Art review: 'Streetwise: Masters of '60s Photography' at the Museum of
Photographic Arts
latimesblogs.latimes.com | Mar 16th 2011
“Streetwise: Masters of '60s Photography,” at the Museum of Photographic Arts,
contains a fair number of indelible images: Garry Winogrand’s confounding shot
of a stern-faced, mixed-race couple out for a day at the Central Park Zoo, each
partner balancing a chimp in children’s clothing on one hip; Danny Lyon’s
gorgeous, tragedy-tinged picture of young black prisoners in Texas, backs bent
in syncopated rhythm over a cotton field; Bruce Davidson’s view down onto the
utterly calm and contained face of a civil rights protester being dragged
across brick pavement by faceless men in badges.
There are more too, but overall “Streetwise” is oddly inert, never quite
summoning the energy of the era it aims to represent. Neither broadly
comprehensive nor tightly focused, the show features nine photographers, with
Robert Frank serving as ‘50s forerunner for the work of Diane Arbus,
Ruth-Marion Baruch, Jerry Berndt, Lee Friedlander, Ernest Withers, Winogrand,
Lyon and Davidson. Organized by MoPA director Deborah Klochko, in consultation
with critic and curator Andy Grundberg, the exhibition is accompanied by an
attractive but equally unsatisfying catalogue.
If change and redefinition are operative terms to describe the culture and
politics of the '60s, so too do they apply to the medium of photography during
those turbulent years. The boundaries between documentation and storytelling,
personal observation and professional reportage became increasingly porous.
In 1967, the Museum of Modern Art took a step
toward codifying the socio-aesthetic strategy in its “New Documents” show,
featuring Arbus, Winogrand and Friedlander. A similar phenomenon was taking
place in print with the so-called New Journalism of Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe,
Hunter S. Thompson and others, all immersing themselves in their subjects and
emerging with idiosyncratic tales, based in fact and recounted using the
mechanics of fiction.
The photographers here are documentarians of this new sort, and street
photographers too, if you zoom out on the label, as Grundberg does in his
essay, so that street photography is less about location than approach -- “one
that prizes chance composition, an engagement with social reality, and the
unfettered, subjective reflexes of the photographer.”
Frank is given homage as prime progenitor of the mode, and 10 pictures from
“The Americans,” his road-trip essay on varieties of estrangement, are intended
to set the tone for the show. Unfortunately, they are among Frank’s quieter
images, relatively light on social friction, so the exhibition starts off with
more of a gurgle than a bang.
What follows is a period sampler of art born of equal parts curiosity and
indignation, images that negotiate the relationship between individual freedoms
and collective power. The dynamic between the one and many threads through the
show, in photographs like Davidson’s, of the protester whose tranquil
expression anchors the scene even as it reverberates outward like a question
demanding an answer.
Or “Texas” (1965), Friedlander’s visual summation of segregated society,
showing a smiling white man and child on one side of a sign reading “Private
Keep Out,” while a black woman passes in blurred profile on the other. Or the
Withers picture of a mass of striking sanitation workers, each holding high a
sign proclaiming “I Am a Man,” on what turned out to be Martin Luther King
Jr.’s last march.
Racial inequity and the civil rights struggle dominate, as far as social issues
go. Indications of other conflicts central to the era—over Vietnam, for
instance, or women’s rights—are absent. Where the show lags as a history
lesson, it shines as a dysfunctional family album. Berndt shoots a wannabe pimp
with endearing pathos. His image of a prostitute alone in a pizza parlor has
all the tender desperation of a Hopper painting. He toughens up other images of
Boston’s red-light district with noirish, inky shadows and grainy blur.
Winogrand is a master at chronicling the everyday, unrehearsed theater of the
absurd, snapping powerful and powerless with equally merciless wit. Arbus homes
in on unconventional sorts, fringe characters like “Jack Dracula, the Marked
Man,” whose tattooed body reads like a scrambled lexicon of Americana. Her
picture of a man dressed as Uncle Sam, standing in a desolate alleyway, is an
incisive portrait of individual and collective delusion. These are among Arbus’
lesser-known images, and the group is not consistently strong. Baruch’s
heroicized portraits of members and leaders of the Black Panthers contribute to
the story of the '60s, but feel out of place alongside work with more editorial
edge.
“Streetwise” nibbles at the piquant feast that is '60s photography. In ironic
contrast to much of the assertive, impassioned work within, the show as a whole
comes across as tempered and tame.
--Leah Ollman
“Streetwise: Masters of '60s Photography,” Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El
Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, (619) 238-7559, through May 15. www.mopa.org
Photos: Top, "Texas, 1965" by Lee Friedlander. Above: "Hooker in the Window of
the King of Pizza, Washington Street, c. 1am, the Combat Zone, Boston, MA,
1967" by Jerry Berndt. Credits: "Texas: 1965," © Lee Friedlander, courtesy
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Collection of the Museum of Photographic
Arts. "Hooker" © J. Berndt 1967, courtesy the artist
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