Not too much.
But it only takes one.
In this case it takes three. Count on the Rose Gallery to have a show to save a trip to Bergamot Station from being a complete let down. (It depresses me that so many galleries could collectively have uninteresting shows. Not bad, but blah. Track 16, another sure-bet, was closed for installation.)
Rose Gallery was showing Three from Britain: Chris Killip, Martin Parr, Graham Smith. All three photographers of very, very interesting work. The show was of pictures from the 70s and 80s—intimate cultural documents. "Intimate" because people and things are shown with their guard down, at home, in the bar, on the beach, not posed but ungainly, broken, drunk and silly. "Cultural" because instead of portraits of individuals, each series—and certainly all three together—produced a portrait of a culture, a country's style of being when they're being themselves with reference to their country: the royal wedding for instance, or the coal mines. "Documents" because all three photographers share a documentary style so completely devoid of posture. Killip's and Smith's works are in black and white. Most of Killip's are outside, cold and rubbishy; Smith's pubscenes are poignant, personal, tender. Parr's extraordinary cold light makes the color of the middle-class world strange, at times nauseating, certainly seeming disfunctional.
This is Smith's Thirty Eight Bastard Years on the Furnace, Front Mess Room for No. 4 and No. 5 Furnaces, Clay Lane, South Bank, Middlesbrough, 1983.
And Chris Killip's Helen with Hula-Hoop, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1983.
Runner-up at Bergamot was Salomón Huerta showing a series of large portraits of Mexican wrestlers at Patrick Painter. Oversized head-shots of men in masks, fiery dramatic masks, covering all but the eyes. Recently Huerta had a show of portraits of men, from the back. There's a theme here of the hidden, obscured face—What does it say to not show your face?
Across town at Regen Projects, Catherine Opie had face-front portraits of football players. The young men in full football gear stare at the camera and sometimes I felt engaged by the person, his stance, his appearance, and sometimes not—sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I suspect that when it worked was whenever the individual was self-possessed and his energy not shielded so that he was communicating something about himself however so subtly. It was really mysterious to me why sometimes "something" was there and sometimes not.
I would not say this was my favorite work of hers, but then I haven't really liked her surfer portraits either.
The first time I saw a work by Catherine Opie was in 1996. Her diminutive etching-like photos of massive, curving freeway ramps were included in a group show, Lie of the Land, at the Museum of Art, University of California, Santa Barbara. They were beautiful: a loving touch to major construction. Then there were her landscapes: ice houses—little blocks of color on a snowy field—very specific to a northern culture, and a series of annonymous rural roads—annonymous, yet with that certain "something."
Then I encountered her self-portraits. Always in these, something was conveyed. Masked and pierced she was very much revealed and a statement was made. Even if it were from the back.
Her photos of her family and friends, the private, ordinariness of their lives, are like the work of Graham Smith and Martin Parr and Chris Killip, intimate and tender documents of a culture. Her portraits of herself, posed, or the surfers and now the football players, these are a different record, working within a different rubric, that of portraiture, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't and that mysterious sometimes is something that, for the moment, eludes me.
This is Gold Hill, 1988, by Martin Parr which curiously says it all: faceless portrait document.
Maybe that's the thing: in Opie's surfer and football portraits, the subjects are faceless—they are nearly annonymous. These photos could be printed in any yearbook or surfer magazine, year after year, barely—or only sometimes—revealing character beneath the garb. Perhaps, in these collections of nearly interchangeable shots, these are portraits of collective appearance and not of individuals at all. Is this because of her unfamiliarity with the subjects? The subjects are not friends or herself, known in a subjective way, but objects much like the houses in Beverly Hills, those odd, closed, impersonal houses she photographed before. And maybe that's the whole point.
Salomón Huerta also showed bronze casts of wrestler masks with bright colored patinas. Maybe Opie could have photographed football gear to the same effect. Houses have street numbers; jerseys have numbers. As an exercise in displaying conformity that would be enough. But for arresting portraiture more than a body—with or without face— is needed. That's that something I was looking for.
