MICKEY PALLAS
Though I immediately interpret such pictures as critiques, they were in fact taken as a commercial assignment, intended for use in Buick ads. Their nonjudgmental gaze forces me to realize it is I, with my particular attitude toward modern technology and culture, who sees horror in this configuration of mass-manufactured cars, cookie-cutter houses, and gridlike streets. While at first glance I saw the Buick family as 50s automatons, with no more personality than the tail fins or the home, closer examination of the image shows the humanity of each face.
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The guiding principle in Pallas’s best work is an attempt to be true not to some preconceived artistic vision but to the nature of each subject. Thus Convertible and Suburban Family has its formal opposite in Bill Haley and His Comets (1956), where the arrangement of band members sprawled every which way–the saxophonist even lying on his back–bursts with near-chaotic energy. Or there’s Jones’ Foundry Striker Surrounded by “Red Squad” (1946), in which the frame is filled with a forest of cops, the silver badges on their hats standing out against their dark uniforms. In the foreground is the figure of the striker, his arms forcibly held back by two police hands, his stout torso bulging forward. The man’s clenched teeth, expression of resolute rage, and straining body seem to be struggling against not only the stern grip of the police but the well-ordered cluster of caps and badges. Just as Pallas matches cars, homes, and subdivisions to the rectangle in the “Buick” series, so here the frames dominant order is that of the police “mob”; the striker struggles to get out of the image itself. Any competent photographer can show us what his subject looks like; a work whose overall composition expresses a truth about the subject can only come from an artist.
Until recently Pallas was not recognized as a “serious” photographer. His work was never exhibited in galleries or museums. In 1979 an undergraduate named Janet Ginsburg, looking for a summer job in photography, went to work for Pallas making contact sheets from his vast archive of about 250,000 negatives. She began to feel there might be a show in his work, and seven years later cocurated a retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center. Pallas was also then the subject of a short Reader profile by Toni Schlesinger. Though now represented by several galleries, Pallas has still received scant critical attention.
Pallas, an intuitive talent, was unlikely to have staged this scene, and he does not theorize about his work. But the effect is similar to that of many canonical works of high modernism: the viewer, captivated at first by the alluring image, is thrust back into his own self-consciousness. I find the man’s stare at the camera more “true” than the moments of aesthetic self-referentiality in the work of more controlling artists. Here that moment of reflexivity emerges unmanipulated out of a real event.
