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Photo Finish
The Voyeur,
the Manipulator and the Frame That Captures Them Both
The impression is of reserved evenness and a calm bordering on
creepy.
By Alfredo Triff
Don’t miss Window Series, the recent exhibition
of photos by Silvia Lizama at Mosquera Orthodontics. Lizama is a
professor of photography at Barry University and a graduate from
Rochester Institute of Technology. Her show presents a body of works
that brings forth important issues in contemporary photography.
These low-middle class North Miami
interiors have a vernacular dignity about them, with soft
upholstered seating and all sort of flea-market ensembles of
furniture, adornments, figurines and trophies - as if frozen in time
between the 1960s and 1970s. As private spaces, they radiate the
banality of an almost staged order.
In one photo, a blue-painted wall shows a house’s side window
covered by awning. It’s neatly framed, painted white, with tiny
Christmas lights hanging from the eaves (as if some luminescent
headdress covered the window). Inside, we distinguish a fish trophy
on the wall.
Another shot
presents an attractive bay window with vaporous curtains, which
opens to the view inside: A lush tassel hangs over a lampshade. We
distinguish the lamp’s gold-painted plaster base with its two period
figurines. Outside, two gray-painted wooden chairs (at each side of
the window) frame the view. The impression is of reserved evenness
and a calm bordering on creepy.
One of my
favorite pictures is that of a trailer home’s front porch, furnished
with vintage-looking folding metal chairs and a slim ornamental
trunk with bluish votive candles. We peer inside a neatly ordered
living room: A bluish upholstered sofa rests against the back
window, covered with white shutters topped by a bluish drape. The
small space is peppered with carefully framed photos and has the
feel of a moment (was someone just now watching the TV?). In the
foreground (close to the louvered window) there is a big urn over a
round stall, next to a lounger. The photo exudes an atmosphere that
is almost noir.
Obviously,
Lizama has technical and formal know-how; her final product aptly
conveys the idea of theme and variations implicit in the show. Then,
there’s the issue that she manually colors her photographs. When
Lizama told me, I didn’t know what to say.
So what? We live in the era of Photoshop, when the limits
between truth and fiction have (as Tom Wheeler and Lawrence Erlbaum
suggest in their book Photo-truth or Photo-fiction?) been
eroded.
More
interesting is that the early history of photography is entwined
with the idea of manipulation. Pictorialism was very popular in
Europe and America from the 1850s-1920s. It tried to assimilate the
art of photography to several current styles of painting (whether it
was Impressionism or Symbolism).
The main
feature in the art of early American and European photographers like
Robert Demachy, Edward Steichen and Alvin Langdon Coburn is the
softness (produced in various ways from soft-focus lenses to gum-bichromate
printing), which was seen as the mark of the shaping hand of the
artist-photographer.
Perhaps the first to investigate the idea of
manipulation was critic Charles Henry Caffin. In his book
Photography as a Fine Art, Caffin questions which techniques are
appropriate in photography and which are not.
The context of Caffin’s analysis was the art of Frank
Eugene and Joseph Keiley, who used glycerin development to create
the texture of brush strokes in their photographs (Eugene even drew
dark hatch marks on his negatives).
The distinction between “straight” and “manipulated”
photographs, according to Caffin, is that “the straight photographer
only modifies the result, whereas the manipulative
photographer reserves the right to alter it.”
If we applied Caffin’s criterion to Lizama’s photos, she would
definitely count as a manipulative photographer. Obviously by
painting the black & white prints, she feels she has more control
over the final product. Perhaps Lizama thinks this procedure makes
her work more expressive and/or more unique. But why not use the
“given” color from the environment?
You may ask:
Who cares? I differ. To understand what I see, I have to ponder
these questions. As sociologist Cecilia Lury has suggested in her
Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity, “…by
stretching (and subverting) the possibilities of truth, photography
has changed ways of seeing and also ways of life.”
Silvia Lizama’s
Window
Series is on view through March 5 at Mosquera Orthodontics, 1254
SW 87th Ave., Miami; 305-264-3355.
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letters@miamisunpost.com. |
