©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Woodmere photo exhibit ‘a window on the world’

Sarah Stolfa, Joanna O’Boyle, 2005, pigmented inkjet print, 28 x 24 inches, courtesy of Gallery 339, Philadelphia.

“Photography is not really a window on the world,” insists W. Douglass Paschall, curator of the Second Woodmere Triennial of Contemporary Photography. His statement startles, until he explains, “People are not three inches high, not black and white. Photography lies.”

Paschall chose the photographers in the Triennial, seeking threads of continuity and contrast to present a wide spectrum of technique, subject matter, style, intent. “You can’t cover all the bases,” he concedes, “but you can try. There are the Old Masters in all the history books and a couple of photographers in mid-career, just beginning to build caché. Others are just breaking onto the scene. Those are the wild cards,” Paschall admits. “You’re taking a chance on an unknown.”

Paschall views his choices as “informed arbitrariness. I might think these six will work – yikes! – nope!” He plays to a mixed audience, intriguing sophisticated viewers while helping the general public understand “how pictures lie, the parameters of the medium.

“In 19th century, Philadelphia was the capital of photography – scientists, publishers, artists. People who could use it and advance it were all here. In Philadelphia as nowhere else, photography was art. This was the center of the publishing industry until the mid 1950s, but Philadelphia is largely overlooked because so many photographers followed publishing to New York.”

Further, Paschall believes photography lost its status as art when too many people jumped in during the daguerreotype days. “It was volume, volume, volume,” he laments, “all about making a dollar. The magic became a fact of life.”

David Graham, Stanislaus County, California, 2003, chromogenic print, 24 x 20 inches, courtesy of Gallery 339, Philadelphia.

European graphic designer Alexei Brodovitch was brought to Philadelphia to shake up the genteel illustration curriculum at what is now the University of the Arts. Brodovitch celebrated the unusual vantage point and declared a Depression-era apple seller as valid a subject as the Captain of Industry.

Paschall moves to Ben Rose: Image and Invention, an introduction to the greater exhibition. Many of Brodovitch’s students, Rose among them, became known as “The Philadelphia Group.” When Brodovitch went to Harper’s Bazaar as art director, he hired from this group. “American magazine and graphic design was transformed. Never, before Brodovitch, did a single photograph span two pages of a magazine. It was a radical concept. Rose was a technological wizard,” Paschall explains, listing the photographer’s use of computers, strobe lights and backlit models as early as the 1940s. Employing a panoramic camera, Rose doesn’t just let us see a roller coaster in the distance, but rather jolts us aboard in mid-dip.

Like Rose, Naomi Savage (1927-2005) was an envelope-pusher. She had a Surrealist sensibility (she was Man Ray’s niece, after all), embracing symbolism, accident, fun. “An accident was not an accident, but a reflection of a subconscious decision,” Paschall says of Savage. “You did something to make it happen.”

At a time when the Museum of Modern Art was showing contemporary photography with its “windows on the world” aesthetic, pioneer Savage considered metal plates and engraving processes, wondering: “Why can’t that be the image, rather than a vehicle to reproduce it?” Delighted to challenge a viewer’s pedestrian concept of photographs, Paschall reveals that Savage’s photographs are not always on paper (try porcelain) and not always a “view” – they are closer to painting and sculpture. Mesh, copper and silver plate, gold foil, pigments can be found, but some have no silver, “none of usual signs of photography.”

Arnold Newman (born 1918) got his start in Philadelphia taking photographs at Lits for $16 an hour in 1937. Later, in New York, he made his reputation with what Paschall terms “environmental portraits.” Objects in the picture inform us about the subject – a concept long employed in Western art, but seldom do attribute and subject exchange places of scale. Igor Stravinsky is just visible at the corner of his grand piano. Working for Life, Newman photographed the glitterati of his era: Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, Ike, Eleanor Roosevelt, Andy Warhol, Picasso, jazz giant Willie “The Lion” Smith, even World War II criminal Alfred Krupp, in what Paschall terms “the most frightenly diabolic portrait ever.”

Philadelphian Thomas Brummett (born 1955) sees landscapes as gardens for contemplation. Like the window of a Mandarin scholar’s studio looking into a garden, each of Brummett’s works is, in Paschall’s words, “a microcosm of the universe.”

Overexposed until nearly black, Brummett burns his image into the silver emulsion, then bleaches to bring it back into a readable tonal range.

Area native David Graham (born 1952, Abington) is, in Paschall’s opinion, ”emblematic of America in collage — things that really don’t belong together but are together because we put them there.” Graham explores accidental images like the juxtaposition of a black-and-white cow with an identically colored dog or a statue of Lenin found on Lover’s Lane in Dallas. Working in color, Graham is a master of cropping, as Paschall stresses, noting that there is “just as much meaning in what is left out of a photograph as in what’s included.”

Recent Drexel University graduate and The New York Times Magazine prize-winner Sarah Stolfa (born Winfield, Illinois, 1975) does color portraits of her subjects at a local bar where she moonlights. Real Philly faces, Stolfa’s sitters aren’t famous, but as Paschall indicates, “are Joe Six-pack types.”

Penn instructor Clarissa Sligh (born 1939, Washington, D.C.) offers a documentary photographic journal of Jake in Transition, a mesmerizing transformation from life as Deborah to a new identity as Jake. Aware his gender-change ordeal will be arduous, Jake asks Sligh to record his travails. As an African American woman, Sligh was hesitant, unsure she could understand Jake well enough to tell his story with sensitivity and dignity.

Then she happened upon an episode from American history that paralleled Jake’s journey. The stories are told in tandem, and it’s hard for a viewer to decide which is more compelling. In the mid-19th Century, light-skinned slave Ellen Craft disguised herself as an elderly gentleman (women didn’t travel without male relatives) headed to Philadelphia, her arm in a sling (to hide the fact she was illiterate). Her husband William accompanied her as slave-valet. Together, they found freedom.

In turn, Sligh shows us Jake enroute to his own freedom, serving with the Army in the Middle East both as a woman and, later, as a man. “The photographer’s sensitivity to human condition drew me to story,” Paschall admits, confessing his concern about community response to the “blatant imagery.”

“Something really magical happened in Philadelphia, and we shouldn’t forget it,” Paschall says, speaking of our history. At Woodmere, something magical is still happening – don’t miss it!

The exhibition will be on view through June 25. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 until 5 p.m. Woodmere may be reached by telephone at 215-247-0948 or on the web at www.woodmereartmuseum.org.