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Treasures among dross
Unidentified photographed objects at BU
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS


No one delights in the serendipitous caches of stereographs, daguerreotypes, and discarded family photo albums that clutter junk shops and in-laws’ basements and flea markets more than I do. No one I know of besides me has missed dinner parties (as host), doctor’s appointments (as patient), and job interviews (both directions) for the pure pleasure of getting lost among pictures of strangers. No one else seems to find yearbooks or the hallways outside the entrances to school gyms and YMCAs with their semi-professional shots of long-departed coaches and athletes as absorbing as I do. So it’s with something bordering on stupefied disbelief that I came away from "In the Vernacular: Everyday Photographs from the Rodger Kingston Collection" — with its more than 100 images spanning 120 years (1850 to 1970), taken mostly by unidentified shutterbugs of everything from class portraits to post-mortem pictures, wedding photos to advertisements, mug shots to cartes de visite — with a profound sense of my time’s having been mercilessly wasted. What happened?

Sadly, not much. This may be the least-worked-on, least-organized, least-considered show of its size (or pretense) I’ve laid eyes on. No overarching principle, no thoughtful juxtapositions, no history, no effort at organization in terms of themes or methods or styles or time periods troubles "In the Vernacular." Visits with Santa appear in the vicinity of automobile ads that in turn appear next to family Polaroids that are next to the wreck of the Hindenburg. This is an exhibit in which you could randomly scramble the order of all its components and either it would make no difference or it would improve the show. At the junk shop or in the flea market, you can flip through the pictures, whereas here you’re made to move at the museum-gazing pace among what’s largely interminably dull. Vernacular is not the same as vacuous.

Consider this: of the 160 odd images on view, perhaps as many as 40 or 50 deserve your attention and contemplation. That’s a lot. Genuine treasures pepper "In the Vernacular," yet the overriding sloppiness of its assemblage all but guarantees that the good work will be missed outright or, if seen, go unattended for the sheer exhaustion imposed by the abundance of the banal.

"In the Vernacular" is further undermined by its failure to provide even the scantiest accompanying wall text, particularly for its most striking historical photographs. Is that Woodrow Wilson reviewing WWI vets from a grandstand in a 1919 photo of onlookers at a parade? Is that Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt — pre-polio, taller than the president — standing beside Wilson? Probably, but who knows? Nobody investigated. And what’s the story of three Asian women pilloried together? What was their crime, their country of origin? Again, no telling. And why include the anonymous 1890 photograph called "Two Women in Front of the Capitol Building" when the women themselves are too distant to be seen and the bulk of the image is given over to the one of the photographer’s fingers across the lens?

On those rare occasions when we’re provided some modest wall text — Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa 1893 depicts the writer with what appear to be his son and wife surrounded by a troop of ax-wielding Samoans who helped build Stevenson his final home — it feels like oxygen after the mine has collapsed. One of the highlights of the exhibit is Fred Hansen’s 1928 The Sinking of the S.S. "Vestris." The Vestris was an ocean liner that went down off the Virginia coast on November 12, 1928; more than a hundred people died within moments of the photo’s having been shot. What we behold in the solitary Hansen image here (there were many) is a tipping deck, the backs of people gripping one another in a human chain headed toward the lifeboats, and exactly one man’s face in profile as he glances back to the center of the ship. Pitched, unequivocal, mortal fear occupies his gaze, and now, three-quarters of a century later, it still feels embarrassing, invasive and unseemly, to see his raw expression.

One of the recurrent motifs that calls for a discrete grouping is of people posing beside animals, either in triumph or in affiliation. In one 1940 shot, a hunter stands beside the black bear he’s killed; in another from a decade later, a woman poses dockside beside what looks like her 300-pound-plus tuna catch. In a number of images, domestic pets play a predictable role beside their owners, but a couple of the photographs stand out for their æthereal strangeness. An anonymous early 20th-century photograph — it can’t be bigger than two square inches — that’s poorly lit and awkwardly composed depicts a burly, moustached sailor with a small, delicately boned monkey in his lap. It’s compelling because of the contrast between the two, the white suit and the dark fur, the sailor’s forearms that are nearly the thickness of the monkey’s body.

Stranger and more gratifying still is one of the rare attributed photographs, this one to Armand H. Labelle from Marlboro, Massachusetts, circa 1920-’30. A man and a woman face the camera as they flank a boxy, ’20s-era automobile that has stenciled signage on its doors promoting "Silent Glow Oil Burners." Between them, hanging by their tapered tails from the door handles, are three tremendous snapping turtles, necks craning upward indicating they’re still alive. It’s a mystifying image, its casual cruelty rendering it entirely bizarre.

Tom Kelly’s iconic photo of the naked Marilyn Monroe is as sidelined in this exhibit as vacation photos and passport snapshots. Mouth open, arms raised, the consummate blonde bombshell gestures like a seductive flame against a backdrop of molten red; beneath her, the first page of a calendar reads January 1953. We learn that it was taken in 1948 but didn’t appear until five years later; otherwise, all the context we have are the pictures to either side of her. To her left, there’s a 1934 Radiograph of a Living Person, a full-bodied, nondescript x-ray of a human form. To her right there’s what looks like a miniature version of an outtake from a flick you might see in a high-school biology class: a man in a lab coat standing beside a human skeleton. Just to the left of the radiograph (nothing’s more than a few inches from anything else) is a guy in a T-shirt and white briefs — a 1930 ad for men’s underwear. And just to the right of the guy in the lab coat is an 1890 picture called Spirit Photograph, in which the supposed transcendent attributes of multiple exposures give us a man slumped at a table while before him appears the transparent figure of a lady in a white dress. It was probably as hackneyed in 1890 as it is now.

As much as the image of Lee Harvey Oswald retracting from Jack Ruby’s bullet, as much as the first hammer blow to the Berlin Wall or the felling of the Twin Towers or Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon, Tom Kelly’s Golden Dreams, as Monroe’s nudie is called, went far to shape our self-image as a people. "In the Vernacular" treats the vernacular, the commonplace, as if all it deserved were disregard.

TWO SPINOFFS of "In the Vernacular," one at the Photographic Resource Center, across the street from the BU Art Gallery, and the other a student show down Commonwealth Avenue on the second floor of the BU food court (775 Commonwealth in the George Sherman Union) are both more limited and, proportionately at least, more satisfying.

At the PRC, seven artists incorporate vernacular — i.e., candid, unsophisticated, heartfelt — photography into their work, and two prove outstanding. Yolanda del Amo takes pictures of her Spanish grandmother that she combines against black backgrounds reminiscent of scrapbooks with photos of the same woman in her youth. Both the old and the new are coupled with funny and troubling observations by the woman under study. In one frame, she wonders — the words are printed near a vintage image of her beautiful, youthful self — whether it was her ugliness that made her husband stray.

Also outstanding are the wry reworkings of 19th-century photo portraits by Joseph Heidecker. This weird master of the unspoken and imbedded finds a carefully coiffed portrait of a prim old lady and sews dark thread in a spider-web design (mimicking the pattern of her bunched-up hair) right into center of her face, ultimately obliterating it. In another photo, a child’s face is embedded with rocks. Heidecker enjoys the wit and wisdom and mischief to see into the personalities of his vintage sitters and treat them according to their own worst nightmare designs. Also included in the show are Nancy Dudley’s mixed media work, which casts her Catholic schoolgirl days against images of the cosmos, and David Prifti’s photo transfers onto found wood and metal scraps. Included too are works by Susan E. Evans, Priya Kambli, and Louise Bourque.

‘In the Vernacular: Everyday Photographs from the Rodger Kingston Collection’

At the Boston University Art Galley, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, through January 23.

‘Contemporary Responses to Family and Found Photographs’

At the Photographic Resource Center, 832 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, through January 23.


Issue Date: November 19 - 25, 2004
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