Visual Arts - Southern exposure
Photography show explores commonplace realities
Photography has become an art form that transcends region, because the very notion of “regional” has dissolved into an Anywhere/Nowhere haze of Taco Bells and Office Depots.
The Southern Photographers 2003 exhibition, juried by International Center of Photography director Buzz Hartshorn, suggests a regional focus. But in truth, the show illustrates the shared fascinations of contemporary photographers tethered by their existence in the same society at the same point in time. Such artists can reveal amazingly common connections in what they see, whether they haunt the streets of Berkeley or Atlanta.
Like the scene that opens Blue Velvet, where David Lynch’s camera delves beneath the green grass and rosy fire trucks of suburbia to find a world of fiercely battling insects, the majority of photographers in Southern hone in on a world right under our noses.
For this reason, Floridian Kerry Stuart Coppin is a bit of the odd man out, traveling as far as Dakar, Senegal, in search of the exotic. Coppin’s sepia images of dilapidated buildings and beached fishing boats suggest a place ruled by eternal rhythms, in which things slowly disintegrate where they gave out or were abandoned, like cow skeletons left to bleach in the desert sun.
More often the photographers in Southern record a far more commonplace reality. Like so many other contemporary American photographers, North Carolina native Mildred Joyner Long is fascinated with that ubiquitously Dullsville character of modern life: the sterile, drive-by banality she captures in her austere, measured images of billboards and shopping carts.
Long’s color images of satellite dishes and clusters of suburban McMansions record the Koyaanisqatsi strangeness of a very familiar place. She often spotlights the odd juxtaposition of a human-made world defined by concrete and plastic and the natural world that grows like weeds between civilization’s cracks.
Rebecca Finley of Knoxville, Tenn., also roots beneath the skin of an au courant photographic muse: the teenage girl. Finley captures her prey in its native habitat of shopping malls or locked in a boyfriend’s embrace. She is especially adept at capturing the Thirteen-worthy complexities of teen fashion. Her Latina hotties and skateboard waifs sport a kind of tough-guy costume that collides with their tentative explorations of womanhood: push-up bras, bared bellies, chipped nail polish and the kind of 14-going-on-40 upsweep hairdos that haunt Wal-Mart parking lots.
And then there are the boys, captured so exceptionally and tenderly in Georgia photographer Louis Lindic’s stand-out story pictures. Lindic photographs boys in an unexpected way, saving them from the straightjacket of gender typecasting. His images are, instead, psychologically weighty, even romantic. They suggest that boys engaged in ordinary pursuits like football and playing with matches are in reality dreamy, fragile things luxuriating like puppies on green lawns, their eyes closed to the warming sun. In an image called “Barbie Boy,” Lindic records a goofy, cute, weird mix of sadism, unashamed ardor, sexual experimentation and fetishism, all in the simple shot of a boy holding a topless, one-legged, upside-down Barbie doll.
Instead of romance, Tennessee photographer David Habercom strives to give his subjects dignity despite the twin indignities of poverty and homelessness. His sympathetic portraits capture the hard-luck residents of a Knoxville motel on the eve of its demolition. Their gaze into the camera’s lens becomes an appraisal of their own cloudy future. Habercom’s subjects are hardscrabble couples and wiry, lean men with Father Time beards and full ashtrays, whose stoic bearing reaffirms their eternal solitude. Habercom’s black-and-white images, whose shadowy depths are often penetrated by a heavenly spotlight of silvery white, capture a heartbreaking scenario of people whose weathered faces will undoubtedly become harder still.