Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [144]
Levitt, “New York (Broken Mirror),” 1942, Laurence Miller Gallery, NY. Helen Levitt’s straightforward style shows both the complexity and humanity of the best “street photography. ”
UELSMANN: FANTASYLAND. An American photographer who exploits the bizarre in a totally different vein than Arbus is Jerry N. Uelsmann (b. 1934). Uelsmann sandwiches half a dozen or more negatives superimposed on one another into one print. He combines these images seamlessly to make a totally unreal scene out of real objects. “The mind knows more than the eye and camera can see,” he has said. Early in his career, Uelsmann portrayed women as fertility figures, with their nude bodies growing out of grass, embedded in rocks, or floating over the ocean. His work succeeds best when he transmutes ordinary objects into uncanny, startling symbols to bring out what he calls “an innermost world of mystery, enigma, and insight.”
Uelsmann, “Navigation without Numbers,” 1971, Courtesy of the artist. Uelsmann layers different negatives to produce a photomontage that restores magic to photography.
Baldessari, “The Story of One Who Set Out to Study Fear,” 1982, Sonnabend Collection, NY.
Conceptual artist John Baldessari is considered a pioneer of Post-Modernism. This narrative photo sequence shows the Contemporary tendency to combine images with text.
PHOTO-REALISM
Also known as Hyper-Realism, Photo-Realism thrived in the United States from the mid-‘60s to mid ’70s. Influenced by Pop art, it reproduced photographs in painting with such fidelity one critic called it “Leica-ism.” To achieve near-exact likenesses, artists projected photo slides on canvas and used commercial art tools like the airbrush. Their painted reproductions of reality are so detailed, the work rivals fifteenth-century master Jan van Eyck’s. Despite this surface factual-ness, however, Photo-Realists differ from their predecessors. Post-Modern realism adopts the flattened effect of a camera image and treats objects as elements in an abstract composition.
HANSON: PHOTO-REAL SCULPTURE
If you ask a museum guard a question and he doesn’t respond, don’t be upset. It could be the “guard” is a Duane Hanson statue. Hanson’s life-size works, dressed in real clothes, are so lifelike they make wax museum replicas seem abstract.
From plaster casts of real people, Honson constructs tinted fiberglass models, which he outfits with wigs, glasses, and jewelry so they’re nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. His “Tourists” (1970) portrays on elderly man in plaid bermuda shorts and flowered shirt, festooned with camera, tripod, and film connisters. His wife sports a tacky scarf, gold sandals, and tight polyester pants. On the street, viewers would ignore such tourists, but they stare with fascination at this familiar species in a gallery.
Most Photo-Realists specialize in one subject. Richard Estes does highly reflective city windows. Audrey Flack paints symbolic still lifes, Malcolm Morley portrayed travelers on cruise ships during his Photo-Realist phase, and Chuck Close paints large-scale mug shots.
ESTES : WINDOWS ON THE WORLD. Richard Estes (b. 1936) goes the camera one better. His sharp-focus street scenes have even more depth of field and precise long-distance detail than a camera could ever capture. Estes projects a photo on a canvas and paints over it in a procedure similar to that other master of realism, Vermeer, with his camera obscura. But where Vermeer’s subject was light, Estes specializes in reflections. His luminous plateglass windows contain a labyrinth of layered images. The paintings portray a clear, glossy world but, at the same time, a world of distortions and ambiguity.
Another Photo-Realist who paints reflections in shop windows is Don Eddy (b. 1944). Eddy air-brushed gaudy designs on surfboards and hotrod cars as a California teenager, then worked as a photographer. His technicolor paintings fuse the two skills, highlighting