The Partial Observer by Chip Northrup

Pictures at an Exhibition

Northern Otsego County is home to two of the greatest living portrait photographers—Dmitri Kasterine, whose one-man show opened Friday, June 7 on Main Street in Schoharie at the SEEC Gallery, and Marc Hom, whose work is on display through September at Fenimore Art Museum. Go see both and you will see the best in post-war portrait photography. Tour each exhibit with the artists and you will get a quick lecture in how great art is made. Right here, right now.

In the pantheon of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, Kasterine took the most iconic photographs of James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Patricia Highsmith and Anthony Bourdain. There is a story to tell about each work, and Kasterine—a White Russian whose father fought against the Communist takeover of Russia—is, like two other great Russian post-war artists, Nabokov and Pasternak, a humorously discrete raconteur. The local Russian expat community was out in force at the opening, including an Orthodox priest from the Jordanville monastery. Kasterine’s son, Nicholas, and his wife, Caroline, accompanied him.

Kasterine has photographed numerous cultural and leading figures of the 20th century, including Cindy Sherman, Johnny Cash, Roald Dahl, Mick Jagger, David Hockney, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. His work was on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London during the winter of 2009 and is part of their permanent collection. Nine portraits were acquired by HM Queen Elizabeth II and presented to the Royal Collection Trust. In 2010, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery acquired five of Kasterine’s portraits.

His work is on display through October at 287 Main Street, Schoharie. The exhibit was made possible by the initiative of the Schoharie Economic Enterprise Corporation and New York City and San Francisco-based chef Anthony Leberto, of Sharon Springs’ Brimstone Bakery.

Under the leadership of Paul D’Ambrosio and Jane Forbes Clark, Fenimore Art Museum has hit another home run with the triple-play exhibits of Banksy, Dylan and Hom. The thematic continuity between the three is that Banksy’s work, which is typically outdoors, ephemeral, and topical, is indoors and presented historically. Bob Dylan, a Nobel laureate poet, is exhibited as a painter, and Marc Hom, a photographer, is exhibited as a sculptor.

As exhibits, the most innovative of the three is Hom’s gigantic dynamic mobiles—which move with the wind, change with the light, and don’t compete with the landscape due to Hom’s use of black and white prints. Hom’s vision, inspired by the Storm King outdoor sculpture museum, was made a reality by the meticulous work of master builder Luke Wykoff and Glimmerglass Festival veterans Joel Morain and Abby Rodd. The pictures were built to fit into a shipping container, so go see them in the sunshine or in the gloaming before they are packed up and shipped to Shanghai or St. Moritz. This exhibit will travel the world, evolving from place to place, but, unlike baseball, it was most assuredly invented, built and first played in Cooperstown.

Chip Northrup is a summer resident of the Village of Cooperstown.