|
|
| |
|
|
Photographers of Rhode Island’s vast vision
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
|
|
|
|
Remain in light
Enjoying the more joyfully populated of his images in the Virginia Lynch show, a viewer might be surprised to learn that photographer Salvatore Mancini was once an artist loner of the most somber, interior sort. To arrive at the socially conscious photo essays he has become known for in recent years, he had to journey out of himself and into the world. In his Cranston basement studio, scores of black-and-white photographs are framed and leaning here and there, stacked in piles, or spread out on tables. Mancini shows his visitor a sample of work from his youth. In one a naked woman lies under gauze as though dead, one hand dropped onto the thigh of the figure in a life-size photo of the Shroud of Turin. That was back when Mancini was exploring the relationship between Christianity and eroticism. "I spent years taking things off of X-rated videos and magazines and putting them together with Christian images," he says. "It was about phallic worship; it was about fertility." One startling image, from the days before computer manipulation with Photoshop, has the bare back of a man toward us as he reaches up and claws ragged gouges out of the serene, cloud-filled sky. In another, a younger Mancini sits in a darkened room with primitive drawings scrawled behind him. "I recreated a petroglyph cave in my bedroom," he explains. "I painted the whole thing black, projected the petroglyphs, drew them on with chalk, and then set up scenes in there. And for a few years I lived in this black room with petroglyphs. It was actually very soothing. It was just a play on the idea that even though you’re here in Rhode Island, your mind is out in a cave in the Southwest somewhere." For more than a decade, Mancini prowled the Southwest, Baja California, and Mexico, camera in hand, befriending ranchers, geologists and anthropologists to learn where these ancient rock drawings were. The photographer says he got very emotionally involved with the images. He grew so reluctant to go back to his car or campsite when light was fading that he devised a procedure to photograph them at night. First he would dimly illuminate the area with a flash, so that contours and perspective were established, and then with the lens remaining open he would play a flashlight beam over the drawings. He eventually began to apply 24-carat gold leaf to some of the photographs, treating the figures much like Christian iconography, which often was gilded. Mancini wanted to help bring these images, sacred to Native Americans, to wider awareness. That began in the mid-’80s, and by then he had expanded his earlier vision of the artist as explorer of private perceptions. "The work I started doing in Italy way back in 1974 really changed my whole point of view on what it is to be a photographer and what you can do with it," he says. That was when Italian photographers convinced him that working, as they did, as documentarians, looking around at reality, was more valuable than manipulating images into personal messages. "So, slowly they convinced me of the importance of that," he says. "My head was in the sky, and they said, ‘Why don’t you come down a few levels and deal with us?’ " Mancini, 55, was born in Italy, in the village of Itri, many of whose residents emigrated to the Knightsville section of Cranston, where his mother had been born. Having dual citizenship, she was able to settle here when he was three, saving money and sending for him and his younger sister and father a couple of years later. In high school, Mancini was into painting and sculpting, but when he picked up a camera there he was delighted to be liberated from the difficulties of drawing. Not being very good at the architectural engineering he was studying at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, and annoyed by the strait-laced students, Mancini transferred to Rochester School of Technology, where he could major in photography. "Then I subverted the photography club and turned it into a political organization," he says, with a smile. After graduation in 1970, he and a pal hopped into a Jeep and went traveling around America for eight months. "We did a pilgrimage," Mancini says. "We went to all the places where great photographs were made, by Ansel Adams and Eugene Smith and Minor White, Paul Strand — people we had studied. We went to Appalachia, the Southwest, the Grand Canyon, all the great parks, California, on and on and on." So Mancini is well prepared for the ambitious photographic projects he has taken on: Itri immigrants, in 1985. Rhode Island petroglyphs, in 1987. The effect of the Industrial Revolution on the Blackstone River Valley, in 1994. The history and environment of Narragansett Bay, 1997-2000. The latest, a color shoot he has just finished proofing, is on the history of southern New England forests. His work is in numerous museums, from Washington, D.C., to Sante Fe. He has received a fellowship and three funding grants from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. In Italy he was awarded the prestigious Bolaffi Prize for photography. Mancini pulls out a box of prints that are particularly special to him. "For me, this was the best people work I’ve ever done," he says. The photographs are impressive. One after another, their composition is professional, but it’s the subjects that provide the impact. A young woman in a seizure helmet and straitjacket, tied to a chair, for example. In one, he points out that while "humanity is round," the woman in the hallway is surrounded by nothing but right angles, from ceiling and floor tiles to doorways and windows. He had been given carte blanche by Joseph Bevilaqua, the director of the state Institute of Mental Health, to photograph for five months before deinstitutionalization in the 1980s. To humanize the patients before they were let out into homes and the streets. "It was profound in a different way than the petroglyphs or the bay photographs," Mancini says. "Here you were given a glimpse into something that was in darkness all these years." What an apt description to come from Salvatore Mancini: A photographer should bring to light what would otherwise remain in darkness. — B.R.
|
There’s quite a diversity of approach and subject matter in Photographers of Rhode Island, the current show at Virginia Lynch Gallery in Tiverton. From wild, gestural expanses to quiet alley-art studies to animated images of people, you’d think that photography was not one medium but many. The five artists on display span the history of photography in the state. Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind were individually standard-bearers of the medium as art in America, as well as bearers of esthetic standards as teachers at Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s. Denny Moers, who was an assistant to Siskind, teaches at RISD today and has advanced the art form with an innovative painterly technique that merges camera image with gestural response. And Salvatore Mancini is as eclectic in his choice of subjects and approaches as this show is as a whole. How delightful that two 1986 images by Siskind are called simply "Providence" and "Providence 14," as though they each sum up the city. The images are of overlapping strokes of tar on cracked asphalt streets, found art reminiscent of Franz Kline’s bold abstract expressionist swaths. Siskind, who died here in 1991, is further represented by four works from the 1950s, close-ups as well, mostly compositions he made from found typography, such as torn posters. With Harry Callahan, who is 91 and no longer living in the state, we get well representative work. There is one of his haunting studies, from 1949, of his wife Eleanor: long hair floating on water she stands naked in, her closed eyes and Mona Lisa half-smile turn something nondescript into an evocative dream image. There are also three of Callahan’s multiple exposures of Providence street scenes, which allowed him to compose carefully while simulating the spontaneity of people catching their reflections in department store windows. From the days when he was doing quiet architectural studies, Denny Moers has been manipulating prints in the darkroom through more than dodging and burning under an enlarger. But beginning with the apocalyptic industrial landscapes he started working with in the 1990s, Moers has been doing much more than darkening areas by brushing on fixer or selectively fogging or bleaching. Two monoprints here demonstrate how far he has taken his process. "Dam in Transition III" (1998) creates a tension between the stability of a bridge anchoring the bottom of the frame and the roiling black cloud-like shapes he created to balance a dark structure thrusting up at the right. The atmospherics are even more violent in "Remains of a Landing II" (1999). Two rows of partly submerged posts extend toward us and intervening black volcanic rocks. The enormous black and midnight blue sky is oppressive, like a nightmare remembrance of the original photographic image, yet tiny shore birds dimly speckle a bleached-out band at the middle. Richard Benson, who heads the art department at Yale, is a photographer who seeks to capture the exactness of what he sees through his lens as much as Moers seeks to engage and change it. Benson’s offerings are always carefully compositional. He selects from sights we might easily pass by without a glance: a rusting metal structure next to a silo in "Arkadelphis, Arkansas"; two vinyl-padded kitchen chairs set on a Formica table as though on a museum pedestal in "Salvation Café." Some of Benson’s color photographs, all done this year, are striking in another way also, for the textures they capture. Paint drips in an even pattern of lines down a semi-submerged, round bridge support in "Gull Rock," and we see virtually every pore in the concrete. In "Ida Lewis Yacht Club" and "Coronet," the dominant portions are bright white — a painted brick wall and a skiff — that we should expect to be bleached of detail but are not. A large-format negative would seem to be the answer, but these exquisite 11"x16" prints were actually taken by a digital camera, an 11-megapixel Canon. It looks like the argument about the resolution and contrast advantages of 35mm film is quite over. The work of Salvatore Mancini ranges all over the map. Literally — from Italy to Mexico, Tiverton to India. Thirteen of his photographs represent him here, more than by anyone else. There is lots of celebration: Italian villagers whoop before a bonfire, a woman tosses her head back and lets the wind billow her dress, a boy leaps into Narragansett Bay. (A far superior variation of that last image is online at vlynchgallery.com.) Two of his photographs are especially striking. "Hand With Cabbage Leaf" (1997) makes its opening impression by being more than four feet wide. The black and white picture invites us to translate it into color: a boy silhouettes his hand behind an enormous backlit leaf. But color might have distracted us from the fine detail of the veining that the larger-than-life scale impresses us with. The most magical image in the show is Mancini’s "Shaman" (1990). The petroglyph looks painted rather than photographed. Arms outstretched, the attenuated black figure on a black background, with a snake above it, is aglow from gold leaf applied to the print. Again the large scale ups the impressiveness ante. Quite a collection at Virginia Lynch. It will be there through August 3.
|
