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LENNIE BENNETTPhotos in two exhibits arrest vision with slices of reality, then open vistas of possibility only the soul can understand.
ST. PETERSBURG - With what wonder French naturalist Henri Mouhot must first have seen the temples of Angkor in 1860, the vast, sleeping ruins of the ancient capital of the Khmers, almost hidden by the jungles of what is now Cambodia. These sacred spaces, built between 879 and 1191 A.D. to honor their kings, Hindu gods and later Buddha, had been all but unknown to the Western world. Mouhot's journals and drawings brought them to its attention and created an interest in the region that continues today.
"Sacred Space: Angkor Wat in 19th and 20th Century Photography" at the Museum of Fine Arts captures the sense of wonder and mystery it continues to exert on Westerners who visit the region, especial Angkor Wat, the largest temple, built in the early 12th century and sprawling across 500 acres.
The exhibition is both historical document and fine art. It is also the vision of Tampa attorney and accomplished photographer Robert Sanchez who, with his wife, Elizabeth, first visited Cambodia in the 1990s. That visit started their single-minded acquisition of photographs of Angkor Wat; the images cover 140 years, including several decades of war that almost destroyed the temple.
The earliest inclusions are engravings and photographs from the 1870s by Frenchmen who were there to make straightforward renderings of the site. By 1901, shortly before Cambodia became a French colony, the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, or French Institute of the Far East, was sending teams of historians, archaeologists and photographers who served not only as recorders of the monuments but as their curators. Their mission was slowed by civil strife in the 1970s and 1980s but never completely halted.
The EFEO images are first-rate archival prints, mostly taken by anonymous members of those teams, and are among the most haunting and beautiful in the collection, such as that of a Buddhist monk, photographed in 1930, seated in a doorway, light spilling into his darkened space as he seems to contemplate Angkor Wat's towers outside and beyond him.
That sense of stillness pervades most of the photographs, even the 20th-century ones of the temples, reminders that while many consider Angkor Wat a world-class tourist destination, it remains a place of worship for many Cambodians.
Works from that era remind us, too, that whatever their greatness, monuments, like men, are mortal, especially in times of war. Photographs of soldiers, some of them children with hardened faces, by Burk Uzzle and Bill Burke are interspersed among portraits of monks and farmers like mementos moris.
The exhibition is enhanced by sandstone statuary from the 12th century and 13th century of the Hindu god Ganesha and Buddha and relief carvings of dancers who guarded the temples, borrowed from the Museum of Asian Art in Sarasota.
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As Minor White once said, a photograph can be about "things for what they are" and also "for what else they are." Both views are represented in a small but fine show, also at the Museum of Fine Arts, "From Ansel Adams to Burk Uzzle: Photographers' Gifts to the Collection."
While the museum has a collection of more than 1,000 images, these are special ones, given by the individuals who created them, not gifts from wealthy patrons or museum purchases. So they can be viewed as more than excellent and varied examples of a medium: They're close to the photographers' hearts, those of which, presumably, they're proudest.
Ansel Adams' Morning Mist, Cascade Pass, Northern Cascades, Washington, 1948 and Paul Strand's Outer Hebrides, Scotland, 1954 are in the "what they are" category, gorgeous black-and-white landscapes of the highest order. Charles Cawley's Winslow, Az. is a "what else they are" landscape, a digital color print of a rest area in a national park with a cutout "viewing window" in a brick wall framing and minimizing the magnificent view, like a photograph of the scene rather than the real one. It's a witty reminder of the mistake tourists often make: so busy trying to memorialize a trip on film that they miss the experience of actually being there.
Documentary photography, sometimes reduced to point-and-click triviality, doesn't get much better than Burk Uzzle's Two Men with Sign, Martin Luther King Jr. Funeral, 1968. The literalness of the scene, the fact that it's in stark black-and-white, and its composition - a black man angled slightly to the left while a white man peering over his shoulder is angled to the right - resonate with metaphor. It's both a straightforward record of an event and an elevation of that event to a more profound plane.
Collaged and combined images, as well as other virtuosities in the darkroom and on the computer, have become the showoffs of the photography world. Barbara Morgan, most famous as a dance photographer, overlays a black-and-white silhouette of dancer Erick Hawkins leaping through the air with a photogram of tulips, their still, curving stems mimicking his movement, then layers both over a New York City street scene of people trudging through snow that reminds one of Alfred Stieglitz's famous street scene. Neil Farkas' color montage of tiny digital images comprises variations on a theme he arranges to form a single, larger image announcing that theme. The most well known is his One Flag series; this one, Street of Memories is a grid of street scenes from his old neighborhood in Detroit that merge to form a trompe l'oeil street sign.
And then there are the portraits, a genre that can devolve into smarmy vanity shots or can rise to penetrating character studies, as do the several here. Both Herb Snitzer and Yousef Karsh use natural light spilling from windows to illuminate their subjects. Snitzer captures fellow photographer Aaron Siskind standing in front of a simple arrangement of zinnias and an abstract painting, a domestic scene that belies Siskind's social activism. Karsh, celebrated for making famous faces look better than they are even as he gets beneath those beautiful surfaces, chose instead to be represented by a portrait of an anonymous Eskimo woman sitting up in a hospital bed, full of serenity and dignity, as a ray of light from a clerestory window slices across her forehead.
Every other photograph in this show is worth discussion, too. I hope you'll see them all for yourself and continue the conversation.
- Lennie Bennett can be reached at lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW
"Sacred Space: Angkor Wat in 19th and 20th Century Photography" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, through Dec. 28. "From Ansel Adams to Burk Uzzle: Photographers' Gifts to the Collection" is on view through Jan. 4. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission $8. (727) 896-2667.