Mickalene Thomas puts a striking racial and gender spin on an… (Mickalene Thomas, Baltimore…)
February 19, 2011|By Tim Smith, The Baltimore Sun
A teenage girl in a two-piece bathing suit stands on a sunlit beach, leaning slightly on one hip as she stares at the camera. From a distance, it could be an innocuous vacation snap shot, albeit one blown up to nearly 5-by-4-feet proportions.
But the more you look and the closer you get to Rineke Dijkstra's color print, "Hel. Poland, August 12, 1988," the deeper and stranger the photograph becomes. Maybe it's the bandage placed over the girl's navel, or the half-friendly expression on her face, but something tells you that all is not quite what it seems in this portrait against the sea and sky.
The eye takes in more and more of what is there, and starts to fill in what is not there.
That sort of experience is frequent in "Seeing Now: Photography Since 1960," the absorbing exhibit opening Sunday at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It's a big show — more than 200 items by more than 60 photographers, all from the BMA's own holdings — filled with images that surprise, fascinate, repel and haunt.
"This demonstrates, I think, the amazing depth and breadth of the museum's photo collection," said BMA director Doreen Bolger. "In many cases, this is the first time these light-sensitive works have been shown."
Kristen Hileman, the BMA's curator of contemporary art, spent the better part of a year putting the show together. She credits the efforts of other curators and collector-donors who helped to build the photographic treasury.
"It is remarkable to me that they had the foresight to begin collecting from the 1960s on," Hileman said. "This was an incredible opportunity for me to learn the collection. It was so hard choosing that there were even a few pieces I had to edit out during installation because there just wasn't room."
The exhibit provides a sequel to the 2008 BMA exhibit "Looking Through the Lens, 1900-1960." The 1960 starting point reflects "when our thinking about photography as an art medium had changed," Hileman said. "There was a decrease of photojournalism. Photography was making its way into museums and the fine-arts departments of colleges and universities."
"Seeing Now" explores ways photographers capture and interpret reality, how they choose a perspective that can allow the viewer to see the image from an entirely different one. Divided into a few large themes — people, places, performance, for example — the show covers the dawning of the age of John F. Kennedy to the yawning of our age of self-absorption. It serves as something of a mirror, not necessarily reflecting the fairest of us all.
Consider another girl in a swimsuit, this one quite a contrast to the Dijkstra shot. Mary Ellen Mark's black-and-white "Amanda and Her Cousin Amy, Valdese, North Carolina" (1990) confronts us with a 9-year-old standing in a wading pool, calmly smoking, the cigarette held, Bette Davis-style, in her left hand.
Her pose and her smug expression speak as loudly as the vacant look on the girl's overweight relative, sitting half-submerged in the water.
Yet another summery scene has quite an impact. It's Robert Frank's "Cape Cod," a 1962 work depicting a young, naked girl holding what might be an American flag, which catches the breeze. In the foreground, a woman lies on her stomach. Next to her, a boy intently looks at the back page of a tabloid; on the front, a headline announces the death of Marilyn Monroe.
It looks at once carefully staged and strangely natural. Time and again in the exhibit, such mixtures of composition and multilayered messages prove compelling.
The Frank item is in a section called "Seeing Pictures" — photos that address other works of art in one way or another. Mickalene Thomas, for example, puts a striking racial and gender spin on an iconic Manet painting in a 2010 photo, "Le dejeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires."
And Andres Serrano, he of the controversial photo of a crucifix submerged in the artist's bodily fluids, is represented here with an imposing, five-panel piece called "Black Supper" (1990).
For this, Serrano took plastic figurines depicting da Vinci's "Last Supper," painted them black and placed them in a tank filled with soda water. The photographic result is a stunner. The familiar forms of Christ and the apostles appear through a bubble haze, as if encrusted by time and unanswered prayers.
This pictures-about-pictures section of the exhibit also includes a delectable 2009 work by John Waters called "John Jr." The color print of a pastel portrait of Waters as a boy reveals, upon close inspection, a sly little addition — a pencil-thin moustache.
The people-oriented portion of the show contains many absorbing pieces by the likes of Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe. One group has been placed in its own room with a mature-theme warning posted outside — Larry Clark's "Tulsa" (1963-71), which chronicles his drug-using friends in stark black-and-white.
