Around the World in Eighty
Great art comes in an almost infinite variety, but artists’ failures tend to fall into predictable patterns. The work may be hopelessly incoherent, not even attaining clear expression; or it may succeed very well at expressing something trivial, lapsing into the cliched, the easy, the cute. Cuteness is a particular danger for the street photographer, who often seems to feel the need to justify unposed images, to try to grab the attention of viewers already bombarded with pictures. But street photography at its best is characterized by a simultaneous openness and unity, held together by an inner organization based on the intersection of diverse sight lines and forms.
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The overly cute works in Stolen Buick Studio’s exhibit of black-and-white and color photographs–30 by Alexandra Buxbaum, 28 by Francine Salerno–help illuminate the better ones. Some of these photos look like amateur travel shots, some are reductive one-liners. But the strongest works, mostly Salerno’s, accomplish something that many much greater street photographers, driven by their own visions, fail to achieve. A photo by Helen Levitt or Garry Winogrand looks like a Levitt or Winogrand: we see the world filtered through their eyes. Salerno–who has no photography training, doesn’t make her own prints, and sometimes uses the camera’s automatic settings–often creates compositions that lack aesthetic “perfection” but that connect her subjects with one another and with the background, leading the viewer to reflect on the diverse, often chaotic nature of reality. Her best images are less openings on an artist’s mind than onto the magic of the street itself.
There’s also humor in the Milan scene of Salerno’s Vive la Difference (her titles too can be annoyingly cute): the men seated on a planter all face left while the lone woman faces right. But the work’s composition takes the viewer beyond the superficial humor. The rectangle of the planter, which determines the formal arrangement of the sitters, leads the eye toward an empty space between two buildings in the background, connecting the human figures with the city’s architecture: the sitters’ arrangement seems to grow out of the life of the city.
