Family Affairs

John Haber
in New York City

Diana Markosian and Gillian Laub

Inward and Muriel Hasbun

What is it to be an American? Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography take the question personally. When it comes to the intimate and the personal, though, they put on quite a show. For Diana Markosian, America is a nation of immigrants, herself included, but also a soap opera. She even supplies the script.

For Gillian Laub, it is a nation of unearned privilege and shallow pleasures, with a soft spot for the master of both, Donald J. Trump. Laub keeps asking anyway, but her life is first and foremost family life, though it still looks an awful lot like reality TV. So what does it really take? The black photographers in "Inward" face the question every single day. Do "serious" issues take a back seat to friends and family for both? No doubt, but then "Inward" turns outward, with iPhone photographs that play out as selfies, in a museum and online.

Not every artist is in search of her roots, but Muriel Hasbun has them abundantly. She can look beneath the surface to dental records from the past, because her father was a dentist. She can look deep into the earth as well, to seismic records, including from El Salvador, where she was born in 1961. Two years later at ICP, they become part of a personal history, a family history, and a history of her time. They are testimony to her love. If they are no less shadowy for that, in several languages and in cryptic images, she knows the shadows as intimately as the substance.

As seen on TV

For Diana Markosian, Santa Barbara was a dream come true. Not only had she grown up in a repressive nation, but she had done so while watching Santa Barbara, the soap opera, on TV—and it lends its name to her show. With the fall of the Soviet Union, she and her family were free to leave, but she replays the events based on a doctored script from the show. Her photos look innocent enough, if not sickeningly sweet, with such personal firsts as finding a job, a birthday in America, and a family trip to Palm Springs. First, though, she had to cast all the parts. How else could she have preserved her arrival in America on video?

She displays pages from the script, with her handwritten edits. She can only improve on the soap opera. For starters, her life seems far more real and unsettled. The messy apartment in Russia hides nothing of its mediocrity and confinement—or its closeness to her. It becomes that much more real as ICP's Lower East Side home becomes a stage set, with a rug on the floor and a dated pink phone. So much for the smartphones behind "Inward" and Meg Lipke.

Yet it is also larger than life. It depends on the artifice of stage lighting and the allegorical nature of art. As night descends, a cactus glows against artificial light. America literally rolls out the red carpet on her arrival, but the carpet ends on its way into the desert. One may remember most moments her ungainly parents, her felt isolation, or a portfolio of actors who did not make the cut. This is an open-ended story, the rejects insist, and it could easily have gone another way.

Gillian Laub does not waste much time watching TV, but she structures her life as if she did, in a nation obsessed with public and private spectacles. She treats over twenty years of "Family Matters" as a play in four acts, with accompanying audio—introducing the cast and a grandparent's death, finding a "life partner," family divisions as her parents embrace Donald J. Trump but the next generation does not, and a hint of reconciliation after Joe Biden's election. They seem determined to have everything play out in public, with political posters everywhere. In lockdown from the pandemic, a little girl dresses as a superhero, and Laub's parents turn up for her birthday under quarantine with, of course, a cake. "I come," she says, "from a very expressive family."

"Rich or poor, you better have money." My father (a secular Jew and, for the record, a liberal) loved the phrase, and her father would have chimed right in. Herself a liberal and a Jew, Laub cringes at the ostentation, of a house in Chappaqua and a wedding with ten planning stages. She commits herself as a photographer, she adds, to listen, to observe, and to connect but not to judge, but her viewers will. Food is a big deal, from Thanksgiving turkey to the most lavish spread of all, the breaking of the fast on Yom Kippur. Any remaining irony of a day of atonement climaxing in indulgence is, for this family, half the point.

Everything unfolds under bright lights, less suggestive of photojournalism or art photography than of the Web. Laub's grandmother lays her jeweled hand on a child's rear end much as a hand for Markosian feels the back of a pink robe. In all this, Laub is only asking what it means to be an American. Her father's proudest moments are a photograph with Derek Jeter, attendance at Trump's inauguration, and each and every Thanksgiving. Does that search to belong also explain the display of wealth? Laub, like Stephen Shore more often known for crossing the Middle East and the American South than for baring all, must be wondering about her fifth act even now.

The selfie within

"Inward" opens with the very emblem of an inner life, a dream. It is, though, only a dream in the photographer's eye, and it is meant for you. Arielle Bobb-Willis or an avatar poses face up, lying down, one arm flung over her head. The carpet, blue-gray as the sea and rippled with highlights, seems to sweep her up in its own troubled motions. Her clashing red top and violet skirt might be divided only by dream itself or the intense but shifting light—the same light that turns her bronzed face into a mask. The camera presses down, so that the yellow pole at her head appears to tilt off to the left, but it cannot compress her troubled sleep into the picture plane.

The show's "reflections on interiority" belong to five emerging black photographers, and every one of them is looking to the outside world. These are iPhone shots, of themselves and friends, and they can hardly help reflecting the unspoken conventions of selfies and the Web. They lean to close-ups, and they mug for the camera even when asleep. Their moods range from Bobb-Willis in her nightmare to Djeneba Aduayom, as she puts it, "at ease in being home and sitting still," but then selfies are all about sharing one's every mood. They also have in common intense lighting, disorienting colors, and clothing with a will of its own. If they resemble traditional photography at all, it would be fashion photography.

Clothes here are as expressive as faces, and four of the five could be using the same colorful wardrobe. Aduayom calls attention to it all the more when she pairs color photographs with black and white. When Bobb-Willis pulls loosely flowing fabric over her or a sitter's head, she could be dancing or smothered. Quil Lemons makes dressing up her very subject, with "Melanin Monroe." The lone exception, Brad Ogbonna in black and white, allows his West African sitters to wear native clothing, but it is quite a show as well. He also photographs snapshots laid out on a table cloth, bringing their lavish patterns that much more alive.

Interiority is all well and good, but Lemons could be speaking for them all when she speaks of her aim as "self-exploration and self-validation." It applies just as much to Bobb-Willis trapped in her clothes and her nightmare. It applies to pretty much the entirely of social media as well. Yet pride here is also a way of life. When Isaac West photographs a man getting a haircut or a groom sweeping the bride off her feet, every day is a special occasion. For Ogbonna in search of his roots, every act is a ritual.

Is this a record of distinctly African American lives, and is it quintessentially African American photography? One might think so from Lemons in melanin or Ogbonna in Nigeria. Still, this is at once too public and too private for a notably political photography. It is about sharing and about oneself. Everyone has dreams, and everyone has nightmares. And almost everyone has a mobile phone.

All art is both private and public. It preserves the encounter between the artist and the work—and between the work and you. Selfies are both private and public, too, but in a way that does not bode well for art. They allow people to preserve every whim and to follow every convention, with or without a cat. The pleasure of "Inward" is in lingering over just five photographers, with their phone at hand but outside the frame of social media. Like their clothing, life has a way of flowing over them, even as they heighten its color.

Roots that clutch

One expects multiculturalism in art these days, but not often like this. Hasbun's mother was Jewish, half French and half Polish, and was fortunate in escaping the Nazis—first to Paris from Vichy, then across the Atlantic. A photo shows her when she arrived. Hasbun calls it Je Me Souviens, or "I remember," and surely she herself remembers as well. Her father was Christian, half Salvadorian and half Palestinian. Si Je Meurs Je Me Souviens, a later title runs, or "If I Die I Remember," and she insists on memories, even in death.

She herself fled El Salvador in 1979, after a right-wing military coup soon embraced by Ronald Reagan's United States—first to France and then to Washington, D.C. She could have been in search of her mother's past as much as her own present, but these things for Hasbun are hard to pull apart. (She also has a degree in French lit.) All this could easily become a dry litany, but for her they are about not a cultural affiliation, but the family she knew. It is not so easy to make art about love without its becoming a record of loss as well, as in "Love Songs" at ICP just this year. But that, too, is a part of life.

The show itself has a multilingual title, "Tracing Terruño," or home ground. "What are these roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?" For T. S. Eliot "a heap of broken images," but exactly that makes "The Waste Land" a satisfying poem and Hasbun's photography a satisfying art. Santos y Sombra from the 1990s mixes recovered and original images to evoke its saints and shadows. They run to tropical silhouettes against pale skies, at times with overlays added in the darkroom. They, too, are what a title calls Presencia, and Todos los Santos (Para Subir al Cielo), or "All the Saints (to Go Up to Heaven)."

Heaven may not be easy to reach, but it still comes down equally to family and art. She applies chemicals to photographic plates with her grandmother's rags, so that they pay homage at once to May Ray in Surrealism and to home. The dental x-rays might seem to step away from anything at all familiar, but they, too, look in all directions. As X Post Facto, they might be pillars in a dry landscape or mathematical unknowns. They also simply come after. Yet they look all the more nuanced and colorful for their detachment.

Seismic disruptions enter with Pulse: New Cultural Registers starting in 2020. (An earlier Central American landscape did show a volcano.) Some prints have thick black frames, setting off the presences. Others look paler than ever, with physical layers like people in their clothing. Her grandmother returns in person, I shall guess to honor her death. The work has become more physical, but also more elusive and ephemeral. It is shaking things up.

Hasbun has had other work that does not quite fit, almost always in series. Still, this is enough for a sizable retrospective and a sprawling history. It also has resonances with "Immersion," a three-person show on the same floor. It, too, is creating a sense of place, of home turf. It has the taller rooms, while Hasbun has the longer walls, in accord with her traditionalism and persistence. One can think of the entire show as her only installation and her only home.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Diana Markosian, Gillian Laub, and "Inward" ran at the International Center of Photography through January 10, 2022, Muriel Hasbun through January 8, 2024.