These Images Did Confront Identities
Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke
I take photographs, but I’m not a photographer. Sometimes I take pictures that my friends like, but seldom do my pictures capture that special quality that causes one’s pulse to slow and mind to quicken, that have that special quality without a name that Christopher Alexander, architect and design philosopher, says provides "… those moments and situations when we are most alive."
You know what I mean. You’ve experienced those fleeting moments when the sun and breeze stream perfectly through an open window, when your child says something that makes you see him as a new person, when a building takes your breath away, when you see a photograph and feel one with the scene.
My good photographs do not engender such epiphanies. If someone likes my composition or lighting or camera angle, I smile awkwardly knowing I’m just a point-and-shoot kind of guy: It’s all wonderful camera technology and luck. But there is an advantage to knowing just enough about photography to appreciate the difference between snapshots and art. It’s a case, I suppose, of familiarity breeding admiration.
The recent exhibition at the Arts Benicia Gallery that ended on August 8th, "Confronting Identities: New Images of Women and Girls" by Polly Gaillard, Heidi Struble and Kym Hoffschildt, deserves much admiration. The walls were lined with images and text that had that special quality that caught my glance, caught me self-consciously looking at myself, and that forced me to try and understand what the artists were saying.
Though each artist displayed images juxtaposed with commentary in the words of the person being photographed, they approached their subjects so differently that I feel it necessary to devote this column and the next to an examination of this very important topic. I’ll begin with Polly Gaillard and will have more to say next week on the work of Heidi Struble and Kym Hoffschildt.
Ms. Gaillard’s "Moments of Inertia: Portraits of Adolescent Girls" juxtaposed confrontational photographs and poetry and interviews that forced me to reevaluate each image in light of each girl’s concerns and aspirations. I found myself going back and forth between text and image trying to deal with media conditioning that values "pretty girls" above all the rest. (No teenage girl seems immune: Remember a certain talk-show host’s comments about Chelsea Clinton?)
In one photograph, Tashina, age 13, a white girl with blond hair and pale complexion, stands in front of a white wall staring at the camera wide-eyed and slightly open mouthed wearing a Marilyn Manson tee-shirt. I initially disliked this picture. I felt as though Tashina defiled herself by becoming a billboard for a performer who makes me uncomfortable, though I admit to knowing little about Manson.
To the left of Tashina’s photograph was a picture of Faith, age 16, a black girl with thumbs hooked in the front pockets of her jeans, bare midriff and silver belt, bracelets and necklace who stands near a dark wall staring through the lens back into my eyes. I was puzzled by her expression. Did I detect a faint smile or was she frowning? Her stance might also suggest defiance, or perhaps she was indifferent to opinion.
Reading her comments, I could only smile. When I was 16, which was a long time ago, I remember focusing too much attention on girls and pimples, constantly vigilant lest the latter preclude a date with the former. Faith is more mature. She criticizes magazines that surround an article lamenting the physical and emotional damage done to girls trying to achieve "perfect" figures with picture after picture of beautiful girls in size-4 miniskirts. She concludes her comments by rejecting the media-driven idealization of girls : "… it’s unachievable! We want realistic images of girls."
Drawn back to Tashina’s photograph by its unsettling special quality, I read her poem, the first stanza of which is: "My sleepy reality, violet skied / In a dream bound body barely occupied / In a water-soaked heart I carry my dream of, / An open hand accepting my shy, timid love."
Poof! Tashina magically changed in my mind from a defiant girl to a perceptive, talented and already accomplished young woman. Funny I didn’t notice that when I focused on her shirt.
Polly Gaillard has given us realistic images of adolescent girls that are complex and, in some cases, unsettling. Her images gave me the opportunity to confront stereotypes fed by the assumption that image and style are enough, and, in the end, I was optimistic that these girls believe that, to quote Ms. Gaillard, "… if you can dream it, you can be it."
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com