Raised by Wolves

Afterimage, Summer, 1996 by Julia Ballerini

- Tweeky Dave

The above words open the hefty book, Raised by Wolves, that accompanies the extensive, multi-media exhibition of the same name. Assembled by Jim Goldberg and the exhibition's curator, Philip Brookman, both book and exhibition are structured around two intertwining stories of runaway teens living on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The tale of their lives of abuse, drugs, prostitution, and of their desires, fears, and loyalties is narrated by means of some 170 photographs (primarily taken by Goldberg), video and audio installations, documents, and objects in vitrines. There are also handwritten statements by runaways, some enlarged and screen printed onto the gallery walls.

Many issues are raised by this project. Some have to do primarily with the actuality of the situation that Raised by Wolves depicts. These are questions regarding causes, conditions and responsibilities: the sources of substance abuse and its effects, teen sexuality (both prostitution and teenage mothers are issues of legislative as well as moral debate), domestic as well as street violence and the availability of weapons, the changing demographics of homelessness, changing economies, etc. What and who is to blame and how shall the damage be repaired? What are the responsibilities of government and private social service agencies? Of corporations? Of parents, school teachers, artists? Of each and every individual?

Other issues have to do with representation itself, in particular that of the disempowered and marginalized. There are financial issues: what is the cost of a large multimedia exhibition such as this? Who funds it and, especially in the case of corporate support, why? Who profits directly by any revenues? (Some photographs and framed copies of the teens' handwriting from Raised by Wolves are currently for sale at Pace/Wildenstein/MacGill in New York City.) There are also formal issues of style and structure. Decisions as to the location of an exhibition, the selection of material, the use of color or black and white, of the miniature or the gigantic, of cropping, sequencing, juxtaposition, and so on, are all ultimately strategic choices that shape the possible meanings of any display and are charged with political and ideological implications that touch on all the firsthand issues of causality, actuality and remedy. Such issues of style and structure are far from being merely academic.

My primary focus here is on the ideological implications of the two interwoven stories told by Raised by Wolves and, by extension, the problematics of a traditional novelistic narrative as a mode of social documentary. My choice is not arbitrary. For one, Goldberg and Brookman have made much of their use of narrative in talking about the project. Brookman describes Raised by Wolves as "a work of art . . . [that] doesn't pretend to tall the truth," explaining that "what we have done is create a kind of story that reflects very well the experience, the stark reality, of what it is like on the street." Both book and exhibition, he says, are "like a narrative story, we set it up like a film or a novel."(1)

Goldberg's and Brookman's use of narrative occurs within the larger context of numerous, mainstream attempts to restore social meaning to contemporary art, emphatically announced for photography over a decade ago with the 1984 exhibition, "Three Americans," in which Goldberg was featured.(2) Mounted for the re-opening of New York's Museum of Modern Art, the show was noted for the photographers' attempts to find alternatives to "the exhausted styles of their immediate forbearers."(3) Raised by Wolves is intended to serve such ends, among others. In Brookman's words, it is "on the edge of cultural inquiry . . . challenging the traditions of documentary inquiry."(4)

Critiques of photo-documentary traditions, particularly those that concern "victims" of social injustice, are by now familiar, having been prominently published and widely circulated since the late 1970s. To enumerate them once again would be repetitious, but a mention of at least one major line of criticism serves as a reminder of a critical background to which Raised by Wolves is accountable, especially given its claims for "cutting edge" status. Traditional "concerned" documentary has been faulted for rendering human tragedy a personal failing outside the realm of politics, for substituting empathy in place of activism, compassion in place of struggle, and thus obscuring the political sphere where determinations, actions and instrumentalities are not in themselves visual.(5)

Measured against such standard criticisms Raised by Wolves not only falls short of the strategical resistance they call for, but inadvertently tumbles into many of the same pitfalls they indicate. This is not to discount the 10 years of compassionate effort that Jim Goldberg has invested in the project, nor some of its immediate benefits. Goldberg's caring assistance has enabled at least one of the represented teens, Beth, to turn her life around. Moreover, despite its flaws, the book and exhibition perform a valuable service in bringing to public attention the extensive phenomenon of runaways on the streets and the desperation and danger of their lives. Numerous auxiliary educational programs accompanied the exhibition at the Corcoran along with a hand-out educational guide. There were workshops for educators, film screenings, lectures and panel and audience discussions with scholars, art critics and heads of social service agencies, as well as with Goldberg and Brookman themselves. I am not in a position to discuss their substance as a whole (unfortunately, I was able to attend only one event), but I have little doubt that they served to question and complicate the narrative structure of Raised by Wolves, among other purposes. Nevertheless, the narrative remains what it is.