The nineblack-and-white ethnographic photographs from Cameroonare part of “Al Sol,” a larger body of images taken by Stella Johnson on hertravels to three locations around the world, including Mexico and Nicaragua. The story she tells hereis one of quotidian life in a bucolic African village, its denizens engaged indomestic activities: children read, a boy milks a cow, a woman pours grain intoa pot. In a purely documentary style, none of the subjects break the fourthwall to address the camera, and Johnson’s role is that of a detached observer.Drained of color, the beauty of her images is found in the details: rough-hewnedges of thatched roofs, fabrics suffused with repeating patterns, intricatelyplaited hair.
Barbara Morgan,best known as a photographer of modern dancers like Merce Cunningham and MarthaGraham, is represented with a series of creative photomontages anddouble-exposures in “The Montages.” Morgan belies the static medium of stillphotography through her compositions. She is a choreographer of images, and herphotomontages contain an inner motion. Four prints feature a silhouette of anoctopus, its shadow hovering over a mass of tiny people. In one, the face ofthe octopus is a grinning portrait of the publishing magnate William RandolphHearst.
In one of Morgan’slater pieces, “Wild Bee Honey Comb Sky-Scraper,” the inventive compositionrelies on purely formal considerations and contrasts. As the title suggests,Morgan plays with scale and adds a honeycomb to a city skyline. Photomontageshave their roots in Dada and a kinship with Soviet filmmakers. Like Kuleshov’sediting experiments, they ripple space and time to inscribe the past on thepresent, or vice-versa, using Vertov’s notion of “kino-pravda,” or“film-truth,” to create an illusory reality, or a composite truth.
Johnson’s documentaryphotographs and Morgan’s photomontages are at opposite ends of a spectrum ofphotographic truth. Third photographer Lucinda Devlin’s arrestingly beautiful,haunting series “The Omega Suites” is somewhere in between. Using longexposures in the light that is available, Devlin crafts visually stunning,poetic images of the interiors of penitentiaries’ execution rooms. From behindthe glass of a witness room, Devlin captures the iconic electric chair or alethal injection bed. The lethal chambers, empty in Devlin’s photographs, areinstitutional, sterile and elegiac.
At first, Devlin’simages appear to be objective studies of empty spaces. Like Johnson, Devlindocuments what is in front of her, but the subject is not found within theedges of each frame, rather what is absent. Some of the empty spaces echo thehotel room interiors of Stephen Shore, whose photographsappeared in the gallery a year before. Unlike lodging for weary travelers,these empty beds render permanent, irrevocable sentences. Rather than lead herviewer to a conclusion, Devlin merely presents a place, and allows the tensionin “The Omega Suites”to exist in thecontrast between their tranquil palette and the politically charged nature ofher presence.
