National Exposure Photography Exhibition
Diana E. Rosen’s Lisa provides an apparent contrast. An attractive young woman in a bikini stands calf-deep in blue water, facing the camera directly, even proudly, dominating the blurry landscape in the distance. But hung just to the right of it is Rosen’s Lisa and Stephen, and it can’t help but modify one’s view of Lisa. Once again the woman faces the camera, but here her look is more tentative. Her arms are wrapped around a man who stands with his back to us–taller than she is, plumper, older, with the beginning of a bald spot. In a way, identity seems more fragile in this pair of documentary photos than in the more synthetic, manipulated work of Persson and Lubin. The joint photo redefines Lisa by placing her in a different context, one in which she seems more dependent–contradicting her apparent strength in the first photo.
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Frank Yamrus’s homoerotic photos suggest human self-enclosure even more strongly. All four show nude men sitting or lying on the ground, posed and photographed to resemble rock formations. Their asymmetrical shapes–the top of a head or a shoulder thrust toward the viewer–communicate a genuine phallic force. But Yamrus’s view of nature suggests a double solipsism: not only is nature at its most interesting for him when it’s dominated by a nude man, but the four different men he places there all look alike because he contorts them to match his own fantasy image.
The outdoor photos in this exhibit forcefully express the utter lack of balance in our world. Everywhere there’s a kind of craven inability to see things or draw a relationship between them. Tourists see only the photos in cafes; suburbia blots out moon and stars; people use objects to express their identities. But a few photographers here do seem to see the relationships between things, rather than transforming all into a unitary, solipsistic vision. Most successful is Robin Radin, whose three powerful portraits place their subjects in familiar surroundings yet don’t reduce the surroundings to an extension of the subject.
