Powerful viewpoints sometimes questionable
By LAURA STEWART, Fine Arts Writer
Daytona Beach News-Journal, FL
Oct 17 2004
Image after self-conscious image at the Southeast Museum of
Photography makes the point that photographs can open doors on
otherwise unimaginable perceptions, and convey vivid experiences.
But that power comes with a caution, one that’s illustrated all too
vividly in four distinctive fall season exhibits in the Daytona Beach
Community College museum’s “Identity and Image.”
When the photographer tells a story, records history or rounds out
an idea, the images may reach the heights of powerful documentary
or photojournalism. However, prints risk being seen as fleeting
impressions or even, in the most troubling examples, slap-dash
exploitation.
The fall season, which wraps up Dec. 12, features four vividly
different shows: “Girl Culture,” photojournalist Lauren Greenfield’s
five-year documentary project focusing on American teenage girls;
“Our Daily Bread,” four decades of photographs from Israel by Micha
Bar-Am; “The Persian Image,” images by Armenian-Iranian artist
Antoin Sevruguin, chronicling the changing Persian-Iranian society
from the 1870s to 1930; and “The Chain,” the photographic work of
Chien-Chi Chang produced between 1993 and 2000 at the Lung Fa Tang
mental institution in Kaohsiung, Taiwain. This is the first showing
in the United States of the complete series of Chang’s work. Two of
the museum’s offerings — “Our Daily Bread” and “The Persian Image”
— are unassuming, yet
powerful.
In “Our Daily Bread,” the small black-and-white snapshots Bar-Am
made in his native Israel present a picture of a complex situation —
grim urban scenes alternating with wholesome kibbutzim moments.
Just as modest are fading black-and-white studies made by Sevruguin in
“The Persian Image.” A vanished world peers from his tiny prints, made
exotic with the passage of time and rising interest in Orientalism:
precisely posed family groups; wrestlers and other character types;
ornate interiors; and ancient Persian palaces’ crumbling columns.
But it is the other two exhibits — “Girl Culture” and “The Chain”
— that draw attention for their striking, but very different,
presentations.
Posing, preening or tentatively trying out their roles in a fast-paced
consumer society, the young women in Greenfield’s “Girl Culture”
don’t simply provide faces for her theme, they beg for responses —
the more immediate and visceral, the better.
Three little girls in Malibu try to look like rock stars as they play
dress-up in one of Greenfield’s color prints, and “Sheena, 15” looks
annoyed with her lack of cleavage as she poses with a girlfriend in
a San Jose, Calif., dressing room.
A row of tall, strong young women are shown from the back as they
pose poolside, in “The Stanford University women’s swim team, Palo
Alto, Ca.”
Seething with loud colors, textures, lighting effects and emotions,
they look like the sort of snapshots their subjects would take of
each other or, more likely, themselves.
Greenfield takes her viewers beyond her subjects’ public faces with
images like “Sheena, 15, shaves outside her house, San Jose, Ca.,” and
“Kristine, 20, poses for a lingerie shoot for Ocean Drive magazine,
Miami Beach, Fl.”
Some of the images in “Girl Culture” are lurid, among them “A surgeon
performs a breast augmentation, Miami, Fl.,” and the luminous “Fina,
13, in a tanning salon, Edina, Mn.”
Greenfield’s studies cover a lot of ground, but focus on her outrage
at the culture that forces children to grow up too fast — literally,
with shallow values.
But the immediate gratification, and all the tensions that come with
it, are evident in her images as well. Just as Greenfield seems to
protest society’s view of girls as miniature, sexualized consumers,
she herself has been seduced into inviting a new level of voyeurism
through her subjects.
It’s a tricky line, and Greenfield is all over it. To make her point,
she uses her nubile girls as bait, and after inviting the viewer to
look and think urges him to look again, and again.
Nothing like that happens in the Southeast Museum’s massive first-floor
show of Chang’s “The Chain.”
The life-sized black-and-white prints were made in a Taiwan mental
institution that has generated controversy by linking patients in
pairs, with a chain.
Like Diane Arbus’ famous images, Chang’s studies are strong, grim and
hard to look at initially; before long, however, the open expressions
on the inmates’ faces make them accessible, and allow the viewer to
see them as individuals.
Some are confused or resentful, while others look amused, cooperative
or even comfortable.
The sense of voyeurism that made looking at Arbus’ subjects a
forbidden, guilty experience is lacking in Chang’s “The Chain,” at
least partly because of an approach that makes its unlikely pairs
more than patients.
Large, shown in softly textured grays, clad in baggy tatters, the men
chained together in an attempt to forge small alliances don’t stand
on the same ground as the viewer. Slightly higher, on the walls of
a quiet, softly lighted gallery, they become iconic.
The difference between Chang’s art and Greenfield’s photo essay —
tempered by the minor impressions of Bar-Am and the historic Persian
prints — is vast.
One transcends its time, while the other wallows in it even as she
criticizes it.