Kevin Landers, “Photographs 1990–2007”

Untitled (I Love New York Cup)

Photograph courtesy Elizabeth Dee Gallery

Kevin Landers may be the best artist you’ve never heard of. For 17 years, the New York photographer has been scouring the Lower East Side, locating beauty and humor in the humblest spots—a curbside trophy collection, hand-scrawled bodega signs, the Pollock-like cheesescape on top of a slice. His portraits, found on the street—and in its moral equivalents the Laundromat and deli—are mostly character studies of crusty old men or erotic glimpses of extroverted young women (the latter suggest unmediated versions of Richard Prince’s “Girlfriends”). The big question posed by this beautifully edited midcareer survey of 69 color photographs is: Why isn’t Landers a star?

The answer is, in part, timing. Landers, 41, is the heir apparent to photographers like Stephen Shore and Garry Winogrand. But when he started showing in 1990, straight shooters like Shore (Winogrand died in 1984), while respected, occupied a photo ghetto distinct from the contemporary art world. (Times change, and the insatiable market has since embraced the genre, with Shore picked up by 303 Gallery in 2000 and Joel Sternfeld represented by Luring Augustine since 2004, to name just two emigrés to the insider ranks.) The big photo news in the early ’90s was the “setup” school, epitomized by the Blue Velvet Encounters of the Third Kind vision of Gregory Crewdson. The decade also ushered in a popular German import, the gargantuan print.

The largest works in Landers’s show are three 1992 photos of plastic bags snagged on tree branches (seven years before American Beauty’s paean to the abject sack) that measure a relatively modest 66 inches, and most of the works are closer to 16" x 20".

Before hitting his stride on the street in the mid-1990s, Landers played cultural anthropologist, gathering material in the “field” of the LES and bringing it back to his studio to document. (He has a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his early work has a touch of the deadpan comedic Conceptualism favored in the late ’80s/early 90s by Windy City artists like Hirsch Perlman.)

The show opens with a salon-style installation of nine photos shot between 1990 and 1993 (like all the works here, they’re unframed and pinned directly to the wall). Bedraggled coffee cups and squeegees (purchased from panhandlers and squeegee men) share a wall with squat plastic bottles of Kool-Aid-colored drinks (a.k.a. “junkie juice”). Isolating his subjects one by one against glowing white backgrounds, Landers elevates gutter fodder to the heroic stature of icon, a gesture that is at once hilarious and oddly touching. The expanded scale—24" x 20" may be a small picture, but it’s a damn big paper cup—enhances the air of uncanny dislocation. These images, while timeless, also speak of a vanished era: pre-Giuliani New York.

The rest of the show jumps back and forth in time, and up and down in scale, privileging visual rhythms over chronology or theme. There’s one wall of minimal still lifes: A mustard-yellow peg board displays three forlorn phone cords; a pristine white Styrofoam cup and a cigarette butt, ash still attached, perch on an unvarnished table by a cinder-block wall; empty white lawn chairs cluster on an aqua tile floor. I’ve never considered the affinity between the noir haiku of Dike Blair’s snapshot-based gouaches and Landers’s work before, but there it is. Another wall is devoted to grids: piles of birdcages, shelves of laundry bags, a headful of hair-curlers spied through a chain-link fence. But Landers ruptures the distancing formalist interval with an image of three stacks of tabloids, whose headlines scream SLAUGHTER ON THE 5:33, MASSACRE and RUSH-HOUR BLOODBATH.

If still lifes dominate the show, portraits are its heart. Landers has a sharp eye for the old coots; my favorite is the skinny man who leans on his cane with a pinkie crooked in the air. His concave grin is denture-free, but far from presenting an Arbuslike geek, the portrait is a study in longevity, humanity and joy. Seeing through Landers’s eyes, we’re reminded what an absurd privilege it is to live in this city and to look at this world.