Bleak beauty intrigues in a pair of exhibits on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Menil Collection. Construction and Destruction in Photography and Collage, curated by Yasufumi Nakamori at the MFAH, features about 100 works from around the globe. Danny Lyon Photographs a lightning tour, meaning it's not a big survey but covers a lot of ground. Japanese photographer Ezaki Reiji's "Collage of Babies," a photomontage of about 1,700 images, was an advertisement for his baby portrait services in 1893. Sparagana, who teaches at Rice University and lives part-time in Houston, "samples" magazine pages like a DJ mixing music. Onto a panoramic view of Hiroshima's landscape after the city was flattened in World War II, Isozaki has layered larger-scaled skeletal building remains, further distorting perception by drawing tiny classical columns at their bases. House Beautiful series strongly juxtapose conflicting ideas of domestic bliss with wartime ugliness. In "Patio View," the curtained awning of a back porch with refined metal chairs frames an image of a Saigon street littered with bodies during the Vietnam War. Rosler taps into a huge archive of ready-made images - war photos from Newsweek or Time and idyllic scenes from shelter magazines - to construct imaginary spaces that are a feminist's wake-up call to reality. Aiming his lens at those on society's fringes - prisoners, political protesters, motorcycle gang members, abandoned children and the very poor - he finds poetry with more a more passionate sensitivity than that of contemporaries such as Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. In a small gallery, Kamps has arranged the images roughly in chronological order, starting with some of Lyon's earliest work and ending with current images of protests from the Occupy movement. In 1962, when he was a student at the University of Chicago, Lyon headed south to shoot after seeing photographs of activist Tom Hayden being beaten during a voter-registration drive. Some of the most gripping are dramatic scenes of prisoners confronting security guards at Huntsville State Prison. A biker from the Chicago-based Outlaws gang, with whom Lyon spent a year or so - managing to handle his Rolleiflex camera while he rode - suggested he check out Galveston for beer and shrimp in the 1970s.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment