
Near the intersection of St. Mary Street and Sophie Wright Place are two of Uptown's main photographic venues, the Darkroom and the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery. Both feature similarly obsessive and shadowy subject matter: pool halls and desire.
JackieBrenner's Friday Night at the Palace pool-hall series hints at her better-known stripper studies. Featuring stark, black-and-white views executed in a style somewhere between film noir and social work, it suggests how gracefully dancer-like pool players can be. But where her strippers' inner lives were revealed in close-ups of personal detail, here the pool-player psyche appears in the facial expressions and body language of competitors armed with pool cues. So we are left with a sense of the game as chess for contortionists, as we see in an image of a player attempting a tricky behind the back shot.

FRIDAY NIGHT AT THE PALACE: Pool Hall Photographs by Jackie Brenner
Through March 7
The Darkroom, 1927 Sophie Wright Place, 522-3211; www.neworleansdarkroom.com
DESIRE: Group Exhibition of Photographs Curated by Mayumi Lake
Through March 21
New Orleans Photo Alliance, 1111 St. Mary St., 610-4899;
www.neworleansphotoalliance.com
Friday, February 20, 2009
The Boom is Over--Long Live the Art
"The contemporary art market is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. Sales are vaporizing ...rents are due. The boom that was is no more... In the 21st century, New York is just one more art town among many... Contemporary art belongs to the world."
Read it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/arts/design/15cott.html?sq=holland%20cotter&st=cse&scp=4&pagewanted=all
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