The Spring Cleaning, a series of three photo shows curated by New York-based photographers Benedict Brink and Todd Jordan, opens on Friday May 29th – but there won’t be an opening reception, as such. The show’s venue, a Laundromat on Elizabeth Street, at the border of Chinatown and Soho, did not want to deter customers from doing their laundry.
“I mentioned doing a show, and Todd mentioned this laundromat that had pictures on the wall. There were these amazing, curled-around-the-edges, old reportage-type images that had apparently been on the walls of this laundromat for five years. We went in once with a friend who speaks some Chinese and had an incredible sheet of Mandarin and Cantonese translations from her mum, trying to convince them to let us take over the walls, but they still said no!”
Three tries later, they got a yes. The series will exhibit work from 24 photographers, some well known and some less so, including Larry Clark, Ed Templeton, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Kersti Jan Werdal, Maya Handley, Motoyuki Daifu, Meshach Falconer Roberts and Jack Webb. Many of the photographs explore portraiture and still more are connected to youth; these recurrences and thematic threads were not intentional on the part of Brink and Jordan, but they weren’t wholly accidental, either.
“A lot of these photographers came from or are traveling down similar roads,” Jordan says. “These are all photographers whose work both Benedict and I feel connected to in some way, and we feel a part of this genre, I guess.”
“It kind of was just intuitive selections that then turned out to be really connected – all very spirited and energetic,” Brink says. “We're both engaging with photography everyday so we’re both super invested, and it's nice to put something together that is so fun and affirmative, and is proof of all the great reasons why we bother.”
The Spring Cleaning will be on display over just three dates (get in!) May 29, June 26 and July 24
