Street Credibility
25 January – 7 June
In ‘Street Credibility’ artist-curator Mike Kelley presents a generation of what is known as ‘post-documentary’ photographers who draw their subjects from real life but lace the work with the semi-staged language of studio portraiture. Kelley questions the blurring of boundaries between real and constructed personas in a way that is commensurate with much of his own artwork. By focusing on the construction of identity, he emphasises the photographers’ awareness of and complicity in the process. Drawing mainly from the MoCA’s own collection, Kelley has chosen 200 black-and-white images from the 1940s to the early ‘70s around the theme of street photography. He has chosen giants from this period, such as Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon, Garry Winogrand and Bill Owens, as well as lesser-known photographers Theo Ehret, Les Krims, Charles Gatewood and Jeffrey Silverthorne. Shown as this generation’s stylistic precursors, albeit with varying degrees of effectiveness, are images by hard-boiled tabloid photographer Weegee, early German social portraitist August Sander, Parisian underground photographer Brassaï and Lisette Model, mentor to Arbus.
Heavily influenced by Arbus’s voracious appetite for the odd and uncanny, post-documentary photographers were realists rather than humanists and mined alternative subjects far removed from the honourable, heroic subjects of the previous generation’s humanist photographers. There is no hint in their work, for instance, of the plight of mankind that was the hallmark of the purposeful, social documentary of Farm Security Administration photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Likewise, they bucked the moral message of the ‘family of man’ and universal moral consciousness implicit in the images of Henri Cartier-Bresson and others, whose legacy dominated the popular illustrated news magazines of the day. Instead, this generation focused on the fringes – transvestites, wrestlers, entertainers, bikers, nudists, loners, topless dancers – describing psychological rather than social narratives. While not all of the images forefront subcultures, even the relatively benign images of girls on the street, women with their babies or couples in their homes have a gravitational pull towards alienated margins. It is this legacy that later influenced Cindy Sherman and Larry Clarke (both of whom are represented in the exhibition), Nan Goldin, Philip Lorca di-Corcia to a degree, and even Jeff Wall’s highly-constructed street scenes.
At first glance Kelley’s selection seems a little predictable, as many images have been shown time and again. In addition, he has grouped images thematically rather than by individual photographer, and after viewing 200 photographs this approach feels very reductive. Nonetheless, Kelley has pinpointed a key turning point in documentary photography when photographers took risks not only in terms of the real life situations they chose to document, but in the uncompromising way they entered their subjects’ lives. These photographers were attracted to personality and patterns of behavior, and this raised questions at the time, and still does, about the degree to which these photographers manipulated their subjects to show them as they wanted to. The MoCA’s press release claims in fact that these photographers were the first to blend the real with the staged. This is partly true, but all photographic images are manipulated to some degree, due to the nature of the medium. The importance of this exhibition lies beyond this, in the self-awareness and self confidence that these photographers possessed about being image-makers. ‘Street Credibility’ reminds us that this generation of photographers didn’t try to pass off their photographs as mirror images of real life, but instead as interpretations of reality.
Post-modernism is the key to understanding
why Kelley, an artist heavily influenced by the Conceptual artists of the
1960s and 1970s, is interested in curating an exhibition of a generation of
photographers that until recently was almost entirely absent from
contemporary art discourse. Kelley’s aim seems to be to show that these
documentary photographers, although themselves operating outside
contemporary art of the time, were the first to create the kind of
psychological real-life portraiture that deeply influenced post-modernist
artists. Their work proclaimed that a photograph is never objective, that it
always implies a context and offers only an image. They refused to feign
objectivity and instead embraced the role of the auteur, just as art
photographers had in their work before them. However, rather than explicitly
forefront the idea of constructed identity in their images, as Cindy
Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince have since, they took photographs
of real life subjects as they saw them. In the end, these photographic
flâneurs were aggressive, provocative and visibly more detached from their
subjects than the humanist photographers before them. They were also the
creators of some of the most important photographs of the twentieth century.
By choosing this particular lineage of photographers, Kelley is peeling back
the ironic, conceptual photographs of Sherman, Levine, Prince and other
post-modernists to show the origins of the images they mine. One such moment
jumps out in the exhibition, and one wishes there were more. Kelley has
paired a Garry Winogrand photograph of a lone woman by a roadside from 1975
with a Cindy Sherman film still from several years later of a woman dressed
almost identically. By pairing Winogrand’s real life subject with Sherman’s
fictional portrait, Kelley reminds us of the classic divide between real
life and its image. Yet there seems to be little difference between them in
the overall effect. This difference, or lack thereof, sums up the conceptual
crux of Kelley’s exhibition: that in fact a photograph of real life such as
Winogrand’s doesn’t necessarily mean it is an accurate portrait of real life
either, but compelling as a photographic image on its own terms.
Noel Daniel