Jack Spencer: Silent Dramas
By Fred Camper
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When Spencer does show faces, he often avoids the dead-on view in which the photographer “unmasks” his subject. The man in Eugene, Greenville, MS shades his eyes with his hand, intensifying their appearance by framing and darkening them, allowing him to look out while “shielding” himself. Cooter With Glass, Coila, MS shows us the man whose hand was on the screen door, now looking through a piece of plate glass. Distorting his face slightly, this image leaves us with the intensity of his stare, his essence at that moment. The face of the dark-skinned woman in Gussie’s Magnolia, LaGrange, TN is blurred because Spencer has focused on the white magnolia she holds before her, its whiteness a stunning contrast with her skin, its sharp edges distinct against the fuzzy outlines of her face.
Spencer flirts with a dangerous exoticism, seeming to depict his subjects as otherworldly creatures. Some of the flowers that fill the background in Girl and Sunflowers, Como, MS are almost as large as the girl’s head, making her seem like yet another fabulous plant. But Spencer’s images are ingenuous enough, and his use of light is evocative enough, for him to forge a convincing link between his subjects and the natural world. He makes one believe not only that Gussie loves magnolias but that they evoke her spirit; in the same way the wonderful old car that fills the background of M.L. and Mr. Henry’s Buick, Batesville, MS is as convincingly human as the man in front of it.
The borders of Plowden’s pictures seem metaphors for our rectilinear culture. Shopping Mall, Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, 1981 shows an empty parking lot, a lone white arrow on the pavement pointing into the image, toward a large brick wall punctuated by a blank door to the left and two lone shopping carts to the right–a labyrinth of right angles. The empty lot recalls the cars it was built for, just as the carts remind us of the shoppers we don’t see. But the detail and relatively small size of the carts also contrast with the stark, massive coldness of the rest of the scene; strangely anomalous, they suggest individuals made tiny by this depersonalized mallscape.
The way Plowden’s images are poised between humanity and its demise, loving those things that destroy nature even as they are themselves being destroyed, is perhaps clearest in “Main Street,” New Richland, MN, 1991. An empty, carless street is traversed by cracks that point inward toward an abandoned building at the left and a store at the center; through its window can be seen farm machinery. Like the shopping carts and Spencer’s tires, these manufactured things signal the creativity of the human beings who make and use them even as the cracks suggest the ultimate fate of everything we make, and are.
