House of Bondage
By Fred Camper
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Cole’s images illuminate the collision between the quest for self-definition and a repressive structure that at best undercuts and at worst destroys the individual. I looked for some hint of self-expression in a shot of a man in tattered clothes being fingerprinted–and thought I found one in the stylishly ragged beard and askew tie clip of the older black man apparently booking him. Then I learned from the book that this wasn’t an arrest at all: mine laborers are routinely fingerprinted before they’re allowed to work, at long hours for little pay. A few pages later were images of a row of nude workers undergoing exams and of the tiny open cubicles in which the laborers sleep, placing the fingerprinting photo in its true context, as one of many assaults on the integrity of the workers’ bodies.
Though he’d worked professionally for South African periodicals, it seems Cole was largely self-taught; his photos rarely aspire to the carefully composed look of art photography but gain strength from their offhand, slightly disordered views. By contrast George Rodger’s Mau Mau in Dock, another picture in the show, is more elegant: we see a defendant flanked by two elaborately uniformed guards, a symmetrical composition that conveys the man’s entrapment yet has its own formal balance. Cole’s view of the interior of a commuter train, on the other hand, is as crowded and chaotic as a cattle car, men pressed together every which way, a few grasping for support against the low ceiling. (The commuter trains reserved for whites, we learn from the book, were spacious and uncrowded.)
Going from Cole’s work to the 54 collaged and manipulated images by five Chicago women in “The Photograph Transformed” at the Chicago Cultural Center, I was reminded that, like much other documentary and street photography, his draws strength from the straight photograph’s status as a direct imprint of the world. A painting showing an imprisoned figure will be read as an artist’s conceit, but Cole’s photos have an aura of objectivity–the street boys really were cut off from the city, the men reaching through the bars of their cell really were imprisoned. These photographs transport the viewer to their original sites, and Cole’s skillful selection and framing are rightly perceived as revealing social truths. His photos’ direct ties to cultural realities also meant that they might have been confiscated–he had to disguise the real nature of his project, persuading the police that he was doing a study of juvenile delinquency.
Katharine Schutta’s digital prints of photo collages are perhaps the closest in this exhibit to traditional high art in that their meanings are the most obscure. But some do suggest a social dimension, if only through the metaphoric clash of cultures. Jump captures a group of boys in bathing trunks in midair as if leaping off a pier, while on a brick pavement in front of them two women in long, heavy coats stand with their backs to us. Schutta leaves the conflicts here–between airborne play and earthbound pavement, near nudity and heavy clothing, youth and age–unresolved. In Faith a businessman on an empty airplane has his head tilted toward a window whose shade is pulled, looking away from a Virgin borrowed from some northern Renaissance painting floating to his left. At his side is a newspaper with a blaring headline. The Virgin’s presence is as ambiguous and finally inexplicable as the juxtapositions in Jump: she seems a possibility open to the lonely man, yet there’s no hint that he even sees her.
