Mise-en-Scène: Two Exhibitions of Photography

Two photography exhibitions currently on view, Tableau and Transformation, and Contemporary Performance, at the Tampa Museum of Art and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts respectively, explore themes of artifice and theatricality in photography since the mid-20th century. Viewed together they harmonize visual trends that came after modernism and that have persisted through the first decades of the 21st century.

Both exhibitions feature photographs that explicitly or implicitly reference cinema, a perfect art-world counterpoint to summer blockbuster movie season. The term “directorial mode,” coined by photo critic A. D. Coleman in 1977, is the relevant visual framework for many of the works in both exhibitions. Photographs in the directorial mode disrupt the tendency to read a photo as an unmediated truth or a slice of life, injecting instead theatricality and obvious created-ness.

Photos in the directorial mode are, quite simply, staged (though I cringe at that term because in photography it seems to carry a pejorative note–again because the expectation is that photographs are supposed to be “natural”). In Coleman’s words, “[Photographers] have simply substituted the credence with which photographs are normally approached for the suspension of disbelief which effective theater wins from its audience.”

Tableau and Transformation is a selection of photographs in the Museum’s permanent collection, with several loans from the collection of Tampa’s Trenam Law throughout. The corporate photography collection of Trenam Law is a sister collection of sorts to the TMA thanks to the cross-institutional efforts of William K. Zewadski at Trenam and Julie Saul of the Julie Saul Gallery in New York throughout the 1980s. It reads like a who’s who of photographic and conceptual artists from the 1960s forward, including important artists like Andres Serrano, William Wegman, John Baldessari, and Sandy Skoglund.

William Wegman (American, b. 1943), Waiting for Dinner, 1988. Dye Diffusion – Polaroid Polacolor II. 34 x 27 ½ inches. Tampa Museum of Art, Bequest of Edward W. Lowman by Exchange, 1989.040. © William Wegman 2019

A staged photograph can take many varied forms, which accounts for the visual diversity in Tableau and Transformation. It may literally reference the proscenium stage as Eileen Cowin’s Untitled (The Bathers) (1987) does, with its freeze-frame dramatically posed figures and deep green velvet curtains at stage right and left. Still lives, composites, and portraits can all be staged. There are narratives and nudes, altered polaroids (Lucas Samaras), and straightforward photos of Weimaraners (William Wegman). Even landscapes that are simply reporting on the scene before the camera, such as the trio of photos by Joel Sternfeld, feel staged, like scouted locations, sets that are awaiting their actors. The sheer diversity of possibility of staged photos, or unstaged photos that feel constructed, leads to an almost infinitely open theme. The TMA has strong holdings in 20th century photography and this is an opportunity to see some of its most important objects in that part of the collection.

Contemporary Performance at FMoPA features works from world-renowned photographers like Cindy Sherman (also represented in Tableau and Transformation) and Deborah Willis as well as emerging artists who matriculated locally, Becky Flanders and Selina Romàn among them. It is a tactile, sensory exhibition. The photographs within share vibrant color palettes and an insistent focus on the human figure. It, too, is comprised of photographs that are created in the directorial mode, though unlike Tableau and Transformation, it is more narrowly focused on narrative suggested by the actions of the people in the frame.

The title, Contemporary Performance, will clue some viewers in to what they may expect in the exhibition, though it is a reference that may resonate only with art-world insiders. Guest curator Kalup Linzy is himself an internationally significant multidisciplinary artist (most notably performance, music, and video) who took his MFA at USF in 2003.

Performance in art is different than performance of a play or of a role in a film. In art, the term is laden with decades of layered, often self-referential context and criticism. “Performance” can mean any and all of: a scripted video work; an ephemeral action designed to be experienced once with no connection to the art market (i.e., without an artifact to be later sold); or the photographic or video documentation of an ephemeral action that is intended to be sold. One-time performances from the 1960s and 70s are now commonly being reenacted by a new generation of artists, adding more layers of signification to the work in a new context. It is not uncommon to hear the term used in the context of performing gender, or to perform other aspects of one’s identity, often to open a space for critique of established social norms. In other words, it is a big term with many potential (and potentially conflicting) interpretations.

The type of performance that the work in the exhibition seems to relate to is the materiality of the human body as a mode of expression or recognizable structure for other variables. Based on the images alone, it seems that the presence of the figure is the connective thread. Locating the site of performance in each image, however, is challenging.

The exhibition provides no contextualization or didactic text beyond the very broad subtitle or description “explores gender, sexuality, class, race, and social identities, and will feature lens based works that convey, elude [sic] to, or concern itself with ideas encompassing performance and role playing.” This has the potential to leave viewers grasping for interpretive threads and possibly not finding them.

Questions I had as an informed art viewer were: How does each photo relate to the theme? What is the contribution of each artist to the curator’s vision? Maybe most importantly, which images show the artist participating in role play? It is not always obvious, especially if one doesn’t know what the artists look like. The professor in me wanted these terms to be defined as they relate to individual photographs within. Which images were dealing with role-playing and which were dealing with social identities? Or more broadly, which, if any, are tongue-in-cheek and which are meant to provoke serious discussion? It is not always easy to locate these important differences with visual information only. This exhibition, including most of the works at an individual level, would benefit from more contextualization for the viewer.

The most striking example of the need for context is in relation to the photograph CREMASTER 3: I Die Daily (2002) by Bjork’s ex-husband, Matthew Barney. When a viewer is confronted with the challenging image, they should have some guidance to help them through the ordeal of looking. Barney is a notorious artist who punishes his body in his performances. He is best known for The Cremaster Cycle, a suite of five big-budget feature-length films (a highly unusual format for video/performance art) in which he performs any number of athletic stunts as metaphors for initiation rites. All students of contemporary art know his name and may recognize some of his iconic imagery, such as the red mouthed Apprentice in his pink kilt and headdress, yet far fewer have ever viewed the Cremaster films because they sell for $100,000 per set, are unreleased individually, and are screened rarely, all by the artist’s decree.

The photograph is disturbing: Barney is in a surgical suite, surrounded by a group of authoritative men wearing aprons that reference those of Freemasons–they all look directly out of the frame at the viewer. His body is partially wrapped in white sheets, his head is covered by a hood with runnels of red coming from the hole cut into the hood, filled by what appears to be a metallic object that must be in his mouth. Barney’s testicles are fitted with an inscrutable white plastic device–is it a surgical tool? The artist’s perineum is at the viewer’s eye-level (possibly referencing the cremaster muscle for which his work is named), and something soft and pink seems to be slithering off the gynecological exam chair and toward the viewer (is it meant to evoke a severed penis, or prolapsed intestines?). I think there are also teeth.

This image is presented without any didactic text to help situate the viewer in relation to what they are seeing. The decision to forego interpretive didactic text is common in commercial art galleries, where viewers are invited to experience the work and bring their own interpretation. Possibly this was a deliberate choice by Linzy to emulate that experience–it is, however, highly unorthodox in museum practice.

Those of us versed in contemporary art are hard to shock, but we would all do well to remember that our familiarity with images like this is rarified and reified, as access to Barney’s videos make clear. To introduce an image like this to an unsuspecting public without any interpretive guidance, in my opinion, has the potential to further alienate viewers who already find contemporary art inscrutable.

Selina Romàn, Drowning in a Desert from the “Please Disturb” series, 2016. Archival Inkjet print. 36 x 24 inches. On loan from the artist.

Barney’s work in the exhibition is exceptional both in its difficulty and its obscurity. The majority of the images, even if the relationship to an aspect of performance is not clearly defined, are engrossing in the narratives they suggest. Selina Romàn’s Drowning in a Desert (2016) feels like a still from a much larger story that leaves the viewer wanting to know more.

Video still from Paula Wilson’s “Salty and Fresh” (2014), Video.

Salty and Fresh (2014) by Paula Wilson is a delightful video that makes the role of artist as performer for her public very clear. In the video Wilson is in a structural dress that elevates her about 10 feet above the sea that she’s standing in. She holds a giant palette and is painting her models’ bodies with a paintbrush several yards long while onlookers picnic on the shore and document the spectacle with their phones. The dress structure renders her unable to move and must continually face the audience and paint her models. If Barney’s Cremaster references the endurance model of being an artist in the public eye, this is a more lighthearted and accessible way to communicate the public persona that artists must perform, tolerate, and embrace.

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida, with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She also has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

Tableau and Transformation: Photography from the Permanent Collection is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through Sunday, October 20, 2019. Julie Saul, of the Julie Saul Gallery in New York, was instrumental in developing the Museum’s interest in collecting contemporary photography and will be speaking at a Tampa Collects evening event at the Museum on Tuesday, October 1st. For information about attending and joining Tampa Collects, please contact Kate Douglass at the Tampa Museum of Art.

Contemporary Performance remains on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts through Saturday, August 31, 2019. There will be a special closing reception on Friday, August 23, 2019 starting at 5:00 pm, with a lecture featuring the exhibition’s curator Kalup Linzy following at 6:00 pm. For additional information about attending the public event, please contact the Museum.

Our Country’s Family Pictures: Here and Now

Our Country’s Family Pictures: Here and Now

Tyra Mishell

Untitled (Memories) from the series Family Pictures, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and Samsøñ.

Walking into this exhibition, steve locke: the color of remembering, I was first drawn to the photos with the ornate picture frames. Looking at the frames, I was instantly reminded of the sort of objects in my mother’s home and the sticky vinyl inspirational messages written in cursive on the walls of her kitchen. But after looking closer at a pretty light blue frame that read “MEMORIES” [Untitled (Memories)] on a golden plaque, I had to look away. I was not saddened or shocked by the photo of a Black man strung up on a tree, surrounded by observing multigenerational white bodies. I’ve seen photos like this before. I have seen photos like this recently. I looked away as a reflex. As a coping mechanism. These kitschy picture frames, photographed on top of a smooth wooden surface and a vibrant colored backdrop, looked like television screens to me. These domestic, familiar picture frames look just like my newsfeed. Steve Locke’s Family Pictures series are mementos inside of the homes of America’s dominant culture. The work in this series brings into focus America’s continuing tradition of violence and subjugation of Black people. Locke does this in a clever way by bringing us into Somebody’s living room and having us come to accept that this tradition is as American as my own mother’s “ EAT DRINK AND BE MERRY” vinyl quote on the kitchen wall.

I had the privilege of attending Steve Locke’s artist talk at the opening of the show and hearing him talk about the subject of the work was helpful in understanding Family Pictures in today’s political and social climate. After the talk and we spent some time discussing the spectacle nature of “Black Death” in the media. Violence towards Black people often goes viral in a sensationalized way. It feels like the announcement of a new “Black Death” is like the release of the most current iPhone. The hype comes and goes like new technology and returns when replaced with the next one. Media outlets delight in providing the public with new and exciting footage for controversy’s sake. In his exhibition statement, Locke goes on to write: “You can see a video, repeatedly (or even as a background image) as two people discuss a man being strangled or shot. To death. The prohibition of showing the deaths of victims is waived when the victim is black. Their last words are broadcasts. Their bodies left in the street as a warning, or as a provocation. You cannot imagine seeing the victims of Columbine or hearing the tapes of Sandy Hook, but for some reason, you can see a black man killed on your television. You can sit in a pub, a waiting room, your well-appointed home with its flat screen tv and see someone killed. These images are public and private and downright quotidian.” The images that we see every day are not coincidental, but deliberate attacks. It is about power and dominance. Our ability to spread information quickly has resulted in a different kind of cultural consciousness.

Untitled (I Can’t Believe We Did That!) from the series Family Pictures, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and Samsøñ.

Two works in particular that have been stuck in my memory for weeks are Untitled (I Can’t Believe We Did That!) and Untitled (Mother). Both photographs involve something so uncomfortable literally reframed into something more pleasing, more palatable to look at. The frames resemble mass-produced picture frames with someones staged memory inside. Looking at Untitled (I can’t believe we did that) in all of its pretty blue glory seriously messed me up. The photo shows the lynching of two Black men (Thomas Shipp and Adam Smith) in Indiana in the year 1930. Below them, is a crowd of white spectators pointing at their bodies and looking at the camera. At the bottom of the frame, it reads “I Can’t Believe We Did That!” This historical picture was originally produced as a postcard, a keepsake, a pleasant memory. It is a funny statement. I’ve heard many variations of “I Can’t Believe We Did That!” From white people apologizing to me about slavery, Jim Crow, and police violence. I imagine the white people in this picture to have thought the same way. I imagine that they too could not believe that they were lucky enough to get such good seats at a hanging and be able to memorialize it.

Untitled (Mother) from the series Family Pictures, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and Samsøñ.

I am always drawn to images representing Black womanhood, especially ones that involve racial archetypes. I believe that it is important to remember and notice the roots of these inherently violent stereotypes. In Untitled (Mother) we immediately associate the woman in the picture as a caretaker or the “Mammy” archetype. According to a source, the woman is Mattie Lee Martin and the image is dated between 1950-1960. It is a beautiful portrait, with Mattie Lee Martin smiling while holding up a cheerful looking white baby. The text underneath the photo reads “Because of you, my world is a better place.” The narrative behind the Mammy character would claim that she would have loved the child as she would love her own and that she would have been content in her domestic role. The quote on the frame is a true statement. In this country, Black women have had to survive. As apart of her survival she has had to maintain the lives of white families, and raise them up through her mental, physical, and emotional labor. I think of this now in a contemporary context. I think of myself when navigating white spaces. I think of myself having to coddle white folk’s feelings when they’ve mistreated me. After reflecting on my own interpretations of the work, I thought about how non-black people were responding to the pictures. I ignored the weird, sympathetic, and disbelief that was coming from their mouths. I wanted to know how their insides felt.

I love how Locke’s work forces us to acknowledge the disconnect between the dominant culture and everybody else. I believe that the disconnect is both subconscious and conscious. The circulating of the past photos used in Family Pictures resemble the 24/7 unproductive and dehumanizing distribution of Black Trauma in the present. We want to remember these atrocities as atypical and that only the most evil people were complacent. We want to remember it all as a rarity. We want to believe in the “good ones.” As we refuse to recognize this as tradition and common practice, we continue to silence the oppressed and commit ourselves to misunderstand.

Tyra Mishell was born and raised in Bradenton, Florida in 1994. She is currently residing in Tampa where she will receive her BA in studio art from the University of South Florida in Spring 2019. She is a New Genres artist specializing in video, new media, sound, and performance. With a combined interest in media studies and the make believe, she produces IN SPACE TV, an experimental net-based television show.

steve locke: the color of remembering is on view at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery 221@HCC on the Dale Mabry campus through March 7, 2019. In addition to the photographs from the 2016 Family Pictures series, there is an installation of Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray). Locke is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA.

Tampa-based artist Omar Richardson exhibits large black and white woodblock prints and unique mono prints in Omar Richardson: My Story, My Truth on display in Gallery 3@HCC on the third floor. There is a public closing reception on Thursday, February 28 from 5 to 8 pm, with Richardson speaking at 6 pm.

steven locke: the color of remembering

On view through March 7th at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery 221 as part of an annual exhibition celebrating African American heritage and presented in conjunction with the Tampa Bay Black Heritage Festival.

steve locke: the color of remembering is on view at HHC’s Gallery 221 though March 7th.

This exhibition examines how African Americans have been depicted in ways which betrays explicit and implicit cultural prejudices depending, in this case, the age of the memory. From schematic diagrams of slave ships, historical photographs of lynchings, to modern day video, brutality and racism – institutional or otherwise – images have been made and disseminated which tacitly imply values which we should, indeed, must find deplorable.

Not only by subject matter but, significantly, it is through the means of presentation that Locke employs in the photography series Family Pictures, 2016, that he addresses how different standards apply, in particular, that there isn’t an universal sense of respect and dignity when it comes to the memorialization of the atrocious. Locke himself memorializes images of the barbaric, setting them in unexceptional frames, engraved with the platitudinous and set against strong colored backdrops – notions of remembering and color are brought to the fore – the colors are strong but it is an overall sense of banality which is most provocative and the taint on remembering which Locke communicates most powerfully.

steve locke: the color of remembering is on view at HHC’s Gallery 221 though March 7th.

In Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray), Locke further confronts how there remains to this day a biased filter as to presentation of the African-American experience in the media. In this case, the tragic death of Freddie Gray on April 12th, 2015 whilst in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. The intrusive and the demeaning combined with sensationalized reporting to ignore the dignity and suffering of this man. Validly, it might be asked had this not been a young African-American man whether the coverage would have taken on a different tone. By distilling the color palette of three commonly circulated photographs of Freddie Gray down to three hues of gray, Locke speaks to the debasement of this individual, his suffering and brutal death. Freddie Gray became a media-currency. His life and death had determined a value, that of a commodity. One that was exchanged between us and the news outlets. Locke shows us how we are complicit in this process, that the communication of outrage embraces complexities which have at their foundation the self same prejudices which they seek to make clear, here it is literally gray.

steven locke’s: the color of remembering at is a powerful exhibition. By bringing together the history of slavery, racism and subjugation through to the contemporaneous he threads a course of prejudices towards African Americans from the overt to the more hidden. It is instructive, in particular, how this exhibition focuses us on the modern day and practices which covertly but evidently seek to assuage the sensibilities of the mainstream at the expense of Black experience. The works themselves, are compelling and visually strong. The replication of composition in Family Pictures is one which has an unerring sense of imbalance. The images contained, framed with frames and repetitively composed powerfully suggest a diluting of content whilst, in fact, communicating the exact opposite. Steven Locke shows a consistent mastery of practice and sheer intellectual energy in working with the complexities of this difficult but very important subject matter. To be asked to re-think, indeed, re-remember and to give life and color to the challenging is the significant and worthy success of this exhibition.

At Bay Art Files, we have asked Tyra Mishell, who is pursuing a BA in Studio Art at the University of South Florida, to write about this powerful and timely exhibition. Her impressions of viewing the exhibition and meeting with the artist will post soon.

Faces in the Crowd

By Sabrina Hughes

Miki Kratsman’s exhibition People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) is a challenging exhibition, but maybe not for the reasons you would think. Though it deals with the emotionally and politically charged subject matter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the subject matter itself is blunt and direct, a presentation of visual facts. Miki Kratsman: People I Met doesn’t ask viewers to do much more than to look, and continue to look, even if it makes us uncomfortable.

Kratsman is an Argentinian-born Israeli photographer who began his career as a photojournalist before he began to exhibit in an artistic context. The photographs in the exhibition borrow the aesthetics and content of journalism but subtly transcend the strict ethics of non-interference that is the photojournalist’s code. One senses the presence of Kratsman’s own compassion to create work inviting viewers to take a prolonged look at faces and places that may be otherwise easily passed over with a glance.

Installation view of *Miki Kratsman: People I Met* at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

The dominant work in the USFCAM galleries is the project that gives the exhibition its name. The installation People I Met in the Lee and Victor Leavengood Gallery is an ongoing (2010-2018) collaboration between Kratsman and the Palestinian individuals who have borne witness to and participated in the decades-long conflict. Two-thousand grainy portraits fill three gallery walls, a scale that is challenging to describe and overwhelming to experience. Some people are looking straight at the camera and some gaze elsewhere. Kratsman’s source images are his own photographs from his career as a photojournalist, from 1993 to 2012. He delves into his archives to look behind the central subject matter and to create new images that isolate the faces of the countless bystanders.

Installation view of the exhibition *Miki Kratsman: People I Met* at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

Detail of the installation of the exhibition *Miki Kratsman: People I Met* at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

The photos, and especially some of the expressions on the people’s faces, make me wonder what was happening in the foreground of the photos these were excerpted from. What are they witnessing–what is making them smile or shout? And to speak more broadly to their original context, what or who are we overlooking in the background of the billions of images that have already been made? Whose daily routines brought them into the path of some newsworthy event, and therefore into the frame of the photojournalist present to document it? What photos are you in, unknowingly? Who were you then and are you different now? Most importantly, who is interested in what happened to you after the shutter clicked?

The photos are not only intended to be seen on gallery walls, in fact, they were first disseminated digitally. Kratsman posts the excerpted portraits to a Facebook Page dedicated to the project. More than twenty-thousand followers of the page see the images and comment on the photos of people they know, people they knew, or sometimes photos they recognize as themselves. Kratsman is literally picking faces from the crowds dispersed years ago and crowdsourcing the reply to the question “Do you know who this person is and what is his condition right now?” In the exhibition, some of these responses from the Page’s followers have been engraved on brass plaques. “My teacher, he was in prison but now he is out.” “He was the best man in Jordan Valley. Now he is dead.”

The plaques are in conversation with the photographs but exist at a physical and interpretive remove from the anonymous portraits. We don’t know to whom the plaques refer. If any of the 2,000 individuals pictured in this iteration of People I Met have been identified, are dead or alive, or of unknown status, we viewers do not know. We are invited to consider the text and the image separately and perhaps to imagine more about the relationship between the sea of faces and the comparatively few who have been recognized and whose status is known.

Kratsman’s People I Met runs counter to the emotional distance photojournalists must cultivate in order to do their job. Photojournalists often face criticism for taking a picture of a heinous scene rather than trying to help the people they photograph. Kratsman’s project of attempting to follow the thread of each individual’s life forward from when their paths crossed, always asking if they are in good health when a Facebook follower recognizes a friend or family member is a heartening gesture.

If the installation People I Met magnifies the sense of scale by isolating so many individual faces each affected by the conflict, the video 70 Meters… White T-Shirt (2017) does the opposite and compresses the impact. The video is a montage of every weapon discharge in the small village of Nabi Salih over the course of one year. After the sound of every gunshot, a rapid cut to the sound of another gunshot. We don’t always see where the shot is coming from and thankfully we never see anyone hit by a bullet. Watching the video, it all seems too brief. The shots come quickly and without reprieve (literally rapid-fire) but the acceleration of all of these incidents into the span of fewer than nine minutes seems to reduce the impact that these violent engagements have on the residents of the town. A shot that may change a life irrevocably is decontextualized and shortened to the length of time that the sound reverberates on the video.

Displaced (2010) and Bedouin Archive (2015-2016), the other two projects in the exhibition document Bedouin life in the Negev desert and towns that are targeted for demolition. In Bedouin Archive, photographs of individuals and buildings in various states of demolition are identified only with the latitude, longitude, altitude, image direction, and time stamp. A document in the truest sense to record where Kratsman was and when, and what was in front of his camera at that moment. If the villages are demolished and people scattered, these photographs serve as a map of sorts to locate the inhabitants in a time and place that may be lost.

One of photography’s unique qualities in relation to other art media is its indexicality. Most photography operates on the principle that what the viewer sees on the print was at one time in front of the camera. Indexicality is photography’s mirror-like characteristic that most of us now take for granted; that which makes it possible to see photography as a presentation of facts, of truth. The person we see in the photo stood in front of the camera if only for a fraction of a second. These people were here. Some still are. I know that person, she is well. This building stood here at this time. This is what the village looked like. These are the sounds residents experienced regularly.

Once an artwork is released from the protected insularity of the artist’s studio into the world, the artist can no longer control its interpretation. Every individual who looks at a work brings her own subjective viewpoint and beliefs to bear. Remarkable in Kratsman’s work is his retention of a documentary viewpoint while treating such highly emotional and potentially polarizing subject matter. One does not engage in light discourse about Israeli-Palestinian relations. By its very nature, this body of work, in particular, has the potential to be highly polarizing. Yet, when in the gallery space, the exhibition seems instead to function as a document of life in this historical moment.

Kratsman’s photographs and videos open a space for questioning the monolithic perception of both Israeli and Palestinian identities and instead to think about the subjectivity of each person, photographer and photographed, as a sum of their experiences extending forward and backward in time from the split second recorded in the photograph.

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida, with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She also has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

Miki Kratsman: People I Met is the first solo exhibition of this award-winning Israeli conceptual photographer to be presented in the United States and is on view at USFCAM through Saturday, December 8. It is the first exhibition organized by USFCAM’s newly appointed Curator-at-Large Christian Viveros-Fauné. A highly regarded international art critic and curator, Viveros-Fauné has also been named the 2018-2019 Kennedy Family Visiting Scholar at the USF School of Art and Art History.

RELATED EVENT: Film on the Lawn

Friday, November 16, 2018
6 PM
Free and open to the public.

USFCAM presents the award-winning documentary 5 Broken Cameras as part of their outdoor Film on the Lawn series. A first-hand account of non-violent resistance in the West Bank village of Bil’in, documented over a span of many years by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat and then edited and co-directed by Israeli Guy Davidi, the documentary has been hailed as an important work of both cinematic and political activism. For more information about this free event, visit the Museum’s Facebook Event Page.

LACMA Photography Curator to speak at the Museum of Fine Art St. Petersburg

Conversation with a Curator: Really! This is (So) Not a Selfie
Thursday, October 25th, 7-8 pm at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.
FREE with Museum admission, $10 on Thursdays after 5 pm.

The current exhibition This is Not a Selfie is drawn from a single collection, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eve Schillo, Assistant Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at LACMA, will be at the Museum on Thursday, October 25th for an informal 7 pm gallery talk to discuss the history of self-portraiture photography and its role in today’s image-driven, media-rich environment. #notaselfieMFA Image: Anne Collier, Mirror Ball [detail], 2004, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, © Anne Collier, courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles

My Camera My Self(ie)

by Sabrina Hughes

In my History of Photography course, there is a class meeting on the syllabus dedicated to discussing selfies. I’m sure my undergraduate students roll their eyes when they see this and wait for me to deliver a punchline that never arrives. Discussing selfies, even uttering the word at all, feels like a relic of 2014, a simpler time. There can’t possibly be any more defenses or lamentations can there? Can’t we just stop talking about them?

Not quite yet. The exhibition This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, Florida once again revives the conversation between the art of photographic self-portraiture and the omnipresent culture of the selfie.

Malick Sidibé, Malick lui même (Malick himself), 1972, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, © Malick Sidibé, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

The term selfie is cute. It’s a truncated form of self-portrait, just as the image produced is, presumably, dashed off quickly, without forethought, without composition, without art. The word, like the photo itself, and a characteristic projected onto people who take selfies, is infantilizing. Selfies are immature. They are not and will never be serious art. They are not worth talking about. SELF PORTRAITS, on the other hand, are demonstrative of the skill of the artist. They can be political, satirical, cutting. They can be ART. This artificial dichotomy permeates all critical discussions of selfies, and is the very cornerstone of the exhibition.

To anyone without a background in art, the title of the exhibition simply seems to reiterate that claim that selfies are somehow lesser than. But it asks us to grant these self-portraits the benefit of the doubt. Don’t worry, these aren’t selfies. They belong here.

The title is a direct reference to Rene Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) from 1928, also in LACMA’s permanent collection which may give some insight into the curatorial decision to reference this work in the title. The painting, which depicts a pipe floating on a flat ecru background with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” inscribed in cursive script beneath plays with the ways meaning is ascribed to objects. This is not, in fact, a pipe. It is a painting.

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe), 1928-29, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

This is Not a Selfie contends that the photographic self-portraits within are not selfies. They have loftier aspirations and have Something To Say. They are role play (like Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #5 from 1977), they are explorations of identity (like Claude Cahun’s photocollage I.O.U. (Self-Pride) from 1929-30), they are political statements (like Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait from 1988, a clear commentary on the devastation caused by AIDS in the gay community). Self-portraits can be artificial (like Lucas Samaras Photo Transformation 8/19/76), they can be authentic (like Malick Sidibé’s head-to-toe Malick lui même from 1972), they can be deadly serious or playful (like William Wegman’s Half and Halfs from 1973). They can be anything. Except they can’t be selfies.

Claude Cahun, I.O.U. (Self-Pride) 1929-1930, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, © Estate of Claude Cahun, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Certainly, a number of the photographs in the exhibition truly do not function within the art historical discourse of self-portraiture: they are not selfies. I think of Sherman’s Untitled Film Still series where she is very obviously not Cindy in front of the camera. She is an anonymous ingenue from a-movie-that-looks-familiar-but-you-can’t-quite-place-it. She is a fabrication. Likewise, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo of his recumbent torso and legs framing a street scene, for instance, seems less about him as a subject and more like a playful riff on his skill at finding a decisive moment even while he’s resting.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #5, 1977, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

In a number of the works, the photographers wear masks, turn their backs, or otherwise keep their face out of the camera’s sight. Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Untitled from The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (where everyone photographed for the project wears a rubber mask) confounds the viewer—it is hard to tell whether Meatyard also wears a mask or if his face is simply obscured in the shadow of his hat. Wolfgang Tillmans’ Lacanau-self (1986), a deadpan photo from the point of view of Tillmans’ eyes—what he would see as he’s looking down—may leave viewers asking what does or doesn’t make a self-portrait? Is it required that we see the artist’s face or any identifying characteristics at all? Lee Friedlander’s shadow reveals his proximity to a woman he follows on the street of New York City (1966), which is how his presence manifests in front of the camera while he remains safely behind it. Is a shadow a self-portrait? Shrug.

Imogen Cunningham, With grandchildren at the Fun House, 1955, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection; Photo by the author.

The real contradiction within the exhibition comes when the institution is left to perform the interpretive gymnastics of justifying how some of the images are different from selfies (spoiler: some aren’t any different! Does this invalidate them as art? No!). Photos by Imogen Cunningham (With grandchildren at the Fun House) and Ilse Bing (Self-Portrait in Mirrors) are no different in intent or execution than a mirror selfie that draws the ridicule of many on the internet for being vain or silly. Most poignant of the mirror selfies, and possibly of the entire exhibition, is Diane Arbus’s disarmingly intimate Self-portrait in mirror (1945) where the sometimes brutalizing photographer, pregnant with her first child, uses her full-length mirror and bulky view camera to create a gentle nude to send to her husband while he was overseas in the Army.

Berenice Abbott’s Portrait of the Author as a Young Woman is delightful, an analog distortion of her face to comic effect. One of my favorite images in the exhibition is 1001 Gesichter (1957) by Peter Keetman. Between Keetman’s face and the camera lens is a wet screen. His face beyond the screen is out of focus but thousands of tiny Keetmans are refracted in the water droplets suspended in the mesh and look back at us. Photographers experimenting with their photographic tools create playful images with water, mirrors, disco balls, and double- or long-exposures.

This is Not a Selfie invites us to consider the ways that, in the hands of artists, the self-portrait can be invested with any number of culturally important interpretations. I would invite a critical viewer to ask in response: why and how are selfies assumed to be devoid of these characteristics? What is the ideological difference between artists experimenting with mirror selfies and distortions, costumes, masks, or alternate selves and any one of us trying the same via our digital camera, facial recognition filters, and Instagram? Doesn’t the nearly ubiquitous access to cameras via our phones (which is what ushered in the explosion of selfies) encourage a new generation of photographers in this type of experimentation?

If I were discussing This is Not a Selfie with my History of Photography students, I would ask them to think carefully about what is at stake in the narrative of the exhibition. Before we discuss selfies in the course we have already spent two classes talking about how photography has functioned as a tool for marginalized groups, particularly in Jim Crow America. While, for example, African Americans were often portrayed in the popular media through a variety of insidious (and persistent) stereotypes, their personal photos of family and friends reveal the antithesis of that harmful view. We learn that photography has a unique ability to empower individuals and groups to conceive and represent the image that they, not others, want to show to the world. Photography is a powerful tool for self-fashioning. It’s within this context and with this groundwork that we finally approach the discussion of selfies as a product of other drives within the history of photography, the history of art, and the social history of photography in its most banal and everyday form: printed or digital personal albums. By the time the class comes around the students completely understand why selfies must be discussed.

The politics of self-representation cannot be overlooked and should not be dismissed. What is behind the pervasive urge to collectively disparage a form of self-representation that empowers the photographer-slash-subject in crafting and distributing their own image? Who is doing the disparaging and who benefits from the results? For instance, when Vogue, uncontested international arbiter of taste and high fashion, publishes an article calling selfies idiotic, readers are being told that they are not good enough as they are. It makes sense. Why should readers listen to Vogue (and therefore keep buying the magazines and the products from the magazine’s advertisers) if they started believing what their selfies tell them—that they are already enough?

Alfred Stieglitz, Self-Portrait, Cortina, 1890, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection; Snapchat photo by the author Sabrina Hughes.

For museums—elite cultural institutions responsible for defining what is or is not high art while collectively struggling to diversify their collections and expand the voices they represent—punching down at selfies feels like a cheap shot. Why can Alfred Stieglitz languor on a set of picturesque steps and set up his self-timer but we should not? Why can artists document moods or changes in their bodies but we are wrong to? Why not use the institutional platform to stand up for and legitimize the lineage of selfies as an integral part of the history of photography (one of the earliest photographs after its invention, Hippolyte Bayard’s Self Portrait as a Drowned Man from 1840, is a selfie after all) instead of creating a narrative that tries to create differences in practice, intent, or validity when there often is none?

All of these questions invite one more: how should we view selfies if not as silly, vain, and disposable? Like any form of visual representation, selfies mean any number of things to each person who makes them. Just like the people that make selfies, they don’t have to hold to only one interpretation. Their ambiguity is their power. They mirror the depth and breadth of all of our various lives and experiences. For some of us, our very existence is political. Making ourselves visible as we want to be seen is a way to retain control of the means of representation rather than leaving it to those who want to control, influence, or sell to us. That is, in fact, how I define selfies to my classes. An image wherein the subject is also in control of the mode of representation. All selfies are political. We, and our selfies, contain multitudes. Take more selfies.

Conversation with a Curator: Really! This is (So) Not a Selfie

Thursday, October 25, 2018, at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.
FREE with Museum admission, $10 on Thursdays after 5 pm.

The special exhibition This is Not a Selfie is curated from a single collection, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
This is Not a Selfie curator Eve Schillo, Assistant Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at LACMA, will be at the Museum on October 25th for a gallery talk to discuss the influence of the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection of self-portraiture photography in today’s world.

Lisa Anne Auerbach, Take This Knitting Machine and Shove It, 2009, inkjet print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, © Lisa Anne Auerbach, Courtesy of the artist and Gavlak Gallery, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

We can selfie if we want to

Snapchat photo by Sabrina Hughes, the author of the upcoming post titled: *My Camera, My Sel(fie)* using Alfred Stieglitz, *Self-Portrait, Cortina*, 1890, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection.

The upcoming essay by St. Petersburg photo historian Sabrina Hughes, My Camera My Self(ie), which will post on Bay Art Files next week, examines the complex relationship between photographic self-portraiture and the selfie. That such a relationship might exist and be scrutinized is explicitly suggested by the title of the current traveling exhibition at the MFA, St Petersburg, This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self- Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection. The title asserts that a clear distinction can be drawn between the two.

The Irmas Collection, on display at the MFA through November 25th, is a deep and rich survey of photographic self-portraiture by considerable artists and is, as such, definitely worthy of one’s time and attention and a visit. In conjunction with the exhibition there are also selfie stations situated in the galleries where one can photograph oneself with various backdrops; projected, optical and otherwise. To take the exhibition’s title at face value, as it were, we are being asked to make a comparison between the art on the walls and the selfie one might take whilst at the exhibition.

Undoubtedly, this is a complex and involved question. The fact that a comparison is being asked to be drawn, in itself, entertains the notion that there is a spectrum on which both can be assessed. There are commonalities between museum-quality photographic self-portraiture and the selfie, and that these two distinct practices should be fairly judged and reviewed one and together, at the same time, and in the same place is surely a provocative question.

It is one that Hughes insightfully and deftly examines in her Essay, My Camera, My Self(ie). Alone, the artists and their works on display definitely deserve one’s time and attention. The issues raised in the essay, it is hoped, will add a further perspective that provokes thought and encourages discourse. And indeed, in addition, add to one’s overall enjoyment of this exhibition. That is our intention.

This Is Not a Selfie – Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg

Coming soon – An essay by Sabrina Hughes on the exhibition ‘This Is Not a Selfie’ currently showing at the Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida.

Disturbed by Delight – Caitlin Albritton

Disturbed by Delight

by Caitlin Albritton

“Woman dressed as a turkey arrested for shoplifting,” “Someone donated a loaded grenade launcher to Goodwill,” “Man claims wife was kidnapped by holograms”—please, don’t let this be a headline from Florida, a local might plead. I can’t begin to imagine how non-Floridians make sense of the Sunshine State: how can so many bizarre stories come out of a place so seemingly utopic? While this handle of land has been distilled into a variety of assumptions, Florida native Selina Román uses photography to usurp these presumptions by reveling in its beauty and strangeness in her solo exhibition A Liminal State at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art. While her exhibition encompasses five bodies of work, most of her solo show revolves around the Please Disturb series and the related Please Disturb: LRMA Edition.

Travel has always been a way to understand a place. In the heyday of road trips in the first few decades of the 20thcentury, the popularity of the automobile lifted the boundaries of economic status and permitted an escape from the everyday. What a better way to welcome Florida-bound tourists than with family-run motels that offer dreams of relaxing seas and palm tree paradise. Yet with contemporary travel, it’s no longer about the journey but getting to the destination as quickly as possible. Travel has lost its spark, while forgotten motels now serve as an embodied representation of Florida—with its own fantasies and unfulfilled dreams. Swaddled in a potentially unwashed comforter, this state encapsulates everything weird, sexy, funny, and mysterious about this peninsula.

So, let’s linger in these transient spaces a bit longer.

“What would happen if I brought a readymade to a motel?” I’d like to think this is how Román decided to turn dated Florida motel rooms into her temporary studio space for her Please Disturb series, inviting her friends and other guests in for intimate photoshoots full of vintage props and 80s beauty products: tasseled majorette uniforms, frilly swimming caps adorned with silk rosettes, and facial treatment masks, all haloed by a barrage of sequins that glitz like fish scales in the sultry lighting. The commissioned LRMA Edition is just as bedazzled, but instead of photographing people she knew, this was the first-time strangers—museum docents and members— had been invited to her room at the Tarpon Shores Inn.

Alter egos arise under the cover of costume.

There’s a bit of improvisation and performance on Román’s part in setting up these rooms, from the careful arrangement of costumes in open-plan closets to the posing of her models; there may be some ideas in mind, but for-the-most-part, all parties involved allow fluidity in the process. Instead of chastising our inherent interest in gazing at others, Roman’s admission of our society’s voyeuristic tendencies whispers to us: don’t mind if you do.

While motels are often the sites of her photographs, other innately Floridaesque locations insinuate the condition of transformation: beaches, fresh-water springs, or abandoned public pools as evidenced in the other series on display.

Ebb Tide, 2016. Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist

What makes her photographs alluring is the fact that they resist direct eye contact; if our eyes are windows to the soul, most of Román’s are coyly shuttered (even the motel’s street-front signage is bashful, its watery reflection mirrored via pool in Ebb Tide). In 15thcentury Italian paintings, many painters would rely on the viewer’s disposition to read into relationships within the work. In a poetic treatise on painting by the artist-philosopher Leon Battista Alberti, he says, “Movements of the soul are recognized in movements of the body.” Searching for emotional keys in body language and relationships between the figures and their flirtatious props (as well as cheeky titles), Román mixes the familiar with the foreign to create moments of captivating uncanny.

Is the Fantasy Better than the Reality? 2012. Archival transparency print in a lightbox, 36 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

In looking for what questions Román’s work asks of us, I found one in the title of one of her pieces: Is the Fantasy Better than the Reality? an inkjet transparency lit from behind to create a soft blue glow in the background. A woman’s curvaceous silhouette lounges in waiting: a fishnet shirt is stretched over the morsel of breast we can fathom from our view behind her. Her short red wig glows from another light source, and we can make out the porous plastic material that makes up the wig’s artificial lining, not even trying to create a perfect camouflage of her natural hair that peeks out beneath it. After a while, you’ll notice it: the sliver of hairy chest she is leaning upon.

Low-Grade Euphoria, 2013. Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

It feels too easy to say that, “Fantasy is better!” since each figure is wrapped up in their own alternate universe that escapes the dregs of real life. Either way, Román seems unwilling to show her cards on which she believes is “better,” equally considering both sides. Hints to this lie in how the perfect image of fantasy is disrupted in her iconic photos, from the awkwardness of a bathing-suit-clad body stuffed through a pool chair like in Low-Grade Euphoria, to the absurdity of wearing silicone lips that promise to make your jawline slenderer and more appealing, seen in Maybe She’s Born With It.

Maybe She’s Born With It, 2017. Archival inkjet print, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist

Glitter is good at hiding disheveled, grubby spaces, is it not?

So, perhaps the answer Román is getting at is that reality impedes imagination. Another rift in the fantasy comes from the prop vignettes throughout the exhibition. The solidity of these props grounds the viewer—Oh, this is what it really is! —slightly shattering the ephemerality of the images by gently steeping them in reality.

In a contemporary art scene where “meaning” feels prized over aesthetics, it seems that Román is also asking how uncanny or unconsidered beauty can be used purposefully to balance the weighted scales of daily burdens. How does the old Hollywood glamour in her LRMA Edition of Please Disturb empathetically portray the sensuality of an aging woman? How can we simmer in the magnificence of nostalgia without agonizing over the past? How can we celebrate and create an identity for transience by shedding a new light on all of the stuff we didn’t know we should be considering as instigators of awe and wonder?

For those who have yet to put their finger on the pulse of what makes this state tick, Roman’s provocative works are like being baptized in the heavily chlorinated waters of Floridian mythology: there’s an element of folklore that reaches towards the fantastic, yet is firmly rooted in reality. Deeply mysterious, it’s the kind of artwork that quivers the stillness of the imagination in an age of excessive data that tries to stifle it.

I am content in being a voyeur in these calm, intimate moments, where I am disturbed by delight.

Caitlin Albritton is an artist and freelance writer based in Tampa with a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. When she’s not looking at art throughout town, she can be found making it. You can keep up with her visual art on Instagram @caitlinalbritton or on her website.

In partnership with Smithsonian Museum Day where participating museums (such as the Leepa-Rattner) will have free admission, the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art will be hosting the event Concealed: A Photoshoot with Selina Románfrom 11 a.m.-1 p.m. on September 22, 2018, for the last weekend of A Liminal State, which will be up through September 23rd. Visitors are encouraged to bring their own props and will have the opportunity to have a Polaroid of themselves to bring back home.