Providence Phoenix

May 1 - 8, 1 9 9 7

[Art Reviews]

Found poetry

by Bill Rodriguez
What could be more artless than snapshots? Family pictures in photo albums molder in millions of closets and attics across the country. In this day of video cameras recording every birthday and workplace picnic, it takes blue hair or precognition of future nostalgia for most people to continue the tradition. That's one of the reasons Snaps, the current installation at Providence's CenterCity Artisans, in the Arcade, is so valuable.
The images on display have been gleaned from the collections of three artists. In recent years, snapshots have experienced a resurgence of appreciation. Photographers and artists such as Michael Lesy and Jonathan Green have written about them as a genre worthy of esthetic attention. The assemblers of this show, however, are interested in ways less academic and more personal.

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Kathrine Lovell, a 1984 Rhode Island School of Design grad in painting, has contributed three multi-media pieces that each incorporates a photo inside a box. In one old sepia picture of a women in a floral dress under a grape arbor, age or light has bleached her feet to yellow. A bundle of grape vines arch above the photo in a battered wooden box. In another, a woman looks over her shoulder as she enters a house. The ambiguity of that moment intrigued Lovell.
"I've always been interested, when I did drawings and paintings, of the moment when things change. That happens in photographs a lot," she says, walking among the images in the Arcade. "There her skirt's flying, and who knows what happened next? You don't know who took the picture, you don't know anything about it."
She and Sandol Astrausky are both scenery painters at Trinity Repertory Company. Astrausky's primary background is as a musician she and her husband perform traditional fiddle music in the John Sayles film The Secret of Roan Inish. So she is especially delighted to come across pictures of bands at second hand shops.
"For me the whole art event is finding them," she says. "Going to an antique store or a second-hand shop and opening a box and finding these snapshots is thrilling. And to go through them, looking for that one prize image, hoping that it's something really amazing."
Astrausky is standing before a group shot of a 1940s Chicago brass band that contained, unaccountably, a violinist.
Photographer Denny Moers, the third contributor, has his own work hanging in art galleries, museums and private collections across the country. But since his teen years in Los Angeles he also has been gathering family albums in antique shops and other snapshots that have caught his trained eye.
"I think photographers were the first ones to elevate the snapshot, because it was their domain. But they seem to have almost totally neglected it until the late '60s, early '70s, when it became a major force in contemporary photographic education," he explains. "Somebody said it was the equivalent of the fine artist being inspired by children's drawings and paintings. It really struck me with some parallel that way. Just the exuberance of it, the spontaneity. Those are things that a sophisticated art student and a photography student longs for, in some ways, works for. And yet can never achieve, because you can't gain that innocence and naïveté."
By way of example, he pointed out a print that was blue-toned rather than sepia or black and white. It is a cyanotype, a popular kind of snapshot through the 1940s. But more than its technical oddity is fascinating. It is certainly the most intimate photo in this collection (apart from a crotch shot that Moers imagined in the wallet of a young man off to war). Two women are reclined on the grass, one asleep. They wear turn-of-the-century dresses, bodices enclosed to their throats. The sleeping woman has her arm not just around the waist of the other quite permissible in the Victorian era, when hand-holding females were allowed a language of love in correspondence that sounds like sublimating on all burners to our ears but upon a breast. The awake woman peers bemused at the confidante taking the picture, her smile acknowledging the shared secret. Moers says that to him the most interesting person in the picture is the unseen photographer.
"I mean it's such a private moment," he observes, and then adding: "That's the thing that is most intriguing for me about snapshots. That when you do start ask questions about them which you generally wouldn't think to do because of the primitive nature of the actual event they start to yield the kind of information that an experienced, artistic picture presents."
Although he rarely incorporates a person into his art photos, Moers sounds a mite envious when he describes the advantage had by the casual, amateur photographers celebrated by this show.
"These people are able to get these expressions out of their subjects because there's nothing between them and their taker," he notes. "Or there is something and it's their relationship."

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