Loretta Lux. The Drummer, 2004 © Loretta Lux, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez- Falla Collection of Photography

In a new exhibition entitled, Shared Vision, Aperture gallery is showing a collection of photography featuring two hundred iconic images from the past one hundred years.

Covering an entire century in a group show is an ambitious task.  The digital democratization of photography in the last ten years alone makes curating a finite number of works a challenging task. To make the task a little less daunting Aperture is fortunately culling from an already refined body of work, the private collection of Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla, widely lauded as one of the preeminent collectors of photography in the world.

Jerry N. Uelsman. Untitled, 1996 Jerry N. Uelsman, © Jerry N. Uelsman Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection of Photography

Alec Soth. Patrick, Palm Sunday, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 2002 Alec Soth © Alec Soth Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez- Falla Collection of Photography

Here, the collectors’ guiding principle has been to acquire vintage prints and works by leading photographers of their generation.  Their holdings include the most iconic works of the last century, photographs that retain the uniqueness of the era they draw from, the ingenuity of their original vision undiluted by the tide of digitally influenced later works.

The images cover a vast spectrum of genres from landscape to portraiture, represented by such canonic photographers as Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, Doug and Mike Starn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, Loretta Lux, and Laurie Simmons.

Richard Misrach. Battleground Point #20, 1999 Richard Misrach, © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez- Falla Collection of Photography

Massimo Vitaly. Amadores 1, 2004 Massimo Vitali, courtesy the artist/Brancolini Grimaldi, London and Rome Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez- Falla Collection of Photography

Rineke Dijkstra. Coney Island, N.Y., July 9, 1993 © Rineke Dijkstra, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez- Falla Collection of Photography

The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Jacksonville, a cultural resource of the University of North Florida. Shared Vision is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by MOCA and produced by Aperture Foundation.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore 547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor – Between 10th and 11th Avenues New York, New York

"Majestic"

Lori Nix arrived in New York from a small town in Kansas in the late 90s to work in a photo lab. Realizing that New York was the center on the photography universe, she picked up and moved from a town with two traffic lights to the bustling metropolis she now calls home.

Nix has carved out a niche for herself in the world of photography: she and her collaborator Kathleen Gerber (a self-described “model maker”) spend anywhere from 3 to 7 months constructing scale models of post-apocalyptic scenes with such painstaking detail that one doesn’t always surmise that they’re models upon first viewing. The relationship is nearly perfect, with Gerber taking care of all the painstaking minutia that Nix “doesn’t have the patience for.”

"Church"

Scenes the pair has created over the years have included theaters, bars, libraries, a church, a laundromat, and others, including a backdrop from a Museum of Natural History under renovation. Every model starts with one object, which then acts as an anchor to tie the rest of the model to, in terms of scale. For the library, it was a globe. In the theater, it was a miniature piano. What do they do with the models once they’ve finished with the photography, which can take up to 2 weeks days? “We get rid of it,” explains Lori, over lunch in Manhattan’s Standard Grill. “After we’ve spent that much time building one of the models, we can’t get it out of our sight fast enough.”

Director of Light Work, Jeffrey Hoone, says it best: “Over the past thirty years, the constructed photograph has become an integral voice in the dialogue of contemporary photography. From Bernard Faucon’s carefully constructed scenes of mannequins of children, to Laurie Simmons’ and Cindy Sherman’s pivotal deconstructions of gender roles, to Jim Casebere’s elegant architectural studies, to the monumental productions by Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, the practice of constructing images from the imagination has allowed photographers to explore, question, and extend pliable links between the veracity of photography as evidence and the photograph as extension of the imagination. As an artist in her early thirties Nix isn’t very far removed from the experiences that inform her work. Recalling a pond that froze over early in the season trapping thousands of frogs in the ice and then chipping them out to throw at her sister is a memory site that she continues to evolve as her work matures. When you compare her work to that of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson, whose epic scenes and monumental scale can overwhelm the viewer with their technical virtuosity, Nix’s photographs, while describing disaster and impending doom, come across with the innocence and visceral impact of a scary story told around the campfire. And like any well told story the power of Nix’s photographs rely as heavily on the imagination and trepidation of the viewer as they do on the strength and timbre of her voice.”

Look for much more to come from the lens of Lori Nix.

Lori Nix's "Library," which was completed over the course of 7 months