Lot 110: ADAM BARTOS (B. 1953)

ADAM BARTOS (B. 1953)
Santa Monica Pier, 1979, from the series Los Angeles
chromogenic print, printed 2006
signed, titled, dated and numbered '1/6' in ink on a printed label affixed (on the frame backing)
24½ x 36in. (62.3 x 91.4cm.)

Bartos, Boulevard, Steidl, 2006, pl. 41

"I saw some early color work I really liked by Joel Meyerowitz in an issue of Artforum, and I just looked him up in the phone book. He invited me to come over and showed me a tray of his slides and looked at mine, which was terrific, and inspiring. In the mid-'70s I was fortunate to get to know Bill Eggleston and Stephen Shore and see what they were doing, as well as my contemporaries in color, Mitch Epstein and Len Jenshel, and, at a certain point, it became too engaging to do something else.

The size of these LA photos is largish, but not really big. I was thinking of a contemporary translation of the size of a 'mammoth' plate, which was 18 x 22 inches-absolutely huge when you consider that these were glass-plate negatives processed in the field by Watkins, Muybridge, Jackson, and others. The prints here are 25 x 35, which seems the right size to be able to read the details in these landscapes and see the entire image in a lavish way."
- Adam Bartos, BOMB 107/Spring 2009