© Joshua Lutz. courtesy Clampart. Above: Pretty Boy Floyd.

Because of basement flooding during Hurricane Sandy, ClampArt in New York City may be weeks without electrical power. But gallery owner Brian Clamp expects to open Joshua Lutz‘s new show, “Hesitating Beauty,” as scheduled on November 29.

Blending family archives, interviews, and letters with his own photographic images, Lutz spins a seamless and strangely factual (yet unflinchingly fabricated) experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness. Rather than showing us what it looks like, “Hesitating Beauty” plays with conceptions of reality to show what it feels like to grapple with a family member’s retreat from lucidity. The work breaks down the structure of the photograph as “truth” and challenges the traditional function of the medium in building narrative.

“Holding on so tightly to what I believed was sanity and being consumed by fear of depression and schizophrenia prevented me from being fully present to my mother’s reality,” the photographer writes. “The past few years, as she slipped away from the aggressive paranoia and depression of my youth to an almost calming sense of delusion, made it much easier for me to rid the anger that veiled my life and to attempt to find a place of empathy and compassion as I managed her care. In making this work and simultaneously falling deeper into her psychosis, I tried to imagine a time when the past, present and future collided; a place where the weight of memory is heavier than reality.”

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Voetganger No. 017, 2008 © Gus Powell

In 1609 Henry Hudson discovered Manhattan Island for the Dutch, founding their New World colony. To celebrate the 400th anniversary, New York photographers Joshua Lutz, Gus Powell, Richard Rothman and Carl Wooley were each commissioned last year to explore a different aspect of Amsterdam: the outskirts, the street, and the night. The photographers were not only struck by Amsterdam’s small scale and peacefulness—but also by more subtle things such as the transparency of the Dutch houses with their big windows, which give every passer-by a glimpse into the private world of the inhabitants. The resulting images reveal an unknown side of the Dutch capital. A selection of photographs by Lutz, Powell and Wooley will be exhibited in the New York City premier of NY Perspectives: Amsterdam discovered by NY Photographers on view at 25CPW, May 8–17. An artist reception will be held on Tuesday, May 11th, 6–9pm.