Mark Laita.

Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles CA September 7 * October 14, 2006

Much like a contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, Mark Laita has traveled far and wide to capture the essence of American culture, combing the land for subjects who "wear their occupation, lifestyle or region's burden on their faces and bodies." From his seven-year odyssey comes "Created Equal," an exhibition of larger-than-life photographs that translate the question of heredity-versus-environment into a stunning visual memoir.

Drawn from all contiguous 48 states, the work chalks up street creds through Laita's guerrilla-style tactics. Traveling unannounced to major cities, he put out the word through "auto mechanics, barbers and police officers that led to some serendipitous meeting where a bootlegger, farmer or pimp was unearthed." Laita has a nose for archetypes and relentlessly tracks them down--altar boys and church ladies with saintly auras, inmates and motorcycle gangsters looking lost and soulless, and a one-handed beauty queen smiling with unquenchable tenacity. But it is by pairing the images that he animates diverging and converging identities at the heart of the work. The photographs are displayed as diptychs, each a conjugal battleground for the flirtations or struggles between codependent denizens wrestling with the undercurrents of narcissism, romanticism, and racism embedded in the American psyche.

Laita presents his findings with a wry and tender objectivity reminiscent of a scientist forced to dissect his beloved monster, in this case the Hydra-headed democratic experiment. Described by de Tocqueville in 1831 as a "wondrous object woven of contrasts," that experiment is reexamined by Laita in a decidedly less benign light. And with the largest photographs at five feet high, the downside of the American dream hits you in the face. In Baptist Minister/Ku Klux Klan (2002/2002), the Klan members' alien-looking masks and theatrical robes decorated with arcane symbols joust with the crosses on the black minister's sash, driving home a form of virulent racism dressed up as religiosity. Images of other failed dreams slip unapologetically into rank stereotype: Cowboy/Indian (2002/2003) drips with B-movie schlock as it juxtaposes a crisply accessorized cowboy with a disheveled Native American holding a liquor bottle. More recently minted myths are also covered, as in Astronaut/Alien Abductee (2003/2005) where both subjects' grossly mismatched claim to fame has nonetheless secured them an exalted place in the cultural pantheon.

"Created Equal" offers a layered look at women's roles, ranging from one of the most visually arresting duos, Ballerina/Boxer (2002/1999), to Polygamist with Wives/Pimp with Prostitutes (2004/2003), which suggests a parallel between the patriarchal power structures governing the secluded cul-de-sacs of Mormonism and the rough trade of urban streets. The body as commodity reigns supreme in diptychs like Beauty Pageant Contestant/Topless Dancer (2000/2002) and Coal Miners/Male Exotic Dancers (2000/2006) with its sober images of tired, grimy miners opposite G-string-clad sex workers. The intrigue of a separated-at-birth scenario puts added spin on pieces like Female Body Builder/Drag Queen (2002/1999)--the woman's ripped six-pack out-muscles the guy's svelte torso but their faces share an unnerving similarity. Stylistically, Laita follows in the footsteps of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, particularly the former's 1967 portraits of hippies and Hells Angels for LIFE magazine and the latter's 1985 book In the American West. As an archive of early-twenty-first-century America, "Created Equal" delivers an impressive forensic body of physical, social, and spiritual evidence, illuminating the resulting cultural dynamic through documentation of the simultaneously predatory and symbiotic relationships that sustain the country's great divides.