photography shows in nyc
so my mommy was nice enough last weekend to take me to nyc. we saw 2 photography exhibits. 1 was irving penn portraits. most of the imagery i’d seen of i.p.’s prior to the show was his still lives. i was always amazed with his sense of light and shapes; more specifically his sense of negative space. however i found the majority of his portraits lacking in this respect (except the corner series).
the other exhibit we saw was at the international center of photography. where there was an exhibit called archive fever. this was a relatively broad ranging group of works. from boltanski to ruff to warhol. there was one piece in particular which i took particular dislike towards. it was a fake history of a created 1970’s african american movie actress named faye richards. what this piece made me realize is that i don’t care about peoples lives. it holds no interest for me whatsoever. afterwards i began thinking about the i.p. exhibit and i think that the same holds true for his portraits. they are masterfully taken; the lighting and composition are very well done. but frankly i don’t care about these people. their faces may hold some insight to who they are or their personalities but that has no interest for me. i do not know these people, they held no effect on my life. it’s not them ‘in action’ or at some event which may or may not contain interst to me. it is just their face. in essence, a foreign thing, apart from me and my experience. i cannot implant any of myself into the image of someone else. i cannot take something away with me from a portrait of someone i do not know. an image of someones face does not give me insight into the human existence or the life of someone in a situation i can relate to, because there is nothing to bring into it within the image. and i personally don’t know enough about most people to be able to bring aspects of their lives into an image which excludes those aspects. for me, they are just faces and they go no further than that.
for those of you who have skimmed through my work i do not photograph people (for the most part) and the one project where i have, i have excluded the faces. i want to allow my work to be accessible to anyone. for people to be able to draw something away with them. to place their own lives and experiences into the images. even the self-portraits i want to keep them apart from myself exclusively. i think accessibility has to be open ended. it has to be universal. accessibility has to have levels more than just appreciation of the mastery of the medium.
Leave a Reply