedentary activities—suggest that Mandel, while fascinated by Gilbreth’s obsessive documentation, denies that science can catalog and thereby illuminate all human behavior.

Thomas Florschuetz (German, born 1960) recently emigrated from East Germany, and now lives in West Berlin. He made his first photographic self-portraits in 1982, and only last year began incorporating color into his work. In his earlier multipaneled [sic] black-and-white pieces, photographs of body parts are arranged in jarring relationships evocative of Neo-Expressionist art. Florschuetz continues to use himself as the model in the new works, but here his presence is reduced to fragments of his hand and face, which are integrated into oversized organic anatomies that challenge the limitations of the term “portraiture.” These photographs are aggressive in their monumentality and frightening in their specificity: once the greatly magnified hair and pores are identified, the viewer is cast by implication into a lilliputian [sic] realm. Florschuetz deliberately selects artificial hues for the backgrounds of his images, shifting the delicate color scale of the skin tones in each photograph. By photographically altering the size and color of his own body, Florschuetz creates forms that range from chaotic to classical.

Lisa Kurzner, Newhall Fellow, Department of Photography

  • This exhibition is part of New Photography.
  • This exhibition is supported by a generous grant from Spring Industries, Inc., and is part of the Springs of Achievement Series on the Art of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.

    Publications

    • Master checklist 3 pages
    • Press release 3 pages

    Artists

    Installation images

    How we identified these works

    In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

    If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

    Licensing

    If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

    MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

    If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

    Feedback

    This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].