THE PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW PRESENTED BY AIPAD

RAY MORTENSON – Installation

APRIL 22 – 26, 2023

Focal Point Booth F7

Harkening back forty-five years to a New York of a far different era, American artist Ray Mortenson has created two installations from his South Bronx series for AIPAD’s 2026 Photography Show.

An intentionally raw presentation of his formal portraits of building exteriors, these push-pinned gelatin silver prints from 1982-1984 on construction board from Mortenson’s studio walls echo the condition of the structures themselves and the tactility and grittiness of a less mediated era. As a single assemblage, it is a typology of a pivotal time and place in the United States’ history. Originally conceived of as a form of “hard art”, the project takes on renewed resonance today, foregrounding questions of urban neglect, endurance, and the politics of the built environment.

On Friday, the presentation will evolve to the interior views of these buildings, which Mortenson made at the time with a large-format camera. Stunning oversized silver prints open up to reveal echoes and details of more personal pasts. One vintage print made by the photographer in the 1980s measures 40x50 inches, and the other, at 40x60 inches, was printed in 2008.

The different approaches used for exterior and interior landscapes of this New York neighborhood are captured in Mortenson's new book, South Bronx. Out later this year and published by GOST, it is available for pre-order at their booth (P14). Long-awaited, this is only the second trade edition monograph (after Meadowland, 1983) devoted to the artist’s long career.

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For nearly fifty years, Ray Mortenson (American, b. 1944), a New York City based photographer who started out as a sculptor, has had a long-standing interest in overlooked landscapes and the visual structure of neglect across industrial, metropolitan, and rural sites in the northeastern United States. In South Bronx, his second major series, he pushed the boundaries of photographic form in the early 1980s by making mural-scale gelatin silver prints mounted on canvas and the first of his unique hand-bound books of original prints. Mortenson continues to explore how the media best expresses the theme in this expansive new arrangement. Although it represents one of the most ambitious projects of his career, this series has rarely been shown in depth, aside from a 2008 solo exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York and at Paris Photo in 2023.

Mortenson’s photographs and handmade books have been exhibited widely and are held in dozens of public collections, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the George Eastman Museum; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where his Meadowland series is currently on view.