Three photographers, Liz Bennett, Keith Cich, and Kevin Hanson, exhibited their work as part of a lecture symposium on contemporary camera-arts presented at Christ Episcopal Church in Austin, Minnesota on November 12, 2022. Keith Cich spoke: his talk was entitled An Instrument for Seeing: Observing Ourselves through Photography. Cich illustrated the themes in his lecture with photographs by various artists including Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand and Ansel Adams along with lesser-known photographers such as Wendy Red Star (her remarkable images warrant further investigation). His words were thought-provoking and provided an excellent theoretical counterpoint to the pictures in the show. You can't see this show -- it was as ephemeral as heat-lightning in the summer night sky (the pictures were hung on the 11th of November in a church basement and taken down by one pm the next day). But the lecture and exhibition were memorable and readers should be attentive to future opportunities to see the work of these artists. Taken together, the show represented different aspects of contemporary photographic practice and the work was highly sophisticated, challenging in some instances, and worthy of close consideration.
Kevin Hanson's pictures are examples of expressively composed and lucid photo-journalism -- the title of his collective work in the show as "The Ticket" and the pictures document at least forty years of the Iowa caucuses and associated political activities, a traveling circus in which candidates mingle intimately with their supporters and prospective voters. Because the Iowa caucuses are the first event of this sort in the election year, there is generally a crowded field of candidates and opportunities to observe them at close-hand before the scrum of reporters and photo-journalists becomes an inscrutable screen around front-running politicians in later venues. Hanson's images show the candidates among crowds of people, working variations on the theme of the one and the many, the singular man or woman against the multitude. In one picture, Bernie Sanders appears as an indelible white sliver in the middle of a sea of faces, implacable and resolute, it seems, unmoved among the agitated crowds. Some pictures focus on the faces of the candidates and are iconic: Chris Christy, for instances, appears as a monster out of Rabelais, Gargantua with his vast mouth open as if to swallow the whole landscape around him. Other pictures show signs displayed forlornly against empty and bleak landscapes. Whereas the politicians are shot in their natural habitat, among throngs of people, these signs suggest something lonely and alienated about our political process -- vacant space posted with names and slogans that are incommensurate with the indifferent nature in which the political signs are posed. We see empty rooms with TVs screens flickering with the faces of candidates. In one indelible image, Kamala Harris is shot from below and behind, her back and shoulders framed against a vast Ferris wheel (the picture was made at the Iowa State Fair); the wheel seems to signify the role that fortune plays in politics -- it's like an aerial roulette wheel -- and Harris' raised hand, raked by the late afternoon sun, is a gnarled and ancient mess of veins and wrinkles; her hand looks like the roots of an old and beleaguered tree. The curious aspect of these pictures is how beautiful they are and how completely elusive and uncommunicative, as well, with respect to the personalities and the political ideologies of the candidates shown in the photographs -- one can't infer what motivates these politicians or what programs they espouse. The photograph records landscapes in which a single figure somehow organizes a multitude around him or her -- but the basis for this organization, structural to many of the pictures, is unclear. The pictures show us ideas that would be invisible to the naked eye at these events, but the ideas are formal and don't have much to do with the opinions or policies espoused by these politicians. Hanson's show demonstrates the strength of photography to organize remarkably complex and, even, chaotic events, but, also, shows that a political understanding of the images depends on something extrinsic to them.
Liz Bennett takes pictures of people and places in her hometown of Swea City, Iowa (in Kossuth County on the Minnesota border in north central Iowa). These pictures are accompanied by a suite of images made in Cuba. Both sets of pictures, by and large, depict the complex textures and dilapidated forms and facades of places that have seen better days -- although her images are clear and, even, hard-edged there is something deliquescent and even partly decayed about the subject matter. I characterize Ms. Bennett as a surrealist -- the buildings in Swea City and Havana, and the people visible in some of the shots, are like Dali's melting watches: time is doing something sinister to these places and they are melting away before our eyes. Lonely figures peer out of dark buildings -- there's something of the melancholy of Edward Hopper with homage to the great photographer Robert Frank about these photographs. Someone has painted a door in Swea City, but run out of energy or time or pigment with respect to the spectacularly weathered walls in which the door is hung. Some men are drinking beer, it seems, on a Havana street -- remarkably, one of the men seems to be stark naked although I suppose he is clothed partially in a way that the camera doesn't reveal. A dog patrols the roof of a building: "Mother Hen", the picture is labeled. (Bennett gives her picture poetic captions that, in some cases, enhance the quality of enigma with which the pictures are invested). In another photo, a hunting dog, possibly a Labrador retriever, grins at the camera. But on the dog's flank, framed as a patch shaved in the animal's fur, there is a criss-cross of stitches from some kind of injury or surgery. In the background, there is a dark aperture that seems to rhyme with the sutured hole in the dog -- this is the pooch's dog house. A handsome old man with an indomitable, even, belligerent expression on his face, confronts the camera -- he isn't about to be cowed by the lens and the photographer. A work glove, possibly for welding, reaches down from a clothesline to touch his shoulder -- at least, this is the perspective that the picture offers us. (There's another brown, battered-looking glove facing us, palm forward on the same clothesline a little behind the man.) The disembodied hand gropes for the old man to the point of putting a sinister mark on him. In the next picture, we see the old man's gravestone, not yet installed in the cemetery, but sitting on a kind of folding table with some other bric-a-brac of a vaguely mortuary nature -- "found in the garage," the label tells us. But why isn't the gravestone with the dead man? (In her comments to those attending the exhibition, Liz Bennett noted that the man, her grandfather, died in Texas and, perhaps, was never brought back to Iowa from that place.) A middle-aged lady stands next to a swimming pool on a resplendently bright day -- her bathing suit glows with two slashes of bright color, radiance that illumines the center of her body so that she seems to be gathering and focusing and reflecting light from the landscape around her. (The label says she's a water aerobics instructor). The woman looks happy and beams at the camera. There's nothing even remotely self-conscious about her. But in another shot, we see her poised on the end of the diving board and there's an ominous chill now in the air, a sense that she is about to venture into the unknown, and, although the day remains as palpably bright as before, an impalpable shadow has entered the frame -- when people are shot with their backs to us, there is something questionable even a bit macabre about the image. Photography is about seeing and, when eyes and mouth are withheld, this brings something eerie and problematic into the image.
Keith Cich works in a vein of poetic introspection. His images have an autobiographical valence and are suffused with melancholy. Hanson's pictures present themselves as documentary and Bennett's images are reveries made objective -- everything in the pictures of these artists would be visible to the naked eye. By contract, Cich manipulates his images: in one set of pictures his face appears inverted on the glass viewfinder of an old single-lens reflex camera, a fine grid superimposed on his features; Cich shows himself upside-down as projected by the system of mirrors in the camera. In another astonishing image, Cich shows his father, then-dying of cancer, enveloped in a sooty black blur, a sfumato-effect that shows the handsome middle-aged man succumbing, it seems, to the darkness that embraces him. (Cich accurately described the picture as looking like a Rembrandt.) In two other pictures, Cich shows his father (these photographs derive from Rembrandt portrait) -- in one of these images, Cich has substituted his own eyes for those of his father; yet the effect is imperceptible: Cich both literally and figuratively has his father's eyes. The idea of the eye is integral to most of Cich's pictures: family portraits ask us to evaluate resemblances among kin and particularly how the eyes seem similar to one another. A hand reaches toward a circular mirror in another stylized image of the eye. Two deer heads glare out at us and, in context, we focus on the eyes of those animals -- the deer have a distinct mien of alarm and warning: their glass eyes are strangely admonitory. These pictures are about seeing and family -- indeed, one might argue how seeing is rooted in family and fascination of family likenesses, how features emerge from the vegetative darkness of kinship, flare into visibility briefly and, then, fade into the embrace of darkness. A fallen tree shows a delicate filigree of roots, tendrils normally invisible in the darkness of the earth, but here shining in a ray of light that penetrates the black void where the earth has opened under the tree. A fizz of seed-froth bubbles off the top of some dying weeds -- things grow out of the darkness. An Eggleston-like image of florescent lights on a metal ceiling makes a cross: x marks the spot. The intersection is similar to the grid imposed over Cich's face. A quotation from Virgil's Georgics reminds us that the eye is capable of swimming -- it overflows with tears or it carries us far out over the waters of Lake Superior shown in two beautiful and morose images: a wasteland of water lit by twilight or extending to the empty extremity of the horizon. In a forest, shadows give way to a blonde tree standing denuded on the edge of a pond. Although the images are all disparate, they seem to form an ensemble: in a note, the artist tells us that the pictures derive from a period of homesickness, when the photographer was far from his family of origin and when his father was in the late-stages of the cancer that would kill him -- the idea is to see things in a way that makes sense of this experience by raising questions of family continuity generation to generation and how the artist will engage with his own children. At the center of Cich's group of pictures is an extraordinary portrait of his mother, a glamorous-looking woman with a swirl of turquoise at her throat and the same deep and penetrating gaze that characterizes other family members -- her eyes, it seems, are cameras.
I thought the show was extraordinary, in the brief instant of its exhibition, the finest show of photographs in the world. Here are three more examples: In Iowa, a man confronts a little girl holding a political sign; other signs are visible in the same picture and, in the background, a long way distant it seems (but probably closer than it looks) we see the flares of flashbulbs shining against the late afternoon gloaming. Politics is the great game that engages us all in a democracy but there is more than a little bit childish about it. The light bulb flares are like torches. In Havana, I suppose, or maybe Swea City, there is a petrified-looking cage barren except for a petrified-looking bird, surely one of the saddest and most bleak cages ever photographed. As in certain landscapes by Magritte, the cage seems to be caught in a transformation into mineral enclosing a mineral bird. A great paralysis and confinement stiffens the world with rigor mortis. In a Minnesota forest somewhere, a place possibly stalked by Yeti-like Big Foot creatures, a tree branch enclosed in dark green leaves with a dark green enamel finish presents several apples. The apples are rose-red, the kind of fruit that a witch might present to a beautiful young girl in order to poison her into a hundred year's sleep. The apples don't exactly glisten and they are very dark, like drops of blood on the picture.
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