Havana: Walker Evans and Andrew Moore
By Fred Camper
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Yet several of Evans’s apparently candid shots are among the most powerful images I’ve ever seen. They may have an offhand look, but their forms collide with a peculiar intensity and energy. Each photo is animated by a tension between Evans’s formal arrangements and the uncontrollable chaos of life. In number 12 on the checklist, three men stand in front of a newsstand wearing panama hats, vertical forms that repeat like columns. But their arrangement is irregular–one partly obscures another–and the newspapers and magazines to their right add clutter. Each man faces in a different direction, as if totally unaware of the others’ existence; only Evans sees their common humanity. Multiple copies of a magazine on the newsstand offer a few repeated faces–an ironic contrast to the men and implicit comment on the difference between repeated media images and the disorganized, individuated flow of life. The image beautifully balances centrifugal and centripetal forces: the three figures seem to both come together and fly apart.
Evans had an eye for the human cost of poverty–he would later become famous for his Depression-era photographs of the United States. But the images of Havana aren’t moving solely because of their often heart-wrenching subject matter: Evans’s compositions express the disorder and devastation of living at starvation’s edge. In Beggar, a seated man stretches his arm out to a well-dressed woman walking past him. But we see only her lower body, and his reaching arm calls attention to the frame’s empty center–to the gap between two figures who will never meet. The empty street, overexposed to a burning white, becomes a metaphor for the isolation of the poor, the breakdown of social connections.
I’m not sure that the 25 pinhole-camera photographs by Kathleen Velo–one of three photographers in “From Pin Hole to Pixel” at Wood Street–reveal any more of an organizing vision than Moore’s pictures. But her small, fuzzy images have an inherent charm, leaving more room for the viewer’s imagination. In Moore’s images one’s eye is always filled, but these pinhole shots evoke the unseen as well as the seen.
Joyce P. Lopez’s 18 ink-jet prints in “From Pin Hole to Pixel” were taken in spectacular, remote locales, primarily Yemen. But her work reminded me of what I like least about digital imagery. Modifying the colors to produce such pairings as blue landscapes and red skies, she’s produced work that’s very pretty in a narrow decorative sense. But the manipulations seem more a display of technical capabilities than the expression of a vision, making me want to see Yemen’s amazing architecture in more straightforward National Geographic form. Fortunately Lopez has also included 27 relatively unmanipulated prints from the same locales that reveal how good she is at capturing the glorious otherness of distant cultures.
