Weathered Works

Both shown on Pier 94 of The Armory Show, photographers Matthew Brandt and Ryan Foerster share a similar fascination with natural deterioration. At Yossi Milo Gallery, Brandt displays selections from a project in which he photographed lakes and reservoirs and then submerged the images—for months at a time—in water collected on site. 

Ryan Foerster, too, sees the beauty in decay and subjects his work to the whim of natural elements. In his solo show at     C L E A R I N G’s booth, Foerster fills the walls with work created by the relentless wrath of hurricane Sandy. The collection of photographs—once dismissed as blurry outtakes and second choices—had been stored in a box in Foerster’s home in Brighton Beach, which was flooded and destroyed by the storm. “When he opened the box, he found 30 or 40 portraits of his friends, destroyed by Sandy,” Barthélémy Schöller told us, at the booth. “They became fabulous abstractions; displayed exactly as they were found, their colors reflect the original images and some even contain traces of sand.”