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Close . . . and intimate?
Photos that connect at Yezerski; ‘Last Great Places’ at the BPL
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
"SOME COLOR"
Howard Yezerski Gallery, 14 Newbury Street, Boston | Through September 6

"IN RESPONSE TO PLACE: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE NATURE CONSERVANCY’S LAST GREAT PLACES"
Boston Public Library, 755 Boylston Street, Boston | Through August 31


Related Links

Christopher Millis reviews Gary Schneider's animated specimens.

Howard Yezerski Gallery's official Web site

Boston Public Library's official Web site

Christopher Millis review's "Frank Noelker: Portraits."

A year ago, in his first major retrospective at Harvard’s Sackler Museum, I wrote that Gary Schneider’s most recent portraits — dark, nearly five-feet-square close-ups of inscrutable faces floating against jet black backgrounds — seemed both over-determined and under-explored. Now, seeing just one of those portraits in the fine and quirky group show at the Howard Yezerski Gallery, I’m led to wonder how much of that disappointment should have been attributed to the presentation as opposed to the artist. Eddie occupies the entirety of one wall, at the far end of a rectangular room, without any distraction. Suddenly it’s a whole new work. Schneider’s curse (talent is always a curse) may lie in his subtlety, which gets lost when it’s piled on thick. Alone, Eddie casts a quiet, powerful spell. It’s unclear whether he’s smiling or whether there’s a light shining in his eyes. It’s also unclear whether his red, parted lips verge on speaking or simply breathing. Because of the dimension of the frame (48x60), it’s impossible to get any closer to Schneider’s subject. At the same time, he resists any real knowing. It’s as if the artist were saying that intimacy can preclude understanding.

"Precluded Intimacy" might be a better name for this show than "Some Color" (all the works are color photographs), since so many of the artists treat proximity in a way that alerts us to its shortcomings and incompleteness. Cara Vickers-Kane’s photos show three different positions of the same white body of the same hefty woman. In one, we see her right leg resting on her left; in another, she sits at an angle with her hands splayed on her upper thighs. In the third, her arms raise her pendulous breasts between which her hands clasp as if in prayer. What we don’t see is the woman’s head. So what makes us think we know her? Is it because we see her breasts or the curvature of her stomach? The poses she strikes are at the photographer’s direction, and yet headless and scripted as she is, we still have a sense of an individual. We know she’s a person of great appetite; we also know she’s both sensual (in two shots we glimpse a tattoo on her leg) and playful (how else strip for the camera?). But these images never fall into mere studies of form. The body is not an instrument for examining angles or shadows or other compositional dynamics. Instead, the pictures come across as idiosyncratic studies in personality, as though the artist had challenged herself with the question "How much character can be communicated without a trace of a face?"

Hide-and-seek takes a different shape in the three untitled photos by Carrie Levy from her "Domestic Stages" series, though her subjects are also nudes and strike deliberate, even histrionic poses. An overweight boy sits with his back to the camera and his face apparently pressed flat to a wall. His immense, square torso looks mountainous both for its girth and for the size of the frame (47x40), yet any immensity of spirit is undercut by his posture. His shoulders slouch as if he were being punished, and the absence of his face registers as perfectly congruent with his helpless body and dejected posture. He seems resigned to his own anonymity; whatever forces contributed to his shape and his facing the wall have become internalized. In Levy’s other photos, we see the faceless upper bodies of two young women. One appears to be fending off an attacker in a shower; her clenched fists and arms are raised, obscuring her face. The other twists her neck to such a degree that all we see of her face in profile is a turned-away chin and the outline of her nose. There’s a staged self-consciousness to these women’s gestures that interferes with wanting to know them better.

Oscar Palacio makes the banal look majestic. In one photo, a green shrub grows through the openings in a chain link fence; its rounded formations suggest the blossoming of a flower. The background is almost black, so the shrub seems to originate not in the earth but in oblivion. In another picture, a green patio table extends like a jeweled disc into space. Behind it lies an unpeopled darkness, no more than a suburban backyard, but again hinting at the infinite. Palacio makes the commonplace the stuff of meditation.

In Paul D’Amato’s one contribution, a woman in a blue jacket and with a handsome coif and lots of make-up faces the camera with a worldly insouciance. She could be a hooker, and not just because behind her lurks an empty bleak urban lot. Her meticulous get-up is at odds with the cheap apparel, and her smile — professional, rehearsed, ready at a moment — wears traces of infinite pain. Only gradually did it dawn on me that this rail-thin, square-jawed, wide-shouldered creature is a man. The deliberate moment of the photo captures the intersection of anguish and relaxation, destitution and courage.

Frank Noelker does portraits with the same psychological acuity, except that he shoots buffalo. One creature is facing to the right, although that wide eye appears to look at us. The other beast stares into the camera at eye level. Both pictures are rendered in light aquamarine while the backgrounds fade into a gentle mist. The formality of the portraits is at odds with those mute animal stares, but they soon induce awe.

María Magdalena Compos Pons’s tender triptych comprises a black-and-white photo of the artist’s mother flanked by two photos of trees. Connecting the three images is a long braid of hair that stops where one frame ends and picks up where the next begins. And there’s another Arabic-calligraphy portrait by Lalla Essaydi: here the girl in a white robe who’s been written over looks to have been caught in a jail of words.

I’m hard-pressed to say what went wrong with the ambitious and thoughtful "In Response to Place" at the Boston Public Library. The Nature Conservancy dispatched 12 well-known photographers to various locations and let them to decide what it might mean to capture a designated Last Great Place. From Indonesia to Mexico, from Maine to Utah, the likes of Sally Mann and Lee Friedlander, William Wegman and Annie Leibovitz shot everything from trees to people, forests to deserts. Yet at this breezy hopscotching of disconnected locations and themes, I felt like an Evelyn Wood graduate speeding through an issue of National Geographic. And some work, like Wegman’s and Leibovitz’s, comes off as shtick. But I was taken by Fazal Sheikh’s portraits of Brazilian peasants, dignified men and women whose poverty wears at both body and spirit. And Lynn Davis’s photos of Utah plateaus summon the grandeur of Ansel Adams, as do Richard Misrach’s images of Pyramid Lake, Nevada.


Issue Date: July 29 - August 4, 2005
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