"Measuring Time" at NYU's Deutsches Haus

"Measuring Time," a group show launched in conjunction with the Chelsea Music Festival, opened at New York University's Deutsches Haus on June 15.

I'm very pleased to have seven prints in this show, three from my series de-composition and four from the Littoral series. It's the first time photos from Littoral have been shown and the most work of mine to be exhibited at one time in New York for a few years. 

Part of "Measuring Time" at NYU's Deutsches Haus with Littoral photos in the middle (between the windows). My de-composition photos are on another wall. 

The show features the work of six artists (four from German-speaking countries), all of which relates to time, though not in obvious ways. It includes woodcuts, drawing, photography and stills from video. The curators chose my work for its focus on decay -- you could call it the effect of time on matter -- whether images of decaying flowers in de-composition or the shifting patterns of sand captured in Littoral. In one way or another, all my photography, with its exploration of mortality and loss, is a form of "measuring time." 

Deutsches Haus is open daily (except Sundays) and is located at 42 Washington Mews in Greenwich Village, which is just off University Place half a block south of 8th Street in Manhattan. The show is open until August 26. 

Littoral Series - Special Edition

Over the last several years, Dave Bown Projects (DBP) has become prominent for its support of visual artists through an ongoing program of art purchases and for unrestricted monetary awards as much as $5000 through its series of semiannual competitions. The company has purchased prints from two of my series for its permanent collection in the past years.

Earlier this year, DBP started a new initiative of presenting special editions of work from select artists and in July released a limited edition of 5 prints of a photo from my Littoral series (Littoral 105). This is a series taken along shorelines, capturing the momentary patterns left in the sand as the tides wash over it; it's very much bound up with questions of mortality and contemplation and the passage of time.

Littoral 105

You can learn more here: http://davebownprojects.com/shop_harry_newman.html

Last Woods

The day before the mass People's Climate March took place in New York in September, photos from my Last Woods and de-composition series were included in a benefit concert for the March. Here's part of a statement I was asked to write about the work: 

There’s a sense of melancholy that comes now with visiting the woods. A conflict between experiencing the grandeur and wonder of the trees and plants and animals—the mind and body’s intuition of the life around you, unfolding without regard to you—and the awareness of how much these places and these lives within them are changing and may ultimately be lost from the climate catastrophe that’s upon us. You encounter their presence and their ghosts from the future at the same time. Everything has an aspect of being haunted about it. No visit to the woods is neutral or simply personal, purely about one’s own pleasure, any longer. The pleasure remains still, but it’s a pleasure alloyed. It’s something like holding a breath, knowing you have to let it go at some point.

This awareness of loss and sense of melancholy are at the heart of my series, Last Woods, which are photos taken during extended, often solitary, walks through the woods and forested areas of the Northeastern U.S. I’ve been working on them on and off since 2009 and they’ve been seen in group shows in galleries around New York. I see them as portraits of the incremental, intimate process of decay taking place in a specific spot—the most basic process of life, of leaves returning to soil—while echoing the larger loss and decay of the woods as a whole. Altogether, the series serves as a form of witness and documentation, capturing a bit of life at ground level before these areas, their diversity and complexity are altered or diminished or, even, disappear.

Last Woods 16