© Anders Goldfarb

  A choice selection of recent photographs by Brooklyn based artist Anders Goldfarb will be on display at Safe-T-Gallery in Dumbo starting on May 15th and running through June 15th. “Constants and Variables” represents the latest segment of what is becoming a life-long project documenting the changing physical and psychological states of formerly blue-color, now rapidly-gentrifying, North Brooklyn and the surrounding areas.
  With an Atget-like intensity of vision, Goldfarb records both the remnants of the past still visible in Williamsburg and Greenpoint (with occasional forays into Long Island City and beyond) as well as the ‘variables’ -- those moments of unexpected beauty and transcendence that appear before the solitary traveller in the city. For Goldfarb’s recent one-person show at PS1, the show’s curator Phong Bui wrote, “Like Robert Frank, who once said he wanted viewers to look at his pictures and feel the way they do when they are compelled to re-read a line from a poem, Goldfarb’s photographs are hidden poetry behind an obvious appearance.”
  The photographs of Anders Goldfarb are not conventionally pretty. This is not because they focus on unpleasant subjects, they are largely everyday scenes taken from the perspective of an observant pedestrian. And not because they are technically lacking, they are carefully visualized and purposely printed. Rather, they have a mystery and gravitas that discourages easy, superficial absorption. The most interesting parts are not in the highlights or the darkest areas; they are in the vast seas of middle greys, the areas where the decades leading up to the moment of the photograph and, perhaps, the decades to follow, reside.
  Anders Goldfarb has been exhibiting his photographs since 1986. In addition to the recent eponymous show at PS1 he has had a recent one-man show at the OK Harris Gallery in New York and has been in numerous private and museum exhibits across the country. His work is held by the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Brooklyn Public Library and other public and private collections.