For our In Brief column, our critics sort through and select from New York's art offerings to present a group of short reviews that share a thread, theme, medium, or neighborhood. In this installment, CULTURED Co-Chief Art Critic Johanna Fateman looks beyond the glut of paintings on view in galleries now to find three, very different photography exhibitions. The search took her to East Williamsburg, Chelsea, and the Lower East Side.
Dietmar Busse
Amant | 315 Maujer Street, Brooklyn
Through February 16, 2025
For the artist-photographer Dietmar Busse, Manhattan is an enchanted isle, and each of his portrait subjects is the hero of a story—that’s one possible interpretation of his exhibition title “Fairytales 1991–1999.” Another might be that this from-the-vault parade of never-before-shown Polaroid images, shot during his first decade in New York (Busse grew up in a small village in Northern Germany), charts his own magical journey. Traveling by bicycle usually, using a heavy Polaroid 600SE camera (which he first tried out and fell in love with at the Meatpacking District rental studio where he worked), he photographed people he encountered, from the Chelsea Piers to Harlem, leaving one instant print behind with them as part of the exchange.
