The critic John Berger wrote, "All photographs have the status of fact. What is to be examined is in what way photography can and cannot give meaning to facts." In some photographs, the facts are as elusive as they are in a minimalist painting. This is quite clear in this month's fine exhibition at Eyre/Moore Gallery, Self/Developed. The show's premise is rather loose: five artists who use photographs of themselves in their work. The result, far from any kind of portrait-gallery feeling, is a set of (pleasantly) uneasy juxtapositions of photography and self as vehicles for meaning.
A photograph by Enrique Martinez Celaya, a Cuban-born artist now living in California, seems to deny the very possibility of self-portrait. It is a standard shot of a man on a beach in which the figure has been carefully and completely inked over, a move that both protects its privacy and frustrates the viewer. Liza Ryan's small, multi-paneled Wind Study alternates images of windblown hair over eyes (presumably Ryan's) and trees. Ryan's work exploits one of photography's great cognitive dissonances: the depiction in present time of something that is already over, already lost. Her work affects on a low wavelength; it's not the most visually startling in the exhibition, but it returns to haunt later.
A photographer I know told me recently that a photographed landscape reveals the space inside the artist. Actually, all art, to some degree, hints at what is inside the artist. But this truism makes interpretation of Alice Wheeler's exhibition of color photographs at Greg Kucera Gallery somewhat problematic. Best known for her documentation of the early '90s grunge scene, Wheeler has turned to landscape, in her words, as "respite from the 'hipster' scene," and as a "search for my roots." And they are good photographs -- vivid, striking -- but they tell me things I certainly know already. There is a lot of contrasting of the old and new West, a theme that has been well-covered by other photographers. The best images occur when people find their way into the landscapes, such as a small head bobbing in a pool, or two boys watching fireworks in Neah Bay where they seem to have been blown over by the spectacle above them. A photograph of a ski-masked magician lighting himself on fire is one of the most arresting in the exhibition, and speaks to the hold that Wheeler's former material still has on her.
On the other hand, Amir Zaki's photographs at James Harris Gallery indicate a quite determined sensibility. Zaki trains his focus on Los Angeles at night. He takes his photographs from the tops of buildings, looking down into alleys and deserted parking lots, using the artificial lights that populate the darkness as his only light source. Looking at his images reminds one of how the eyes adjust to the dark: First the surface is simply broad and dim, and then details begin to emerge, single moments of particular intensity like a window lighted at basement level, a lone TV satellite dish on a vast empty roof, or a plastic bag languishing in a gutter. His long exposures reveal, on close inspection, the lights of cars that have gone by, like delicate brushwork on the empty streets.
Zaki manipulates the images digitally to restore some of the colors that would be lost in the darkness, and this gives a feeling of recovery to the works -- of ghostly things taking their rightful place on the retina. The photographs have a magnificent matte quality and flatness. At the same time that the artist uses the most modern software and printing techniques, he declines the glossiness and depth that are among photography's best mimetic qualities. There is a vertiginous feeling that permeates the exhibition, a bit of Gotham in a city associated with broad Southern California light. There is a truth to it, but it is a truth manufactured to suit the artist's vision.
Which, come to think of it, you can say about any thoughtful work of art.
