An exhibit of U.S. photographs at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art reminds us of our common humanity.
By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
Published December 4, 2005
SARASOTA - Some among us of a certain age, or any student of photography, will remember the "Family of Man" exhibition organized by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. It was monumental, with more than 500 photographs by almost 300 photographers, some famous, some unknown, that pictured life in the 1950s using images of people and places throughout the world. They were grouped into universal themes that conveyed the clear message that, regardless of station or status, we all breathe the same atomic dust. It was one of the most successful photography shows in history and changed the way they were organized thereafter.
An echo of it drifts through "Picturing What Matters: An Offering of Photographs from the George Eastman House Collection" at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. This exhibition is smaller, with a scope limited to the United States, though its chronological reach of more than 150 years is much broader. But its organization around themes and a blatant purpose to shepherd us into the common fold of human aspirations, loss and love invokes Steichen's grand opus. The shows also have similar, cataclysmic motivators: Steichen was responding to McCarthyism and the Cold War; Eastman House organizers state theirs is a response to 9/11.
So, fittingly, it opens with the juxtaposition of two battlegrounds that have become consecrated in the public mind in part through iconic, unforgettable photographs of American flags being raised: one at Iwo Jima by Marines and another at ground zero by firefighters. As often as we have seen both, they never fail to stir our emotions, and they tell us right away the purpose of "Picturing What Matters."
Despite the two photographs' patriotic appeal, their differences - black and white versus color, military war versus terrorist attack, for example - also set up a then-now dialogue that continues through the show.
To see it at its best, you need to be counterintuitive and start on the left side of the gallery rather than going to the right, which most of us always do. (I learned that from reading a study about museum viewing habits.)
The first theme, the Road, sets us on our journey. We see our forefathers traveling by horse and buggy across sand dunes in an image by Timothy O'Sullivan from the 1860s. O'Sullivan's work is sprinkled throughout the show and it's a wonderful discovery. He earned his chops as a field photographer during the Civil War and was hired by the government to document survey expeditions throughout the West. He never approached his subjects as art, but they have a visual strength and eloquence equal to the best of Ansel Adams and Margaret Bourke-White, two of the many more famous names represented in the show.
Farther along, a train crosses a river on a bridge held up by steel poles that look as substantial as pick-up sticks, a moment captured by William Henry Jackson several decades later. We zoom through the 20th century via a Greyhound bus that seems the size of a toy as it speeds past the Great Salt Lake in a photograph by Elaine Mayes from 1975. In that same year, Michael Becotte shot his car as he drove it around a narrow curve, the hood stretching out as if to meet the thin dividing line of the road and just avoiding a precipice.
Glimpses, the second theme, slows us down with a random collection of faces and places that illustrates the diversity of life in the United States and the way lifestyles have changed over a century. Some are hilarious, such as the 1909 postcard by an unidentified photographer in which two men in a boat hook a fish altered in size to leviathan proportions.
In some cases, the photographs suggest comparisons between the past and the present. In View of Luna Park by George P. Hall and Son, Coney Island visitors in 1912 are decked out in jaunty boaters, coats and ties, inviting the observation that in today's theme parks, only the entertainers would be so dressed up. The same could be said of Aaron Siskind's well-known Savoy Dancers kicking up their heels in high fashion. Edward Farber's The Flag is Passing By from 1941, with men's smart salutes on a bandstand mirrored by young boys lying on their stomachs underneath it, is a nostalgic reminder of how changed are our patriotic responses.
The Family theme sprawls through two galleries with continued emotional freight. A somber group of daguerreotype portraits of Civil War soldiers received at the dead letter office are framed together. An 1899 platinum print by Frances Benjamin Johnston of children and their teacher in a garden hangs near a 1960s portrait by Larry Clark, taken from above, of a man smoking in bed while holding a baby. The differences in the subjects' circumstances are obvious but more interesting is the subtle way white fabric highlights them. In the former, everyone wears starched muslin, obeying conventions; in the latter, a rumpled, unironed sheet suggests a certain abandonment. Lewis Hine, who famously documented the miseries of tenement life in New York, surprises us with two mothers sitting in cozy domesticity on a roof lined with laundry, smiling, knitting, taking care of their infants.
Workers is the most focused theme. Men atop the Empire State Building work in balletic choreography in another series by Hine that lyrically recorded the building's construction in 1931. Bourke-White's cerebral shot of the Fort Peck Dam for Life magazine contrasts with Alvin Langdon Coburn's carbon print of tunnel builders that looks more like a drawing.
The Icons gallery seems surprisingly small given the range of interpretations organizers give it. But as they do elsewhere in the exhibition, the photographs are often used as compelling associations. For example, Coburn's take on the Grand Canyon makes us think about Adams' series. We look at the dramatic photograph from the 1968 Olympics in which the gold and silver medalists, both African-American, raise their fists in protest on the podium and then see Steichen's portrait of Martha Graham, completely shrouded, who also raises her hand, only the fingers peeking out, in another form of iconoclasm. Dorothea Lange's haunting migrant mother looks as if she never spent a day without worry while Nikolas Muray's Babe Ruth looks as if he doesn't know what the word means.
The final theme, Legacy, lands one back in the front galleries with a gentle thud. Previous themes are reiterated: the beauty and diversity of the American Landscape, the hardness and sweetness of life that coexist both in a photograph of a young boy walking through a ruined slum carrying a new doll house in 1970 and in the portrait of Abraham Lincoln from 1860. "Picturing What Matters" leaves us with the sense that everything has to matter or nothing will.
"Picturing What Matters: An Offering of Photographs from the George Eastman House" is at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 5401 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota, through Jan. 19. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily except Christmas and New Year's Day. Admission is $15 for adults, $12 for seniors and free to children 12 and younger, Florida students and teachers with ID. Admission includes Ca d'Zan and the Circus Museum. Call (941) 351-1660.
