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Still images run deep
[Photo: Dawoud Bey]
"Sharmaine, Vincent, Joseph, Andre and Charlie"
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By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 10, 2002
''Photography's Multiple Roles,'' the new exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art, embraces photography in all its ambiguity and genres.
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TAMPA -- It sounds like the title of a term paper -- "Photography's Multiple Roles: Art Document, Market, Science." And there is a whiff of academic earnestness wafting through the new show at the Tampa Museum of Art. But an equal part of subversion underpins it, and that's why the show is more than just another stroll through the history of photography, which is the way many comprehensive photography shows appear.
"Photography's Multiple Roles" is a traveling exhibit of about 200 images organized by the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago from its permanent collection of more than 5,000 images.
Photography has worked hard to gain first the attention and then the respect of the art world. It has certainly been around long enough to have joined the pantheon of traditional media such as painting and sculpture. Yet its status as a medium joined at the hip with technology, which is always changing the rules, continues to make photography suspect for some.
This exhibition does not dance around photography's ambiguities. It embraces them. The photographs are divided into four general groupings: art, documentary, commercial and scientific. There is some blurring of those lines, which curator Elaine Gustafson acknowledges in the way she has displayed the show. Angled, free-standing walls mark the end and beginning of each section, and those walls are used to display photographs that might be categorized in several ways.
Some early work by notables such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Louise Dahl-Wolfe are included. But this is mostly about American photography in the latter part of the last century and, more specifically, the influence Robert Frank had on fellow fin de siecle photographers.
Only three Frank images are included in the exhibition, but his aesthetic pervades it. In the 1950s, Frank, a naturalized American born in Switzerland, loaded his family into a station wagon and went looking for America. The images he returned with -- all 28,000 -- were different from the homogeneous, Eisenhower prosperity seen in publications such as Life. Frank found a country divided by race and class, and used his camera to craft Edward Hopperesque images of loneliness and alienation.
[Photo: Harry Callahan]
"Chicago"
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His photographs have a raw, candid quality that appalled those working to elevate photography to an art form. His book, The Americans, published in 1958, flopped. He has since been vindicated, and he paved the way for a younger generation of unconventional practitioners such as Diane Arbus and Duane Michaels, both represented here.
The photography-as-art section is the most self-conscious and also the one in which viewers will linger longest. Michaels' group of four prints, Gilles, references the Victorian love of creating a sequence of posed images that act as a narrative of domestic life. Michaels combines a lot of irony with his artistry, as does William Wegman, in a portrait of his Weimaraners in life jackets. Joel-Peter Witkin's The Fool, Budapest, is witty and hilarious, like a Monty Python movie, with references to Titian's Rape of Europa and Velazquez's Phillip IV on Horseback.
If photography's status as an art form has been debatable to some, its triumph as a commercial medium and documentary tool is not. Both of those sections show the range of possibilities photographers have found to examine war, natural disasters and consumerism. And to advance the art of portraiture.
Shelby Lee Adams' The Home Funeral is a beautifully composed slice of life in which we are taken, with a godlike omniscient perspective, into the home of a grieving Appalachian family where sorrow, surprise and resignation mingle on the faces.
The portrait of Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for a Gap ad by Annie Leibovitz, is an unrepentent ego trip, from its huge size to the swagger of Kiedis' pose.
Some of the most artful photographs are those in the science section. Who knew a gallstone could be beautiful? This group shows photography as both a tool of science and a product. Harold Edgerton's Football Kick, one of the few color images in the show, captures the moment when a foot meets a football and was made possible by the invention of stroboscopic light. Abelardo Morell's dreamy Camera Obscura Image of Houses Across the Street in Our Bedroom uses the primitive pinhole camera in a box technique but makes his bedroom one big box that records itself and the world beyond.
Absent from this show is any image by Edward Steichen, which, intentionally or not, is symbolic. Steichen, one of the pioneers of the medium, was a proponent of fine art photography. He believed in making his subjects -- be they Camel cigarettes or Greta Garbo -- glamorous and beautiful. He was a master of detail and precision whose influence became even more widespread after being appointed director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s. There, he organized a huge exhibition, "The Family of Man," which traveled around the world for several years and furthered his aesthetic agenda.
It would have been antithetical to many of the photographers represented in this show. But there's a place for both points of view, and an exhibition such as "Photography's Multiple Roles" gives mainstream photographers and contrarians alike their due and demonstrates that sometimes the line is fine indeed between art and science, document and commerce, beauties and beasts.
[Photo: Dennis Stock]
"Untitled" from James Dean, a Memorial Portfolio
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REVIEW: "Photography's Multiple Roles: Art, Document, Market, Science" is at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, through Jan. 5. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Monday. Admission is $5 with discounts for students and senior. (813) 274-8130.
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