John Gossage: There and Gone
at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, through October 31
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In a 1996 interview, Gossage gave several reasons for his approach (he also gives a lecture here Thursday, October 15, at the museum). His background in street photography caused him to question the way the photographer’s presence often influences supposed documentary pictures, and he didn’t want “to be a presence [or] a factor in the equation.” He also finds that, today, “every intrusion of the photographer is suspect, as is every intrusion by the hand of the media.” Instead the public trusts more anonymous records: “The more a picture looks like it’s been taken with a surveillance camera in a convenience store, the more likely we’ll believe the images in it.” Mentioning his U.S. citizenship, Gossage also suggests he wouldn’t feel comfortable telling “an individual Mexican story,” so his method rules out “the specifics of personality,” concentrating instead on “the gesture of a hand [and] other, subtler information.”
Reading Gossage, one would expect profoundly modest photographs, as the photographer documents his subjects in a supposedly objective medium. But these photos produce an effect quite different. It may be true, as Gossage says, that we “believe” surveillance-camera images above all others–but what do we believe? Most often we see such images in the context of news reports of serious crimes like robbery and murder. Gossage’s images encode his subjects as potential criminals even before his prints dry. Nearly featureless, they’re like animals trapped in the flat field of a telephoto lens. And because they’re often caught in motion, it seems as if they might be moving here soon.
Paul Seawright: Cages, Fires, Walls
at Rhona Hoffman, through October 17
These works are enriched by Seawright’s divided vision. Fire #3 shows a burned stick, heroic and absurd at once, pointing toward the sky from a desolate plateau. A remnant of the bonfire Protestants light annually, it suggests both a monument towering above the city visible beyond the plateau and a pathetic emblem of the final outcome of all human construction. Seawright uses beauty to transform such endings into a new beginning.
