EVOLUTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY MAKES FASCINATING EXHIBIT
RedLine’s “Between the Medium” is a fun trip through an art form turned upside down by technology
“Between the Medium: Seeing Photographically” attempts to capture photography at the height of its 21st-century technological disruption.
Photography used to be such a serious act; now, no one takes it seriously. It’s gone from an exclusive enterprise, requiring expensive equipment, hazardous chemicals and the real estate of dark rooms, to a basic part of everyone’s daily existence.
Technology has made photography so easy and pervasive that it is actually replacing language as our primary means of communication. We don’t tell people what we had for dinner; we show them a picture. And the transformation has just begun; there’s a reason the photo-only cellphone app known as Snapchat is currently valued at $25 billion, even though the company that owns it lost $500 million in 2016.
For people who consider photography an art form, the offspring of Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus and Gordon Parks, the revolution has been good and bad. The struggle to set themselves apart from the selfie masses has been humbling, but it’s also generated a new era of self-examination and experimentation.
That becomes clear as you wander through “Between the Medium: Seeing Photographically” at the RedLine art center. The exhibit attempts to capture photography at the height of its 21st century disruption and goes to great lengths in its efforts. Curator Mark Sink has included 29 artists, and he’s only scratching the surface.
But here, you can see the new divisions of photography forming, and that makes the show a fascinating journey for visitors.
The most interesting photographers of the bunch turn out to be a heartwarming surprise -let’s call them the hangers-on, the ones who resist digital manipulation in favor of good, oldfashioned, scene-capturing. They see something interesting, they take a picture.
Only in this exhibit, they’re not stuck in some traditional act. Sink shows us shooters who actually do exist “between the medium.” They’re not engaged in pixel foolery, but they’re certainly influenced by it. A lot of the photos in this show appear to be Photoshopped, but they’re actually just pictures.
Michael’s Borek’s “Treachery of Images” series, for example, looks like he took shots of famous monuments in Washington, D.C., and layered bits of urban architecture on top using a computer. Turns out they are actually just photos of photos of those monuments that have been reproduced on tour buses. He’s a street photographer, not a programmer.
Same with Lars Anderson. At first glance, you think he took photos of factories and industrial sites and afterward, using a mouse and keypad, applied a top layer of something the looks like a fence. But no, he actually shot his scenes through fences he encountered during his everyday travels.
These photographers are daring us, really, to see real life with the excitement of visuals we’ve gotten used to making artificially. It’s a fun game to play.
Are Margeaux Walter’s eyeballrattling scenes of babies crawling and moms cooking digital constructions or real scenes? They are, unbelievably, real. And what are Catherine Fairchild’s elusive images of loopy yellow and white bits of light and shadow? They are just enlarged shots of fold-up Post-it notes, to be honest.
Sink doesn’t limit his offerings to traditionalists, of course. He acknowledges numerous expansions of the form, including its continued incorporation with painting. That leaves room for the works of Stephen Batura, who makes paintings of photos, and for Andrew Huffman, who paints and draws on top of photos, and for Sabine Pigalle, who makes contemporary photos that look like formal, Flemish paintings from five centuries ago.
There is a bit of wasted wall space in “Between the Medium” -- some things that look digitally manipulated just because such acts are possible, and, for some reason, an Andy Warhol, which turns back the clock in a way that threatens to make all this new stuff look like old news. Sink has a generous eye; he can’t really help himself.
But that also leaves room for the unexpected, including objects that look back in innovative ways, like Lisa McCarty’s experiments in darkroom drawing and Anne Arden McDonald’s photograms, made without the use of a camera.
It’s also broad enough to allow photography to be a minor player. Jane Hammond’s prints use found photos as part of an imaginary board game. Janice McDonald’s collages are primarily cardboard boxes with paper and bits of shredded photos attached.
Is that even photography? It’s a stretch. But that’s exactly how it goes when an art form is in flux.
The nice thing about this show is that it allows us to see a path forward for photography. Should it resist the new world and stick to its formalist origins of freezing crucial moments -- the reason we fell in love with it in the first place? Or should it embrace the democratic revolution sparked by technology, drop its official definitions, and be everything to every one?
Here, the answer is neither. Technology and tradition do a play a part, but it’s the artist’s intellect that counts the most. Photography will live, like painting and sculpture always have, by showing us new ways to see those things that are familiar, not by stopping things but by projecting them in all directions and simply seeing where they land.