Mapping the trajectory of vision.

NEW PHOTOGRAPHY '05: CARLOS GARAICOA, BERTIEN VAN MANEN, PHILLIP PISCIOTTA, ROBIN RHODE

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

OCTOBER 21, 2005-JANUARY 16, 2006

After a period of renovation, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) demonstrated its commitment to contemporary photography by presenting the exhibition "New Photography '05: Carlos Garaicoa, Bertien van Manen, Phillip Pisciotta, Robin Rhode," which included over fifty photographic works and a video piece. Organized by Eva Respini, MoMA's assistant curator in the Department of Photography, the exhibition was concomitant with the museum's effort to open its new architectural spaces to aspiring contemporary artists.

The series was reinstated into the museum's exhibition calendar following a six-year break and, yet again, featured provocative and intelligent accomplishments in the field of contemporary photography. Several prominent contemporary photographers received their first high-profile exhibitions through the "New Photography" exhibition series including Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Olafur Eliasson, Boris Mikhailov, and Vik Muniz. As in the previous exhibitions, "New Photography '05" seemed to echo the themes of memory and history, examining the shifting role of the spectator. The show included national as well as international artists: Garaicoa is from Cuba, Pisciotta is from the United States, Rhode is a native of South Africa, and van Manen is from The Netherlands.

At first glance, Pisciotta's photographs appear banal and ephemeral. Yet there is something about these awkward images, with their high color saturation and disturbingly vertiginous angles, that demands a closer investigation. Pisciotta photographs his subjects--friends, family, and people he encounters on his travels--in the privacy of their homes. What draws the viewer in is precisely the intimate interplay of familiarity between the photographer and subject, which is subtly coded into the content of the images. Spectators suddenly find themselves voyeurs, self-consciously placed in the very spaces of the photographic composition.

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In Pisciotta's photograph A Lone, Portland, Maine (1999), the depth of field is disturbingly ambiguous. The sense of overlap, which helps us determine spatial relations, seems to be off. The subject is positioned in the righthand corner, half-dressed, his torso exposed. His thin body blends into the high intensity colors of the printed fabric that surrounds him. In a strange case of figure-ground reversal, he exists on the same plane as the wolves that crowd the hanging fabric print in the background. He gazes into the camera through partly closed eyes, laughing distractedly while scratching his back. Next to the man, as if coming right out of his hip, is a nightstand with a naked bulb, an old-fashioned rotary phone, and a digital alarm clock. The crammed space of the photograph's composition forces the viewer to feel a sense of tension and uneasiness. The photograph captures the irreconcilable experience of a private space opened to the public. Through his work, Pisciotta manages to communicate some of the structural principles at work between the photographic realm and real space. The peculiar sense of depth and awkward sense of intimacy add to the overall atmosphere that these photographs exude. This is what makes our position as viewers seem all the more precarious.

Different concerns guide the work of Rhode, who uses both single-channel video and photography to explore the passage of time. Inspired by early scientific experimentation in motion and anatomy, his pieces read like visual vignettes, capturing the brief instants of movement on video as well as in the photograph. Rhode's work operates on the border between the photograph as a static document of time and the video as a record of action. In Rhode's Stone Flag (2004), a photographic piece comprised of nine C-prints, we see an aerial view of a man dressed in white against a dark background of pavement. Although prone on the ground, the point of view implies he is standing up, waving a large flag. The flag, seemingly made out of shattered bricks, appears heavy and cumbersome. The man's body language suggests a physical tension, as he struggles under the flag's weight, waving it against the force of an imaginary gale. Similar to Eadweard Muybridge's and Etienne-Jules Marey's early experiments in motion photography, Rhode's images read like the comic book strip: the temporal dimension is a product of visual conventions and the movement of the image is performed only in the viewers' minds.

The work of Garaicoa documents the architectural spaces of the city. Delicately positioned needles and thread puncture these black-and-white photographs, creating hybrid images that map out a terrain of absence and ruin. His work is implausibly utopian because it speaks to an ideal landscape that no longer exists. With the use of the colored thread and pins, he creates a faint outline, a fragile delineation of memory. His compositions recall late nineteenth-century stereoscopic photographs, where the juxtaposition of two images created an illusionary sense of depth.

As viewers we carefully compare one photograph with another, looking for signs of resemblance and difference. On the one side is a photograph of an abandoned office building with a deteriorating sign spelling out "Lyon--Business Records, Private Vaults." Atop the building, a vacant billboard reiterates the dominant theme of abandonment, which is reinforced by the empty streets that surround the building. At the back of the building, we observe visible symbols of chaos and reconstruction: towering cranes, heaps of dirt, and construction fences. In the adjacent photograph, the signs of reconstruction are absent, and a desolate lot occupies the area that once was a warehouse. The massive negative space produced by the absence of the building is compensated for by the imaginary design of pins and thread, mimicking the exact outlines of the architectural structure that once occupied this space. Garaicoa's work resonates with the poetic prose of Walter Benjamin's writing. In Theses on the Philosophy of History (1939), Benjamin observes, "History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now." (1) Garaicoa's C-prints, pierced by needle and traced by colored thread, practice the mapping of insignificant spaces, granting them a past and preserving them from oblivion. The tension between the imaginary and the real, what was, what could have been, and what will be, is covered in the spaces of his photographs. Garaicoa's work addresses the tensions between the past and the present, both the failure and the promise of reconstruction, which lies at the intersection of the political and the personal. His images conjure the melancholic remainder as an embodiment of loss and disillusionment.

Van Manen's photographs examine similar conceptual territory. Each image offers private expositions of someone's memory and history through unique collections of objects. We, as viewers, become visual psychoanalysts deciphering the meaning encrypted in the photograph. Questions without definite answers endlessly arise in her photographs. The documented objects present a roadmap of individual memories, where each banal item constitutes an imperative message, an important trail. This imaging of remembrance presents us with the chasm between present and the past.

Her photographs operate and depend on the viewer's linking of particular sights to specific historical contexts, settings, and narratives. The histories she captures are not the official commemorative acts of nations, but rather the very private memories of individuals she encountered on her travels through Europe. In the G-print Munich, Germany (2005) from the series "Give Me Your Image" (2002-2005), an incongruous collection of objects surrounds a photograph of a Nazi officer. Polished brass vases and garish ceramic souvenirs provide awkward company for this disturbing image. The geographical designation that appears in the title, combined with the subject of the photograph, conjures up specific associations with Germany's traumatic past. The grainy black-and-white photograph of the Nazi officer dominates the composition and appears entirely out of place and time among the reflective surfaces of bourgeois decoration. How do we perceive such an image? What is our reaction? It may be that we agree with Susan Sontag when in her 1973 essay "Melancholy Objects" she writes, "Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at the time past." (2) Perhaps such a photograph might prompt another memory, one felt as a painful absence, recalled only through our own private act of remembrance.

JULIA FRIDAY is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. She currently lives in Oswego, New York.

NOTES

1. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 261.

2. Susan Sontag, "Melancholy Objects," On Photography (New York/London: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1973), 71.