Author Description

Photographer Joel Grey has been the subject of two solo shows, at Staley Wise in New York and the Galerie in Einstein in Berlin, and his work has recently become part of the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Pictures I Had To Take, his first monograph, published in 2003, collected work created over a 30 period. In the intervening years, Grey has made new photographs with renewed vigor, seduced by color, texture and enigmatic urban tableaux from Los Angeles and New York to Berlin and Venice. His work is often painterly, bringing to mind Bacon, Rothko, Cornell, Tuttle and Dine, all of whom have greatly influenced him. Looking Hard at Unexamined Things brings under its wing industrial sites, abandoned buildings, graffiti, wall art, detritus and public works--its often dark vision is Grey's own walk on the wild side, and a poignant homage to the beauty of bruised and broken things.