Our photos, our selves: the last installment of a three-part examination of identity, PhotoEspana 2003 encompassed the work of 170 international artists - Report From Madrid

Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Richard Vine

The punning event title for this year PhotoEspana in Madrid--"NosOtros," which transliterates as "UsOthers"--perfectly conveyed not only the psychological complexity of looking at camera images (especially the oscillation between identification and differentiation, empathy and distance, elicited by shots of people) but also the myriad ambiguities of the photographic enterprise itself. It reminded visitors that one must be constantly wary of the medium's deceptive sense of "capturing" living subjects, of making them our own, in pictures that are, in fact, intricately constructed. And it evoked, for some vigilant critics, the art world's now fervent yet still-suspicious embrace of an increasingly technological practice so closely allied with commerce, entertainment and news.

In this, the last of her three successive stints as artistic director, Oliva Maria Ruble followed a well-established procedure, organizing the annual photo festival's sixth installment into two major divisions. The Official Section comprised 29 shows in 17 venues, while the Festival Off mounted 24 semi-independent shows scattered among 19 commercial galleries and five exhibition halls. Altogether, the work of 170 participants--including performance, film and video artists as well as photographers--was presented during the event's monthlong summertime run. Billed as chief among the dozens of curators enlisted were Elizabeth A. Brown, chief curator of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Enrica Vigano, director of the ClicArt Gallery in Milan and of the Foto&Photo festival there. This year's budget, as always a combination of governmental and private (mostly corporate) support, was just over $3 million, nearly $1 million of it for advertising. Though down slightly from the 2002 total, this expenditure nevertheless produced an 8.5 percent increase in attendance. Among the 440,000 attendees were 200 members of the international press. Ancillary activities included nightly projections, a two-day seminar featuring international figures such as Dan Cameron, Hou Hanru and Catherine David, a review of 374 portfolios, various workshops and master classes, and even a contest for users of mobile photo-phones.

In 2001, Maria Ruble, who chose to examine "identity" in all three of her directorial efforts pat the emphasis on territorial aspects of self, definition; in 2002, she highlighted various forms of femininity [see A.i.A., Nov. '02]. This time, the focus widened to include two broad thematic categories suggested by the festival's subtitle, "Identity and Otherness." First was the presence of multiple selves within any so-called individual; second, the dilemma provoked when one person confronts another who is noticeably different in appearance, social status or culture. Nosotros, without the maverick capitalization, means "we" or "ourselves"--an extremely bedeviling concept. As Maria Ruble observes in her catalogue essay, "We are never only ourselves, we are also partly our others and others are partly us."

The clearest example of the every-us-contains-a them approach was a show of large-scale, richly colored serf-portraits by Samuel Fosso. The 41-year-old artist--barn in Cameroon and a child refugee in Nigeria before taking up his current residency in the Central African Republic--began photographing himself at the age of 14 for perhaps the most identity-bound of all possible reasons: to demonstrate to his distant mother that he was still alive. His practice quickly evolved, however, into a series of flamboyant dress up shots parodying various stereotypes--French sailor; femme fatale; platform-shoed hipster; pirate captain; African shaman; even a poor young man, seemingly far from home, standing almost nude at an open window and examining his own visage in a booklike hand mirror.

Role-playing as a form of self-discovery is a dominant but subtler element in the androgynous images created by Norway's Vibeke Tandberg, who depicts herself in a bourgeois living room as a blue-shirred figure, designated "Dad" in the series title, whose clothes she does not quite fill. Douglas Gordon's "Monster" series, meanwhile, presents dual views of the artist posed first naturally, then with tape deforming his features--a wry reminder, no doubt, of the normalcy at the heart of every grotesque, and of the monstrosity that lurks in us all.

Treating the body as a jumble of objects to be scrutinized (indeed, she routinely called her images "sculpture"), the Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) produced countless close-up Polaroid views of herself that blur, fragment, discolor and otherwise defamiliarize the human form into near-abstraction. The selections that Brown made for PhotoEspana, shown singly and in grids in a solo installation, titled "The Self as Other," suggest a solitary obsession with a personal being that remains elusive even (or especially?) when all social roles are stripped away. A cooler, more indirect objectification could be seen in Sol LeWitt's solo show of photographic works dating from the late '60s to 1990, especially Autobiography (1980), a grid of more than 1,000 close-up, black-and-white snapshots of his apartment and belongings. This domestic inventory, in which personality is a matter of inference (who would live in this place? who would choose these daily items?), dovetailed with the earlier "On the Walls of the Lower East Side" (1976), encompassing over 600 small, dull-colored views of signs and graffiti in the artist's neighborhood.