An American Visits America: Photography Show In Miami - Page 2

The restaurant reviews that may come later tend toward the affordable, the Chinese (my favorite cuisine), and the Cuban on which I grew up. However there is a Japanese-Chinese with a Shanghai dish that I plan to note, the Peruvian-Chinese where I ate a Szechuan dish the other night, and my favorite luxury restaurant in Coconut Grove at the Ritz-Carlton (which is not affordable, just perfect). Later, you hungry readers - first the eye and the mind.

Finally, after meaning to during a number of trips here (filled with hospital and medical chores), I went to the Miami Art Museum in Government Center, an easy-to-reach downtown location. Only half the galleries were open (two) but "Modern Photographs: The Machine , The Body And The City " was worth the train trip on Miami's clean and quick Metrorail elevated system.

The show includes 160 photographs from Atget and Stieglitz, through Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Edward Weston, to Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, and some 21st century photographers with whom I am not familiar. However, new views of the world is what art is about, as are visits to old friends like a Weston sand dune picture and his nude torso of his son Brett.

Mapplethorpe is represented best for me by nude torsos, magnificently printed of nude figures in black & white — the photo and the models. Some of the newer workers have large chromogenic prints of "10 cupolas" and a Chinese shipyard with skeletal, industrial symbols of the growing might of the Eastern powerhouse that has its sights on American dominance. Maybe for the first time, this photo made me think that they may, indeed, be aiming for competition with the West. They are a-building while we are a-fighting.

There was one of my favorite Bruce Davidson's, the Coney Island shot with the 50's boy, sleeves rolled up, Marlboro Man, and the girl primping in the vending machine mirror, a wonderful William Klein, Mirror, Times Square, Vogue from 1962 lent by the Howard Greenberg Gallery back in my New York where we expect great photos to live.

Then click over to the MAM site for their one reproduction — a photographer and picture I did not know — Ted Croner, Taxi, New York Night 1949, which shows that a good collector can find pictures by less famous people that are still the essence of art - transported by being well-seen. In this case, a ghostly blur of 40s speed in the epitome of a view of the Big Apple before they even called it that.

Article Author: Howard Dratch

Howard writes on science, books, movies and news for Blogcritics and on his own blogs from the border of North and Central America.

Visit Howard Dratch's author page — Howard Dratch's Blog