The day I talked with Sarah Stolfa of PPAC, their website had briefly crashed from all the traffic they were getting from Living Social, a coupon site, where they had some half-off coupons on offer for their upcoming workshops. ($30 instead of $60). The fact that they’re using a coupon site for class coupons tells you how web- and business-savvy this organization is.

Sarah Stolfa, photo courtesy of Workman publishers, publishers of Stolfa's book, The Regulars

PPAC opened in late summer 2009. It opened because while there were co-op dark rooms for hands-on professional photographers in Philadelphia, “No one in the city was running a nonprofit, high end digital equipment center for the creation of work,” Stolfa said. And, for one photographer to purchase the digital scanners/printers needed made no sense — it was not affordable and took up too much space. But to share the equipment in a community art center made a lot of sense. As with many organizations, PPAC grew as its mission grew. From a space with equipment it is now a place with an educational program, a gallery to show work, and a lot of free or low-cost programming open to the public. Here’s the interview I did with Sarah, by phone, on Dec. 22.

Sarah Stolfa, photo courtesy of Workman publishers, publishers of Stolfa's book, The Regulars

Roberta: Are you a membership organization?
Sarah: We are free and open to the public but also a membership organization.

You are an active photo community with lectures and other programming, and an art gallery. What printing services do you provide?
PPAC makes museum quality prints 60″ wide for practicing artists.

Tell me about printing for other artists. You printed the Zoe Strauss show at the PMA.  It’s a great coup to print a museum show.
We created two sets of prints – one for the museum and one to travel (the show will travel)….and we did match prints for the book. We did everything. Zoe got to choose who printed [the show]. She’d never worked with us before and was very excited about it. She wanted the work [the printing] to stay in Philadelphia. She’s giving back to the community. It’s really a great way to highlight Philadelphia, the community, support the community.  Peter Barbarie was on our advisory committee. But he had nothing to do with it. It was great to work with him in another capacity.

How did the printing go?
It was a lot of proofing and talking to see how the images should feel…it’s a process. It’s a great project.

How many works in the show and do you frame it too?
There are 170 photos, different sizes-”20×30″ to “8×12″ in the show. Framing is done in house at the PMA.

How about the book?
I just got an email today [Dec. 22]. Zoe has the book in her hands.

When did the project begin?
We started on the project in April or May…it’s roughly 8 months of work.

Have you printed this massive quantity for an artist before?
It’s the first time we worked with an artist for this big a show.

Who else have you printed for?
We were printing and scanning with Daniel Traub since May 2009 [even before PPAC opened and the equipment was in her house in Fishtown]. We worked with Janelle Lynch, a New York artist. We do scanning for her.

Are artists hard to work for?
Working with artists is our favorite thing.

Where do you teach?
At Penn and PPAC. Everyone [at PPAC] has teaching experience and is an artist. We understand that practice. It’s in our tool sets. We do this because we’re part of the community.

How many photographers here in Philly
That’s hard. Many artists wear many hats. The census form doesn’t capture it…

How about community…How does everybody get along…Light Room, Basho?
With the Light Room there’s no competition and no overlap. They support us and come to our events. We go to theirs. They are the opposite of us [not digital]. They have a really great darkroom. Basho…We have a healthy competition. Our lectures are drastically different. It’s like fast food chains close together. But helping each other.

How about your programming?
Laura Heyman is giving a talk on her Haiti photos. We’re sponsoring a screening with the Free Library of the film “War Photographer” about photographer James Nachtwey. Zoe is doing a free lecture Feb 18. There’s a show and panel in February…”Of the Ordinary” features artists who use photographs in their work that were never meant to be shown in a gallery context. Our Book Fair is April 28. The Slide Luck Pot Show…there’s a call [see website for more]. Last year more than 125 people came. This year we’re going to have it outside in the garden.

How are you doing with the recession?
It’s a tough economy now. Running PPAC is a tough challenge. I anticipate us continuing to grow. We want to expand things. We will be announcing an artist in residency program in Jan. 2 people per year will come and use the facility for one month.

Is this a residency with housing for out of towners?
Ultimately we’d like to do housing.

What else?
We expanded Philly Photo Day. And next year we will start being a collecting facility…we will get a print from the artists in residence.

How is it being a photographer in Philadelphia?
It’s a hard time to get a job as a photographer. Philadelphia is affordable to live in…it’s a friendly and open community. If you come to events you’ll be in the community…There are great resources for artists. Even if there’s not a lot of jobs there’s space for you to do your own thing.

Do it Yourself?
People can do it; It’s easier [to be a photographer] in NY where the film and fashion industries are. There are photo opportunities there. But I know people who set up here and can work for 10 years.

There’s teaching jobs?
At PPAC! If you have a great idea for a workshop or class, send me an email. There’s a lot of opportunity if you make it…like the fact that PPAC opened.

The Wind Challenge announced the nine artists for its series of 2012 juried shows. Through a blind jury selection process, the artists were chosen out of a pool of nearly 200 applicants. This year will mark the exhibition series’ 34th year.

Anita Allyn, Alana Bograd, Astrid Bucio, Christopher Hartshorne, Laura Ledbetter, Erin. M. Riley, Nora Salzman, Sara Steinwachs, Jennie Thwing

Moore’s president Happy Fernandez to step down in 2012

President Fernandez

Happy Fernandez, the president of Moore College of Art & Design, announced her plans to resign effective May 2012. Since her inauguration in 1999, Fernandez has been a progressive leader of the institution, increasing the enrollment at Moore by 29% and completing a successful $30 million capital campaign. “I feel it is the right time to make this transition with the college in such a strong position,” stated Dr. Fernandez.

Philly artists out of town

Judith Scheachter will participate in the 54th annual Venice Bienniale as part of Glasstress, an exhibition of glass work by contemporary artists, from June 4 through November 27 2011.

Judith Schaechter, Nature, 28” x 45”, stained glass

Silver Eye Center For Photography‘s first ever Pennsylvania Photography Biennial opened at the Pittsburgh gallery on May 24th. Half of the participants highlighted are Philadelphia-area artists: Donald E. Camp, Edward McHugh, Amie Potsic, Nadine Rovner, Amy Stevens, Jeffrey Stockbridge, Sarah Stolfa, and Lori Waselchuk.

Sarah Stolfa, Clarksdale, MS, photograph

Andrew Jeffrey Wright has a solo show Down For Whatever Forever at THIS Los Angeles from June 3 – 23.

New gallery in town!

Fourth Wall Art Salon announces the opening of the Fourth Wall Art Gallery. The gallery is having a reception with founder and curator Keir Johnston on Friday, June 3rd from 5 – 8 PM at 158 North 3rd St. for a celebration of their visual artists.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Misc. Tyrone (Tyrone Smith), 1976. Oil and magna on linen canvas, 72 x 50 ¼ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.Barkley L. Hendricks, Tequila, 1978. Oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 60 ¾ x 50 ¼ inches. Collection of the Butler Institute for American Art, Youngstown, OH.

I was struck by, how in a funny reversal of expectation, Hendricks’ paintings, with their blank backgrounds and fashion focus, come out of a recent photographic tradition, while so many of the photographs in Personal Views come more directly out of the painting tradition, in which sitters pose with symbols of their worth.

Hendricks’ portraits also reference religious icons, an association that elevates his subjects to sainthood. Some of the paintings glow with an ethereal light; and some of them have iconic gilt backgrounds. Surrounded by nothing but ether, with no details of the urban environment from where they come, these subjects are well-positioned to communicate their self-worth with sartorial splendor. They come without pedigree and create their own individuality. It’s costume as self-invention. And Hendricks loves and admires them for being exactly who they are.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people – Bobby Seale), 1969, Oil, acrylic, and aluminum leaf on linen canvas, 59 ½ x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

This is not art as fashion design; this is art with a political subtext. The scale is confrontational, grand and powerful at the same time that the figures are non-threatening. The iconoclasm in Icon for My Man Superman, a portrait of Bobby Seale, takes both Superman and Seale off pedestals, humanizing the cartoon, humorizing the man. Barkley Hendricks loves his subjects and loves people. It comes through loud and clear. He is legitimizing, embodying, making visible. It’s a gentle approach to a social revolution.

Sarah Stolfa, Benton, MS, 2007, Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches, Edition of 10

Sarah Stolfa’s, Zoe Strauss’ and Justyna Badach’s portraits at Gallery 339 may provide environment in the tradition of Rembrandtian burghers, but their subjects are not exactly burghers. not the usual powerful or moneyed class who can afford to commission Annie Leibovitz.

Justyna Badach, Rourke, 2009, Archival Pigment Print, 23" x 30"; Edition of 3; 31" x 40"; Edition of 3

Badach’s photos of bachelors are sad, the men isolated in forlorn environments of their own choosing and creation. These photos have no lushness to them, but the question of who we are looking at and why is plenty of a draw, with or without the statements Badach displays with the photos.

Sarah Stolfa, Memphis, TN, 2007, Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches, Edition of 10

In Stolfa’s current series on view, which references Robert Frank and Alec Soth, there’s a question of intention. She lets the subjects project who they are. But she cannot cross the social divide in the same way that she did in her portraits across the bar at McGlinchey’s.  Stolfa means to disconcert her viewer. And I suspect she herself is disconcerted by the kitchen worker with the gun at her waist. In this sense, Stolfa’s portraits are less about the individuals, and more about a cultural divide between northern and southern values.

Zoe Strauss, Bunny, 2001, Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 30 inches

Not so in Strauss’s work, where the people’s faces become a roadmap away from Britney and Joan Rivers, a different vision from the media circus of what it means to be human. Strauss is the Walt Whitman of Philadelphia photographers, singing her love for an entire side of the culture otherwise ignored. But unlike the romanticizer Hendricks, Strauss keeps the hard-scrabble environment and the hard-nosed realism, be it no makeup or too much makeup.

Andrea Modica, Sicily 7, 1990, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print, 8 x 10 inches, Edition of 20

Also in the show at 339 are Andrea Modica’s sociological photographs of Italians who have been largely untouched by glamor shots and the notion of performing for the camera; Rita Bernstein’s painterly photographs that are less about portraiture than mood and light and material; Jessica Todd Harper’s portraits of middle-class comfort, which seem closest to the burgher portraits of the Dutch golden age of painting; and Nadine Rovner’s setups, which are less about the individual people and more about cinematic mise-en-scenes.

a portrait by Josh Rickards

PS: I saw Josh Rickards at BYOTY at Little Berlin while I was thinking about the photos and Hendricks, so then I gave some thought to what Rickards is doing. He, like Hendricks, takes the subject out of a real environment. Sometimes the background is a blank color, but sometimes he creates a flat, abstracted environment that represents a milieu, a time and a place. And his stylized faces, which draw from craft veneer drawing, emphasizes the deadpan ordinariness of his subject. These are not so much personal portraits; they are pictures of a lifestyle and subculture.

Personal Views: Contemporary Photographic Portraiture in Philadelphia is up through November 14, 2009 and Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool is up to January 3, 2010.

Sarah Stolfa’s large portrait photos of the regulars at McGlinchey’s bar created a stir in 2004 when the artist, then an undergrad at Drexel University, won the student photography contest run by the New York Times. Since then, Stolfa’s had solo shows in Philadelphia and New York and picked up her MFA from Yale.  And “The Regulars” — as the series of McGlicheys photos is called – was just published as a 96-page paperback by Artisan Books.

Sarah Stolfa, at her new community photo art center, PPAC, located in the Crane Art Center's first floor

Stolfa is not a digital photographer although she prints her large photos on a digital printer working from electronically-scanned negatives. Printing digitally is an economical alternative for large costly color photographs.  “A lot of photographers shoot film and scan it high resolution,” she says.

To scan her photos, the artist used to schlep to New York to access equipment that rents by the hour at Print Space.  Explaining that there are no scan labs in Philadelphia she said, “To outsource a scan costs $50 a scan; for $50 an hour you can do 50 scans [yourself].”

After 2 years of taking the Chinatown bus to New York every other month to spend several hours scanning her negatives, Stolfa grew tired of wasting time and money to create work. And, she realized she and Philly’s growing community of photographers needed their own scanners—to say nothing of printers, computers, classes, exhibits and a library. Though local film photographers can utilize Project Basho, a community art center devoted to non-digital photography, Stolfa wanted a place for digital tools.

“Photography has moved to digital.  The schools are teaching it,” she said. However, when students graduate they lose access to school photo labs.  “A printer costs $6,000 and a scanner costs $16,000.  Nobody can buy that,” she said. “There’s a missing resource [in Philadelphia] I’m hoping to fill.”

In 2008, her last year in grad school, Stolfa hatched the idea for a fully functioning community art center for digital photography.   Reaching out to private donors, her Philadelphia gallery, Gallery 339, and friends, she talked up her idea for the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, PPAC. What came next wasn’t easy.

PPAC, which opens Aug. 11, will have state of the art computers, scanners and printers for DIY photographers. Stolfa will also scan and print it for you if you prefer.

Early on, her business partner pulled out, leaving her alone in the project and without some promised funding — all at a time when her fiance was battling cancer.  But several private donors were very generous, and much of the work by lawyers, graphic designers and others was done pro-bono or at a discount. Recently granted non-profit status, PPAC will now be able to seek government and foundation funding.

“I couldn’t do it without Martin and Tom,” Stolfa said of the two owners of Gallery 339, Martin McNamara and Tom Callan, who are both on PPAC’s Board of Trustees.   And with additional support from an a-list advisory board that includes the photo curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Peter Barberie and Yale School of Art’s Dean Robert Storr, PPAC looks poised for a solid launch on Aug. 11.

Six weeks ago, a crew began carving out PPAC’s labs, classrooms and lounge in a large, sunny space in the Crane Art Center’s first floor. Located on American Street a few blocks from Project Basho on Germantown Avenue in Kensington, PPAC’s digital lab will have state of the art equipment that rents by the hour and the center will be open long hours to accommodate artists’ quirky schedules. Classes will deal with software and hardware issues and with professional development.

Exhibits—including the inaugural show, opening Sept. 10, juried by nationally respected curator Ariel Shanberg of the Photography Center at Woodstock—will offer exposure to the region’s emerging artists.

A resource for the community as well photographers, the non-profit plans to offer photo workshops for families and an after-school program for teens. Lectures, workshops and exhibits will be open to the public.

Stolfa has big aspirations for PPAC. “Photography is always changing.  At PPAC we want to be flowing like the scene is flowing.  My goal for the center is for it to be like ICP [International Center for Photography in New York],” she says.

Philadelphia Photo Arts Center–open for business Aug. 11
1400 N American Street Suite 103
Philadelphia, PA 19122
215.232.5678

Suyeon Yun
Crabmeat, Boulder CO, 2007
Archival Pigment Print

Yale’s M.F.A. program in photography is known for turning out artists who specialize in stagey, inscrutable film-noir hyper-realism focused on scenes of societal or domestic dysfunction. Gregory Crewdson, himself a perpetrator of X-Files-like drama photos, is the Yale prof who makes such a heavy imprint.

But for every rule there’s an exception. The work of this year’s Yale M.F.A. photo grads—as seen in a show at Gallery 339—is less Hollywood drama-driven than quiet and inner-fueled. The scale is modest and the ambience is sad and sweet throughout.

Included in the nine-artist show—a smaller version of the students’ M.F.A. thesis exhibit that showed previously at Yale and in New York at Danziger Projects—is born-again Philadelphian Sarah Stolfa, whose large-scale color portraits of McGlinchey’s bar customers made a big splash a few years back. It’s always interesting to see what effect schooling has on an artist, and Stolfa, who’s in the 339 stable, is showing some great landscape photos and an interior in which portraiture has expanded from the extreme close-up on facial characteristics and gestures to a more narrative approach to people and their surroundings.

Sarah Stolfa
Athens, AL, 2007
Archival Pigment Print
30 x 24 inches

Like several artists in the show, Stolfa’s works come from a road trip around the country during which she took photos of friends as well as of complete strangers. One remarkable photo of a light-filled bedroom in Athens, Ala., is a puzzle that slowly unfolds. As details add up, you realize the art-bedecked room also contains a hospital bed and medical apparatus and belongs to someone bed-ridden. The person is tucked under a blanket and all but hidden, and this “I am my room” portrait could be set in an institution and not what looks to be an ordinary bedroom in a house.

Jen Davis
Mike, New Orleans, LA, 2007
Archival Pigment Print

Jen Davis’ shots of men, boys and a cowboy—all tinged with macho posturing that feels real and unprovoked—are the artist’s chronicle of “the other.” Davis, whose self-portraits of her plus-sized body are well known (some were shown in Philadelphia in 2003 in the group show “Self-Centered” at CFEVA) also shows a self-portrait in the shower that’s a knock-out.

Jen Davis
Untitled, 2008
Archival Pigment Print

Marley White’s portraits of her father and several playful works of a cat, a sailboat and a historical reenactor are cheerfully disturbing. White’s subject is perception and the human psyche. In an untitled work that evokes Jeff Wall’s darkly weird setups, White captures her father cataloging his Tic Tac box collection. The man’s intensity is palpable as he bends to his task of organizing the empty plastic boxes. The scene in the tidy, tchotchke-filled study raises issues of obsession and family dynamics. Her photo of a gray-and-white cat licking a small porcelain figurine of a gray-and-white cat is a chuckle about what’s real.

Marley White
Untitled, 2007
Archival Pigment Print
50 x 42 inches

Suyeon Yun’s photos come from a road trip during which she focused on the effects of war on ordinary people. Crabmeat, Boulder, Colo., is an almost perfect picture of family dysfunction. A family sits around the dinner table in what looks like a comfortable suburban home, but one young girl is disaffected and reading a book while the mother is speaking to another child who’s pouting, and the father is the only one eating happily as if nothing is wrong.

Also great in a wonderful show of personally fueled works that explore the world of I, you, we and they are Sasha Rudensky, Bradley Peters, Samantha Contis, Richard Mosse and Bryan Graf.

Marley White
Untitled, 2007
Archival Pigment Print
30 x 24 inches

Stolfa, by the way, has moved back to Philadelphia and brought her classmate Marley White with her. As gallerist Martin McNamara explained, the artists figured they could have gone to New York and been waitresses and tried to be artists. But they knew if they came to Philadelphia they could be artists and try to make something happen for themselves.
“Sarah became the ultimate PR person for Philly trying to get all her classmates to come here,” McNamara said. Can’t give her any flack for that.

“Yale M.F.A. Photography 2008”
Through Sept. 6. Free.
Gallery 339
339 S. 21st St.
215.731.1530.

Photography is all over town–and there’s more on the way. From L’Autre, a group show at University of the Arts, to Tina Barney at Gallery 339, to James Johnson’s installation in the faculty show at Moore College, (not to mention Joel Katz’s 1964 photographs of Mississippians in the midst of the Civil Rights Era, also at Moore), to Eileen Neff’s eerie work at the ICA, I couldn’t help but think of how photography is increasingly slippery. Only Katz’s reportage from more than 50 years ago has the authority of what we like to think of as fact.

The work that’s totally outside the camera-as-reporter box is James Johnson’s installation at the galleries at Moore. Johnson’s prints would pass for reportage of the world around us, except he shrinks his digital prints into 1-inch images without frames, and sticks them all around two areas of the gallery. The amazing thing about the prints, at that scale, is they are surprisingly readable and invite you to enter their miniature world, kind of the way little television screens pulled you into the lives of the Cosbys or Edith and Archie.

James Johnson, When I was a Kid I thought Mr. Rogers Could See Me Too
2006, detail, inkjet prints

Maybe, with big flat screens, people no longer feel that way about the television screen. (Digression: or maybe it’s that Desperate Housewives and The Office are so darned arch that style eclipses emotions; we never quite believe in these characters in the same way that the nation believed in the Beav and in Ozzie and Harriet.)

But if you think about your iPod Nano, with its 3″ screen that displays a video, that shrinking of reality is more than ever a part of our world.

The name of Johnson’s piece is When I was a Kid I thought Mr. Rogers Could See Me Too. The feeling of being sucked into another zone of reality becomes a kind of poetry. The compression speaks to the body in Johnson’s piece–at once shrinking down and forcing you to peer into a minuscule space. But the little photos are dispersed widely enough to force a viewer to physically navigate them. The comparison of the micro and macro is surprisingly physical and mental. That duality allows the installation to accomplish something quite different from all the other self-contained photographs.

But the slippery slope of reality in photography is everywhere.

Thomas Ruff, Portrait (S.Kewer), c-print
courtesy Sender Collection –this print is enormous, and you the viewer, are staring directly at the subject’s chest.

L’Autre, at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts, includes a surprising mix of power photographers and relative unknowns–Tanyth Berkeley, Alex Da Corte, Rineke Dijkstra, Suzanne Opton, Jessica Roberts, Thomas Ruff, and Sarah Stolfa. Roberts, Stolfa and Da Corte are local photographers. Curator Sid Sachs saw photos by Roberts at Nexus Gallery and invited her to be in the exhibit. And Alex Da Corte, on seeing what Sachs was up to, suggested his own work be included. Note this strategy, all you shy artists out there.

Tanyth Berkeley, Sarah, 2004, C print
courtesy bellwether gallery

The works I found most exciting were by Tanyth Berkeley (she just opened Sept. 30 in an exhibit at MoMA) and by Roberts. Berkeley opens up the discussion of what is beauty with her probing photographs of young women. She reveals the downy hair on their skin, the imperfections of acne, their non-movie-star plainness, and makes a convincing argument that this is what it really means to be human and to be beautiful. Her work stands in sharp contrast to Ruff’s enormous portrait of a woman, Portrait (S. Kewer), and Da Corte’s mid-sized portrait, Nick (that’s artist Nicholas Lenker). Both of these portraits, against fashion-blank white grounds, acknowledge the power of the cultural ideals of beauty and allow the subjects to communicate some sexiness and the power of that beauty. Nick, however, still looks a little uncomfortable. But that striving to control the message and to create the ideal gives the images an element of fiction and posturing. On the other hand, Berkeley’s subjects are completely vulnerable to the eye of the camera, the photographer and the power of natural light.

Jessica Roberts, Before the Coming: Ryan Andrew, 2006 digital print

Robert’s Before the Coming series of photographs of adolescent boys broke my heart with the boys’ vulnerability. Unless you know Before the Coming means before sexual maturity, it’s easy to interpret these as boys entangled in some religious cult. Either way, they are completely vulnerable and beautiful–at a time of their lives that society dismisses as transitional and homely, neither belonging to the realm of handsome real men, nor to the realm of beautiful little boys. And for me, they are best of show. I still get a lump in my throat just remembering them in my mind’s eye. I don’t know why, since the photographer has her own agenda, I find the truth of these photographs so impressive–perhaps because these kids are not pretending to be cool.

Suzanne Opton, Still Standing: Peter Kenny, 2001, archival pigment print

I don’t mean to dismiss the other images in the show. Of Opton’s Still Standing series of photos of New Yorkers after 9/11, I especially loved Peter Kenny, who is wearing not one ID but three. This photo got at something the others in the Still Standing series didn’t, that feeling and fear of being lost in the rubble. The others required more explanation.

Ryan Smith, 2005, archival pigment print, courtesy gallery 339, philadelphia

Stolfa channels her subjects sitting at a bar, allowing them total control of their persona! And Dijkstra’s biannual series of pictures of Almerisa, revealing the child’s growth from a young immigrant to the Netherlands, to a young woman who is totally Dutch, is really not about the subject so much as about acculturation, differences, and acceptance.

All of these photographs are terrific. But taken together, they ask the question of what an image of a person can mean. Ultimately, I came away thinking that whatever each image means, it is not necessarily about the subject or the fact of a person before a camera. The photographs are slippery signifiers of what’s on the photographer’s mind.

Tina Barney, The Standing Man

Having just seen this exhibit, I went straight over to Gallery 339′s Tina Barney exhibit. Whatever I expected, I was wrong. Barney is pretty interesting. And talk about fact! Well, it’s pretty hard to know the facts that Barney offers up, but she gives lots of room for narrative speculation. People criticize her for pandering to the cushy lives, and in some of the photos she seems more focused on the cushiness than the humans. In the ones where the humans are key, however, the question becomes, are these really live action or is there complicity between Barney and her subjects. The gallery notes suggest there’s a degree of staging here, and a degree of spontaneity.

I simply don’t know the answer, just looking. But some of the images are fabulous. I was especially taken with The Standing Man, with its non-American decor, the relationship of the man to his standing sculpture on one side, a mysterious-looking modern sculpture under glass on the other, and his seated daughter balancing the collection spatially. This is Euro-chic par excellence, but it’s not the only thing Barney has to offer.

Tina Barney, Tim, Phil and I

Another photograph, on Barney with her two sons standing around a barbecue grill, Tim, Phil and I, is incredibly strange for all its casual familiarity. There’s a sneakiness suggested in Barnes’ triggering the shutter without looking, and the focus on the bodies of the young men, the dwelling on their manliness, is unsettling. As for the shrimp on the barbee, it’s undercover, wrapped in foil, unlike the two young men. I don’t know that I’d trust her as my mother.

And yet, I doubt this tells a true story about reality in the Barney home.

Joel Katz, from Mississippi 1964 series, Woman waiting to see the Special Assistant to the Governor, Mississippi State Capitol

Which brings me back to Joel Katz’s reportage photos at Moore, Mississippi 1964. These are earnest photographs that we are meant to take as reportage, but once again all reportage is as seen through the eyes of the beholder. A person with a different political agenda might have made different choices. None the less, I find myself appreciative of how straightforward Katz’s role is here–making choices of what to photograph with some intention of revealing the truth–his view of the truth.

And somehow, I think that’s every decent photographer’s intention–maybe. It’s just that these days, it’s a lot easier to create a whopper to tell that truth.

I haven’t seen the Eileen Neff show at the ICA yet, but Neff, with very different approaches, creates a reality that shimmers with a fifth dimension–i.e. not a reality at all. Also on my list to see–Women to Watch: Photography in Philadelphia will showcase new or recent work by Alida Fish, Neff, Clarissa Sligh, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Deborah Willis, Genevieve Coutroubis, Sarah Stolfa and Zoe Strauss, at Moore college, opening 10/25.

Although Roberta and I went to the Woodmere Museum’s second Triennial of Contemporary Photography a week ago, I am still pondering some of what I saw, namely the photographs and text by Clarissa Sligh.

Sligh, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, documented the transformation of someone born a woman who was so sure she was really a man that she underwent sex-change surgery and hormone treatments.

The photos of Jake are sometimes breathtakingly beautiful, sometimes hard to look at even from the corner of my eye, sometimes both all at once. I should explain that I’m a little squeamish. I haven’t even gone to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Franklin Institute, even though I am curious and heard it was great.

But the picture I found most disturbing bothered me for other reasons.

It was a breathtakingly beautiful picture of Jake from the rear, after he had undergone the breast reduction surgery and already was showing some male physical traits. The photo captures this transitional figure standing with his baggy jeans dropped just below the rear end, awaiting a syringe poised above the hip for injection. Jake’s creamy torso is smooth and shapely, looking for all the world like a classical sculpture of a nude woman from behind.

The image calls into question the other photos showing Jake working out with free weights, looking macho and tough (not to mention horribly scarred).

The photographer’s eye vs. the subject’s eye

The torso seemed to say the other photos were of Jake as he preferred others to see him, but this was the way Sligh saw him…and us too, as the viewers being given the tour of Sligh’s point of view.

The photograph was a sort of summary for me of what I thought Sligh was getting at. She stated in the accompanying text that she was disturbed by identity issues, the inside versus the outside, the expectations of others versus the interior person. And her installation broadened the sexual identity issues to race identity issues with the retelling of a story of slaves who hid their identities to escape. The story she told was of Ellen Card, a light-skinned slave who hid both her race and her gender, pretending to be the young master of a man who really was her husband, but whom she treated as her slave during their flight to freedom.

Some of Sligh’s narrative about Ellen Cope passing as a white boy to escape from slavery

Passing

Sligh said in her story that although she was familiar with instances of African-Americans passing as white–in essence, becoming white because who’s to say otherwise–she found the notion of a woman becoming a man more unsettling. After all, we are our bodies, and we are our gender, even if we identify ourselves as non-standard versions of our sex.

It’s a marvel of the human mind to adapt to who we appear to be. We adapt to our names and become those names. And we adapt to our appearance and become our appearance.

Layers of deception

But to just say these sexual traits are not only not who we are, but are a lie we cannot tolerate, and then to create a body that is basically a lie about who we are and declare it the truth, is startling and unsettling.

The overlay of society expectations may be similar for race and gender, but the underlay of biology is not really similar. Afterall, geneticists tell us there is no race. So passing for white is about this society and its hierarchies and castes. Passing for a different gender has some of the same elements, influenced by society and its definitions of male and female.

But most of us are not deeply disturbed by Some Like it Hot and Paris is Burning.

The unkind cut

When we go beyond passing, however, which is about acting and posing and undermining the rules, and go to our fundamental biology of cutting ourselves up, it’s more disturbing. Can we actually change ourselves this much? I don’t know. The pictures suggest otherwise. Afterall, the testicles Jake so painfully acquires are not real testicles. They are the semblance of testicles.

Clarissa Sligh, Untitled, from Jake in Transition, 1996–2006, gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches, collection of the artist.

But I wonder how different this is from French artist Forlan, who disturbs me greatly with her plastic surgery self-transformation of her face. I wonder how different this is from Chris Burden‘s gun shots in which he doesn’t really change how he presents himself to the world, but just hurts himself. Somehow, I find this less disturbing. So is the issue about how we look, if Burden is less disturbing? Also, I would say that the first time I heard about Burden, I was deeply disturbed, so there’s some inurement going on here. But nothing has inured me to the horrors of Forlan‘s plastic surgery.

I have a friend whose son used to be a woman. I find this knowledge less upsetting than looking at Sligh’s pictures, having the process go on in my face.

Faces

Even in the recent case of the woman, mauled by a dog, who acquired someone else’s face by plastic surgery, there’s still a sense of horror about identity. This was not exactly voluntary surgery. But there’s something about a face that is so personal, so much our own, with no two alike. To overcome that identity is somewhat shocking.

I recently read a pair of books–Lucy Grealey’s Autobiography of a Face and Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty–both about Grealey, who lost a huge percentage of her lower jaw to cancer as a child, and who spent the rest of her life dealing, not dealing, looking for restoration and over and over again facing disappointments as each new surgical attempt to give her back a jaw only ends up maiming her more. The woman who was Lucy Grealey was extraordinary in many ways, and the two books offer shockingly different views of her. Piecing together the disparities and looking for the truth of her identity was part of the interest of reading the two books that are both about Grealey’s search to restore on the outside who she was on the inside.

But ultimately, it was that damaged face who she became. So there is this incredible ability we have to incorporate what we are on the outside into our characters. And if we think we look like the other gender, we are the other gender, and if we think we are the other gender, there’s some rationale here for changing our bodies to match.

How we look is a powerful factor in how the world responds. In Calvin Trillin’s recent tribute to his late wife, Alice, he recalls the moment when her good looks combined with her charm no longer allowed her to bat her eyelashes out of a speeding ticket. Something had changed for her. And she recognized what a loss it was. He recognized what a loss it was for her and her modus operandi. But to him she was still the beautiful Alice.

That ability to find the immutable character beneath the outward appearance is a marvelous ability that lets us continue to love who we love, no matter how changed they become over time. People go from babyhood through childhood, adolescence and into maturity, changing all the while, and incorporating those changes into their identity, usually without too much problem (except perhaps during adolescence, when those changes plus raging hormones lead to lots of risky behavior).

Women’s bodies alter during pregnancy, and yet they and usually their spouses can belt back the changes without choking.

The test of time

It’s only when we hit the downhill trajectory of aging that many people once again stop coping well with the deals their appearance hands them. Part of it has to do with what society values. We are such an ageist society, so enchanted by the energy and beauty of youth. So that passion for changing our appearance with surgery reemerges when the appearance no longer fits society’s evaluation of what is beautiful.

In some ways, I think the teenage acting out has so much to do with this too. The process of maturing into an adult involves things like acne (it’s right out there, on your face, afterall) and other unruly bumps and lumps that may not fit the projected version of maturing a teen may have imagined. And then there’s the fact of maturing mentally into a family that’s still wishing for that sweet child whose immature character was enmeshed in the family structure. At the point of maturing, that teenager is staking out their own, separate identity. It’s a scary turning point that combines a physical and mental transformation all at once.

The gold standard

When I was a teenager, growing up in a mostly Jewish neighborhood, girls were aided and abetted by their families in getting nose jobs, to become the American princesses of the media. Subjugation of identity to some societal ideal via plastic surgery is horrifying to me.

Also in the Triennial, Thomas Brummett, Nocturne #6, 2001–04, chromogenic print, 30 x 70 inches, courtesy of Schmidt-Dean Gallery, Philadelphia

Yet society seems to encourage it. When I turn on the Today Show, they seem to be talking on a regular basis about getting one sort of plastic surgery or another. In a way, they are imposing the (horrifying) standard of their industry on the larger culture. For them, plastic surgery means a longer life on the air. They are pressured into that culture by tv executives, but also by us, the viewers, who expect our tv personalities–and also our politicians–to look a certain way. And god bless her, Barbara Walters, has gone on looking pretty amazing with the help of the knife beyond all reason.

As part of a society where money counts, naturally people who trade on their good looks will try to preserve those good looks for as long as possible by nearly any means possible.

Also in the Triennial, David Graham, Stanislaus County, California, 2003, chromogenic print, 24 x 20 inches, courtesy of Gallery 339, Philadelphia

We all know people who have had face lifts, eye lifts. People change their hair color at the drop of a hat, or go from curly to straight and straight to curly. The more drastic changes get put in the context of what seems whimsical and good-natured girls-will-be-girls frippery. But it’s all aimed at identity shaped by conformity to some societal ideal (breast implants and liposuction, for example) or some generational ideal (I’m thinking purple hair and tattoos here). Certainly people in other societies do scar themselves or otherwise undergo unnecessary surgeries that set our Western teeth on edge.

Global views

That identity can be so tied to societal expectations is shocking. If I grew up in China or in the jungle in Africa, would I have had my personality snipped and tucked by social pressure to a somewhat different one than I have today, I wonder. And how about my appearance?

The miracle of all this is that our identity usually can incorporate the changes that life imposes on us, whether those changes be societal or physiological. It’s not always so easy. I still am shocked by the mirror or the photograph that shows how I look now, versus how I think I ought to look, used to look, imagine I look. I see someone who fights the fight to retain a glimpse of their physical past, and I feel guilty and disappointed in myself.

Also in the Triennial, Arnold Newman’s portrait of Horace Pippin, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1945, gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches, collection of the artist

I went to a party and saw someone who I remember looking 10 years older than me in the past now looking 10 years younger than me, and I suddenly wonder if I’ve missed the boat on what is important. Because she looks younger, does it mean she is younger at heart, and that I’m as old as I look?

Infinite variety

Our society has stretched to accept a wide range of sexual preferences. In fact, society has always stretched for that, but just not in a codified way. It handled the variety by looking the other way most of the time. I mean, really, who didn’t know that Liberace was gay? People knew it and accepted it, but didn’t go face-to-face with the technicalties of the sex acts that it implied. As human beings, everyone got it–and didn’t get it, all at the same time. These days, with sex acts out in the open, people who would prefer to not go there are forced to go into the bedroom and confront the privacy of the sexuality.

I am not saying we shouldn’t be accepting or approving; I am saying that we have just changed the way that we are accepting, or not accepting, and the desire to have a public identity that matches a private sexual identity has won the day. But no matter how you slice the public identity, the private identity has been there all along and understood all along. So we’re back to the role that society plays in what identities it allows and makes public.

That we change our appearance to match our identity crosses lines at different places for different people. Our desperation to be who we really think we are can motivate us to do incredibly shocking things. But how shocking is a face lift in a society that says youth is more valuable than age? And how shocking is passing for white in a society that says light skin is a higher caste? And how different is it when a society of one says my identity calls for a sex change in a world where men mostly stay men and women mostly stay women no matter what their sexual orientation?

Truth in advertising

In a way, it all comes down to truth in advertising. I’m a guy, therefore I need to advertise it physically. I’m gay, therefore I need to be able to say it publicly. I feel younger than I am, so therefore I need to look it. But Sligh’s photograph of that white torso suggests that there is no truth in advertising, and that everything is a lie–the identity, the sex change, are all called into question.

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

I find myself hoping that Jake finds true happiness as his and his doctor’s idea of a male. Certainly, the wedding picture at the end–our cultural idea of a happy ending–suggests he found it, at the same time that it raises questions. For there is Jake, all 5’2″ of him, proudly standing next to a woman several inches taller. Only Jake and his bride can say if this a marriage made in heaven. But as I presume Sligh intended, it raised questions about sex and roles, which of course brings Jake’s story back to Ellen Cope’s story, in which she becomes the young master, and her husband plays the role of her slave. In this case, the roles are temporary, and the two arrive in Philadelphia safely, where they find sympathetic people who then accept them, retransformed back to their original identities, as free people. Cope was in a position where she could pass, not as a man for very long, but as a free white person, had she chosen. She chose to retain her identity as his wife and as a woman of color–free, but in those days, in danger, even in Philadelphia.

Others in the Triennial

Others in the Triennial exhibit are Thomas Brummett, with his gardens based on a Japanese tradition of faux window landscape views; David Graham, whose ironic landscapes celebrate and laugh at the American scene; Arnold Newman, whose dramatic portraits recall a time when people dressed up and had dignity; Naomi Savage, who experimented with printing techniques; and Sarah Stolfa, whose Rembrandtian color portraits from the bartender’s point of view manage to capture dignity in people who aren’t dressed like Fred Astaire.

Planet Rock
Ice sheets, volcanoes, crickets, waterfalls and garden motifs make their way into spring’s art offerings.

Artists are always itching to connect with nature, so it’s no surprise that this spring you’ll see lots of earth, wind, water, animals and plants in the area’s art galleries and museums. No antihistamines or sunscreen required, and flip-flops are always welcome.

Climate Control
Abington’s Out of the Blue

Felix Gonzalez-Torres icy spill of blue candy putting out the fire in the fireplace at Abington.

Abington Art Center‘s “Out of the Blue” focuses on climate and environmental concerns, and includes 22 local, national and international artists. Several, like Diane Burko (Philadelphia) and J.J. L’Heureux (Los Angeles), are geo-trekkers, exploring the world by plane and ship to photograph extremes of nature like ice sheets in Antarctica or volcanoes in Iceland.

Joy Espisalla’s piece, set on the floor. The fly-over showing clouds and city is very beautiful — and ominous.

Flirting with issues of nature’s beauty and power, these artists make works that transcend National Geographic by imposing a mindset that questions what it sees. The works are in the tradition of sublime landscapes painted by Thomas Cole (Burko) or photographed by Ansel Adams (L’Heureux).

Stephen Andrews’ 365 sunsets printed on a kind of un-usable folded blanket. One of the best things in the show. For lots of images from the show, see the Out of the Blue website.

But since in 2006 we understand sublime landscapes no longer exist and global warming is real and threatens us all, the art is grounded not so much in beauty but in worries about the future.

Display case with, among other things, a photo and a story from Eileen Neff. The photo shows a large shadow moving across the continent of Europe. A digitally-enhanced construct significant to Neff for being believable as a satellite photo — and also as a faux satellite photo (which it is).

If you like behind-the-scenes, “Out of the Blue” has it-an installation of objects, books and artifacts (provided by the artists) that were triggers for their ideas.

John Tallman’s installation at Abington. See flickr set for more pix.

Also at Abington in the community gallery is John Tallman‘s installation of Day-Glo abstract paintings and sculpture which immerse you in an intense unnatural world. Tallman is an emerging local artist and Tyler grad who spent five years teaching English in Korea. He absorbed a lot of that country’s urban excitement, and his work broadcasts a techno-industrial ambience that overwhelms all thoughts of land, sea and sky. Serendipity perhaps, but the show is a nice counterpoint to “Out of the Blue.”

Out of New Orleans
Gallery 1401

John Woodin New Orleans photo, after the flood or before, I can’t tell.

John Woodin‘s film and digital photographs at Gallery 1401 present New Orleans neighborhoods pre- and posthurricane and flood. Woodin, a New Orleans native, captured the city’s unique architectural styles on a 2004 visit. Last October he documented the severe destruction wreaked on many of the same houses, including his mother’s home. See more photos at Woodin’s inliquid page.

Out of Woodmere
Second Photo Triennial

Thomas Brummett, Fern. For more images see Schmidt-Dean Gallery’s website.

Photography lovers eagerly anticipate Woodmere Art Museum‘s “Second Triennial of Contemporary Photography,” a regional roundup that acknowledges Philadelphia’s strong and vibrant photography community and dares to pass critical judgment. (Someone somewhere should organize regional triennials for painting, sculpture and video as well-it’s overdue.)

Sarah Stolfa’s Arpson Bravo. See more Stolfa photos at Gallery 339′s website.

Among this year’s honored photo practitioners is Thomas Brummett, whose lovely, dark and otherworldly photographs focus on trees, plants and sky. Also honored is emerging artist Sarah Stolfa, not a nature photographer, but one whose nuanced color portraits (taken at McGlinchey’s bar, where she works) depict people as hothouse flowers–beautiful and exotic.

Natural Women
PAFA’s The Late Show

Nadia Hironaka’s Late Show at PAFA. See bigger here.

Nadia Hironaka‘s “The Late Show” at Pennsylvania Academy‘s Morris Gallery is a multiprojection video installation that takes you to the drive-in movies with crickets chirping and wind rustling in the trees. Hironaka’s technologically savvy piece shows a brightly lit drive-in screen on one wall and a gravel road with a car driving toward you on an adjoining wall. Recorded sounds on various speakers surround you with nature’s night sounds to create a believable immersion in the woods. I would’ve liked a little more story (a woman getting out of a car and lighting a cigarette and a moth flying up on the screen just aren’t enough), but the audio is a treat and a pleasant reminder of nature’s nighttime lullaby.

Bubble Stages at Painted Bride

Nami Yamamoto’s bubble installation at Parts to the Whole at Vox Populi a few months back. See it bigger here.

Nami Yamamoto‘s bubble installations-which have appeared at Vox Populi, the Philadelphia airport and elsewhere-suggest nature under a microscope. The artist’s new installation at the Painted Bride Art Center continues her lacey foam, paper and vinyl evocations of cell division, gurgling hot springs, champagne spills and cascading waterfalls. Made of hundreds of hand-cut bubble forms pinned to walls, floor and ceiling, Yamamoto’s pieces hint at the trap of excess, but mostly suggest plenitude and the magic of life.

Woman Photographers at ICA

Candida Hofer photo of an opera house interior which I saw at the Armory show recently. See bigger here.

At the Institute of Contemporary Art human nature is foremost for two female photographers whose concerns with forlorn architectural aesthetics might find surprising kinship. German photographer Candida Höfer focuses on depopulated architectural interiors of public spaces like libraries, opera houses, galleries and cafes.

Zoe Strauss image of a half of a house shows her focus on the architectural forlorn. For more images see her website.

And local artist Zoe Strauss trains her camera on streets and alleyways. While Strauss is known for her people pictures, there’s another stream of her work that deals with depopulated scenes in downscale neighborhoods of Philadelphia and elsewhere. Höfer, who studied with renowned German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, is an established international artist. Strauss, who’s self-taught, is having her first museum solo. Both artists make works of formal beauty and compositional clarity, and I can’t wait to see them under one roof.

Rococo at the Art Alliance

Eva Wylie’s piece at her Vox Populi show last year. See bigger here.

Philadelphia Art Alliance‘s “A Delicate Constitution” provides floral and animal-themed decorative riches, with four artists (Colleen Toledano, Linda Cordell, Carson Fox and Eva Wylie) installing works of rococo excess in various media in the second-floor galleries.

Carson Fox, faux flowers and a double-edged word. At the Art Alliance.

Downstairs and on the third floor Kelley Roberts, Libby Saylor and Julianna Foster add three more distaff voices in separate solo shows. Wylie, a Vox Populi member who screenprints tiny, intricate architectural and garden motifs right on the wall, has been a standout in other group exhibits.

where it’s at

“A Delicate Constitution”
Through May 21. Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th St. 215.545.4302.

Candida Höfer: “Architecture of Absence” and Zoe Strauss: “Ramp Project”
April 22-July 30. Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St. 215.898.7108.

“The Late Show”
Through May 14. Morris Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118 N. Broad St. 215.972.7600.

Nami Yamamoto: “Stages”
April 7-May 27. Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St. 215.925.9914.

“New Orleans Photographs”
Through April 7. Gallery 1401, University of the Arts, 320 S. Broad St. 215.717.6000.

“Out of the Blue”
Through May 6. Abington Art Center, 515 Meetinghouse Rd., Jenkintown. 215.887.4882.

“Second Woodmere Triennial of Contemporary Photography”
March 26-June 25. Woodmere Art Museum, 9201 Germantown Ave. 215.247.0476.