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Photography and Its Ghosts
John Haberin New York City
Your Mirror: Portrait Photography at ICP
Alec Soth and Ghosts
So many people, so many different ways to see. Can portrait photography find room for them all? For the International Center of Photography and its collection, they are all "Your Mirror." For Alec Soth, they are seeing ghosts, not least their own. To judge by the photographs and other work at a gallery, they could be your "Ghosts" as well.
So many people
They might be in the moment, like street life for Weegee, or long since gone. They might be in a terrible place in-between, like a child on its deathbed in an early daguerreotype. They might be in a family or alone. 
They might be caught between nations, like immigrants for Jacob Riis, or between sides in a brutal civil war. They might be washed in blood, like Nicaragua for Susan Meiselas, or facing bayonets with an innocent gaze and a flower, like a high-school girl for Marc Riboud. They might be protesting a war or in a pro-war parade—like a boy with an American flag, a clip-on bow tie, and preposterously big ears for Diane Arbus.
They might pose as they are, for a snapshot, or as they would like to be. They might be as messy or ugly as life, like a nude for Lisette Model. They might demand recognition as an individual, like a cleaning woman for Gordon Parks, or as a type, like almost anyone for August Sander. They might be actors, like Paul Robeson for Edward Steichen or Marilyn Monroe for Richard Avedon. They may make the role their signature, like Robeson as the Emperor Jones, or play against their public image, like Monroe in cropped dark hair as Theda Bara, the silent film star. They might be artists, like René Magritte in an enormous bowler hat for Duane Michals, or the photographers themselves.
They might be in a theater of their own making or of the photographer's, like a family drama for Tina Barney. With Cindy Sherman, they are in both. They may flaunt their presence, like Samuel Fosso, or hide it, like Paul Mpagi Sepuya in a photocollage. They may only wish that they could hide, like men in an FBI wanted poster. They may shine forth, like glistening bodies for Margaret Bourke-White, or dissolve in puddles of chocolate or ink for Vic Muniz. Can they all, then, be "Your Mirror," and just who are you?
Are they all even portraits? The curators, Erin Barnett with Claartje van Dijk, start with family albums and end with self-portraits—but with varieties of photojournalism along the way. The layout moves seamlessly from genre to genre, leaving you to mark divisions if you dare. And to many critics, that is the very essence of portrait photography or of photography itself. What is it, they ask, if not the recognition of another life? And they might not mean that as a compliment.
For Geoff Dyer, one photograph here could stand for them all. Photographers are drawn to life on the far side of the camera, like a blind man for Paul Strand, but the subject cannot look back without disturbing what they see. That, he argues, is why Walker Evans hid his camera while on the subway. Roland Barthes takes similar care to keep subject and viewer apart. For Teju Cole, that distance opens the viewer to eternal mysteries, even if the photographer then has to supply the text. Susan Sontag, too, sees a refusal of mutual recognition. And for her that means appropriating the pains of others, at their expense.
They cannot all be right, but they share a hidden assumption. For them all, photography is an unmediated record of human experience, and any hint of mediation is a failure. It has replaced painting as a fabled mirror or window onto nature, only this time as a matter of chemistry and nature. ICP may well go along, with the mirror of the show's title—but it also throws that assumption to the winds with its diversity. Not every photography is a portrait, not every subject is blind, not every blind man is unaware, and not every photographer hides the camera, not even on the subway, like Bruce Davidson in his own subway series. So much art, so much terror, and so fragile a life.
Beating time
A gray-haired woman emerges only slowly from a plenitude of dappled, translucent colors. From a distance, one can hardly know which belong to the furniture and foliage that surround her, the rugs and cushions thrown aside at her feet, sunlight through the window beside her, or her lavish dress. Closer, she becomes the beauty of her own and the camera's imagining—still commanding, a choreographer of note (although with no hint of that from the photographer), even if she has to lean back a bit for support. For Alec Soth, in the title of his latest photographs, "I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating," even if common sense says that the rhythms of her life have slowed. Old and young, his subjects are searching for themselves in a remembered past or a hopeful future. They just happen to find themselves in the present, beating time.
A shallow focus isolates that woman in the middle ground for good reason. The sitter's world is always just apart from the viewer's, and old and young may never find common ground. An elderly man leans into the picture plane, leaving the memorabilia behind him to tell his story along with Soth's and theirs. A wrinkled woman seeks herself in the three panes of a bedroom mirror, leaving her to decide if any one reflection is hers. Another woman seeks vitality and order in the small stones that she shuffles furiously enough, but they persist in their weight and clarity, even as her hands dissolve into a blur. Other hearts beat only in crumbling books or an empty bed.
Pride and anxiety go together for the young, too. A black woman looks sexy enough seated, but her head turns ever so slightly away. A young man is caught between still more windows and reflections, so that he and the viewer alike are looking both out and within. A dress spreads out on the floor beneath a standing little girl, as if it belonged to the adult she is determined to be. Then, too, she might have sprouted all at once the very moment before. She may have eaten the wrong side of the mushroom in Wonderland, or she may be uncanny vegetation herself.
Like Stephen Shore or William Eggleston, Soth uses sharp colors to pick out people and places. A Midwesterner, in Minneapolis, he also conceives of his projects as road trips. He has crossed the country much like Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander, and he could easily have called many a book, like Frank, The Americans. His subject, though, lies not in the open road but in people. And he is interested in people not as the wayward soul of America, but as lost and found souls. They are also in denial of any loss.
Soth often situates people in places that embody turning points and transience. His best-known book followed them to Niagara, where they look mostly lost even in a wedding party. He intersperses them with shots of the falls—to show, no doubt, how furiously their heart is beating or what they came to see. In practice, though, the water could be falling fast and furious on them. A hotel sign hangs askew as well. They must have been glad, newly married, to go home.
This time out, he ranges more widely, as far as Eastern Europe, and much has an old-world flavor, like the piles of books and peeling walls. The first elderly woman could be a European grand dame at that, if not a southern belle, although she is a noted choreography in California. Titles state names and places. Still, Soth's subject remains displacement, and his tools to that end remain depth of field, multiple reflections, and color. Paired photographs can be doubles, except that the woman at the right has darkened to the point of vanishing, or a single panorama. Like his subjects, too, he is a show-off, at the expense of honesty or edginess, but not at the expense of the imagination.
Not zombies but ghosts
Galleries and museums are full of ghosts. They bring past or merely absent artists into the here and now, while their artists bring past or absent lives into art. They can even give them the color of life. If they have to make up a few along the way, all the better. An unusually coherent group show, though, earns its theme of "Ghosts" differently. It keeps evoking the extended moment of death.
For its six artists, death is an extended moment. They accept it as their fate, even as they refuse to go away. Hervé Guibert died in the AIDS crisis, but here he is again, in a photograph of his reflection in a window. He seems all the more ghostly from its silvery black and white, like that of early photography—and all the more present by not allowing you to look through the glass to the other side. You can make out a larger and still darker space all the same. He described past artists as a critic as well, with a book on photography without photographs, Ghost Image.
Another photo took him to an older Europe, that of the Villa Medici in Rome. Its two chairs bound in white sheets could be ghosts themselves. This is not the museum as a grand public space, as in photos by Candida Höfer. Elizabeth Jaeger enters the museum, too, for her Denudes, which all but efface female nudes in unidentifiable European paintings, using black pencil. Where Guibert's writings also paid tribute to Michel Foucault, she may allude to Jacques Derrida by placing art history under erasure. Yet she does so to reassert women's autonomy and women's lives.
Cortney Andrews has a more grisly extended moment. In her video, Holding, she hangs herself from a tree. At the same time, she could be climbing or holding onto the tree for dear life with every twitch of her body, and she is still very much alive, or so I hope. Her videos often suspend their actors suspended between modern dance on the one hand and a horror film on the other. Still, she asserts the body as a woman's subject, even when it is also an object for fine art and men. A photograph shows a lock of Catherine Deneuve's blonde hair up for auction.
If they all treat photography as an opaque window, Bennet Schlesinger constructs Possible Windows, with fluorescent colors behind small, irregular frames. And if they ever manage to die, Quay Quinn Wolf has already prepared their funerals. She stains satin or velvet in the color of roses, lilies, and blood, as if for a casket. Still, one thick fabric drapes over a stand for houseplants. Another lies on the floor beneath a man's black jacket. This funeral will be an everyday affair among the living—and a stylish one.
Martin Soto Climent obsesses over rituals, too, those of ancient Mesoamerica, but it may not matter all the much. One sees instead seemingly precious objects preserved under glass. Here, too, past life has a fragile existence, for the glass is cracked, and a candle's flame has gone out. And here, too, found materials reflect the obsessions of the living. Collected butterfly wings retain their dappled black and orange. The candle and a feather have become abstract art.
Talk about "zombie abstraction." By comparison, zombies have it easy, as well as a bit stiff. Art often brings past visions into the present, while making inconvenient memories, bodies, and objects difficult to forget. Classicism does so with its belief in a lasting ideal, Impressionism with its belief in the persistence of vision, political art with its urgency and context, or performance art with its discomforting encounters. Still, every so often it pays to see them as distinct fictions rather than that one big thing called art. It pays to see not zombies but ghosts.
"Your Mirror" ran at the International Center of Photography through April 28, 2019, Alec Soth at Sean Kelly through April 27, and "Ghosts" at Jack Hanley through March 17.