Rattle & Roll

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Dore Bowen

Rattling the Frame: The Photographic Space 1974-1999

San Francisco Camerawork

San Francisco, California

October 15-November 20, 1999

Tracey Moffatt, photographie

Galerie Laage-Salomon

Paris, France

November 20-January 22, 2000

Tracey Moffatt: "L'Enfance de L'Art"

Galerie Piltzer

Paris, France

December 15-February 12, 2000

Within a door-sized photograph, a feminine eyelid seems to have either just shut or be on the verge of opening. The text above the photograph recounts the story of a woman who refused to open her eyes before her lover for fear of being overwhelmed with longing for her previous beau. Finally, in full acceptance of her present lover, the narrator opens her eyes, "now certain that he was the one I wanted to see." Later she would understand that this moment of sight was in fact "our last night together. He was about to leave me." The moral of the story concludes: "What happens is always so far ahead of us that we can never catch up to it and know its true appearance." This summation acts as a parable to the narrator's personal account: (in)sight lags behind reality; events always outrun their emotional, visual and linguistic capture. The photograph, Sophie Calle's Autobiographical Stories (The Other) (1993), speaks eloquently to the theme of the exhibit of which, it was a part--"Rattling the Frame: The Photograph ic Space 1974-1999." With an ambitious sampling of major photographic works from the past 25 years, the exhibit charted photography's evolution while commemorating San Francisco Camerawork's twenty-fifth anniversary. Like Calle's tale of belated ardor, this retrospective disclosed the relevance of these works after the fact.

With its gallery journal, lectures and classes, SF Camerawork has consistently championed innovations in photography. A partial list of artists who received early West Coast exposure at SF Camerawork includes Judy Dater, Robert Dawson, Graciela Iturbide, Barbara Kruger, Sally Mann, The Stain Twins and Joel-Peter Witkin. Furthermore, SF Camerawork has an exemplary record of curating exhibitions that combine formal innovation with political relevance. This anniversary exhibit summarized SF Camerawork's past 25 years by presenting a wide range of work organized loosely around five categories: formal experimentation, portraiture, personal narrative, landscape and appropriation.

Highlights of the exhibit included Ray Metzker's Mykonos Greece and New York City (from his "Pictus Interruptus" series, 1978-79). The photographs' in-camera framing and focal strategies produce arresting abstract arrangements of city scenes, while Metzker's more recent Arrestation #10 (1996) and Arrestation #27 (1998) relinquish representation entirely. Similar in strategy to Henri Matisse's dazzlingly playful cut-outs (1951-54), Metzker's Arrestation photographs aggressively recollage exposed photographic paper, successfully exploiting the paper's edge and contrast to create a sculptural form. Other examples of formal experimentation included Michael Rovner's abstract One Person Game Against Nature II (1992-93) featuring three vertical black and white enlargements of two tiny bodies floating against an immense and flat ashen field. Rovner's monochromatic One Person Game Against Nature II contrasted nicely with Uta Barth's luscious color panels, Ground #31 (1994) and #59 (1995), both depicting interior land scapes with her characteristically diffuse light and focus.

Recent innovations in portraiture were well represented by the digitally refigured Maria (1995) by Aziz Cuchar. The computer manipulation in this large color portrait alters the face so masterfully that the figure's skin stretches seemlessly, covering--and effectively eliminating--the eyes, mouth and nostrils. The human face becomes a bio-engineered mask, an organ without a body. Through its careful reconstruction process, Maria references the slow and deliberate tempo of early photographic processes more than the immediacy of modern photography. Thus, Maria, like many recent digital works, marks a departure from the "decisive moment" of street photography and a return to the retouched delicacy of early photographic portraits and miniatures. Another example of contemporary photography's interest in its early history was Joachim Schmid's The Face in the Desert (1999), an interesting mixture of word/text appropriation and site-specific installation. After mining the Daily Herald's National Museum of Photogra phy, Film and Television newspaper archive, Schmid reprinted his own version of the newspaper and distributed it at British rail stations in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow. In his selection process, Schmid accentuated the innocuous back page events from 1914-1968 rather than the sweeping political events of the time. The project takes its name from the title of a 1930 article that Schmid reproduced directly from the archive--torn, marked and with the editor's printing notes. The article tells the story of a lonely British private stationed in the Suez Canal who happens upon a scrap of the Daily Herald, a "face in the desert" featuring a local beauty queen. The private contacts the 19-year-old English typist and she returns with a letter to "John do Middle East Land Forces." Schmid highlights this story of a spectacular encounter between two ordinary youths in order to disclose the ironic and singular nature of history. Like The Face in the Desert, Peter Garfield's Mobile Home (Manifest Dest iny) (1996) and Mobile Home (Communique) (1996) depict the everyday, yet with an "American Gothic" spin. These photographs depict houses ripping across a suburban landscape and refer to a variety of dark domestic narratives--from The Wizard of Oz (1939, by Victor Fleming) to the recent spate of suburban void films such as Happiness (1999, by Todd Solondz) and American Beauty (1999, by Sam Mendes). Working in the contemporary vein of photo-tableaux, Garfield produced the images by placing miniatures suspended by wire against a backdrop of sky. Thus Garfield refigures the quintessential problematic of photography, its un/truth of depiction, by staging photographs that are true to the cinematic nature of our contemporary imagination.