I set out to see photographs this week in Los Angeles driving both east and west across the 10 freeway. I realized that the two shows I saw during the space of that day were connected through their similar dislocation. Swiss born Robert Frank found himself disillusioned with American cultural life probably as the novelty of the country grew tired. In order to find his subjects Frank famously hit the road taking thousands of photographs in the process. Robert McGinley found himself far from the slickness of Hollywood knee deep in Illinois farmland with a camera. In McGinley’s dislocation he found a community of conservationists and eventually created a wildlife easement out of his photography project.
Robert Frank immigrated to America and initially became a fashion photographer. In 1954 he won a Guggenheim and traveled across the United States photographing the everyday people and situations of daily American life far removed from the artifice of fashion. The resulting book, “The Americans” launched a firestorm of criticism for its gritty look at Americans and awkward takes on masculine identity, race relations and alienation. It’s no wonder that Jack Kerouac wrote the introduction to the book full of irony and malaise. 50 years after the publication of the Americans MOCA Grand Avenue is displaying the complete collection of photographs from its permanent collection. Though many of the images are familiar they remind the viewer of the importance of intuition and authorship on the part of the photographer. There is a remarkably unified blankness in the photographs. Fleeting moments are captured and the lack of self-consciousness on the part of the subjects leads us to believe that Frank was able to move around the country almost invisibly. Otherwise its hard to imagine that a shoeshine would allow himself to be photographed bending over subserviently in a public toilet surrounded by of a row of urinals. The artifice of our encounters with reality via moving pictures is also explored by Frank in one image of a Hollywood premiere the alienated masks of aspiring talent in Hollywood seem to flash by us in an anonymous way the identity of the starlet concealed by her archetypal blurry beauty. Frank’s seems to be speculating that as Americans we are so invested in aspiring to be one of these archetypes of beauty either the cowboy or the ingénue that we miss out on the actual scene right in front of us.
Across town at Blue Seven Gallery in Santa Monica is a very different kind of photography show a slick foil to the show at MOCA with a no less compelling story. McGinley a film director found himself in Barrington Illinois endowed with an estate, Horizon Farms. While on the farm taking care of business for his parents who ultimately passed away during his stay, McGinley discovered a watershed ecology full of endangered wildlife and aquatic species. McGinley saw an opportunity to create a wildlife easement in order to protect the species on the property and prevent further development along the Spring Creek Nature Preserve. The photographs in the show were shot to create exhibits for federal and state lawmakers and ultimately led to the creation of the largest permanent land preservation easement in the state of Illinois. These photographs have all of the technical awareness of a filmmaker and an artist with a vast knowledge of pastoral landscape painting and Italian Cinema. They seem to deliberately quote of from Frederich, Boucher, M.C. Escher and Antonioni. The images dramatize the state of the environmental preservation efforts and make nature the star of the show deliberately pulling on our heartstrings in order to create a moment of communion between the viewer and the life around them.
— From Mary Anna Pomomis' WHITE LIGHT blog.
The special character of the photographic image has been its ability to capture the fleeting moment and freeze it; and in that sense defy death. Conversely, Robert McGinley has chosen to reveal the moment as eternal, time suspended rather than stopped. His landscape images of sky, water and earth explore the essence of being present in the moment, and as such they are a meditation on impermanence as a state of being.
As an artist, McGinley acts as a witness to this process, and his photographs exude a contemplative silence. Shot either at dawn or dusk when the light hovers between day and night, they inhabit the indivisible space between here and there; then and now; inhaling and exhaling. Seasonally, they traverse the border, where winter wakens to the first breath of spring, and autumn dissolves into winter.
The subject of these images is not the objects that reside on the land — the rooted trees, two ducks on the lake, the gravel road or the rake, but the space between — the leaves not yet on the branches, the ice beginning to melt, the flickering reflection on the water, the vastness of sky, the mist at dawn, and the mysterious intangibility of the ever-changing light. McGinley seeks to reveal what Miles Davis referred to as “the music between the notes.”
Although the topography belongs to the American Midwest, McGinley’s images are not tied to the specificity of place or event, but rather to the ongoing cycles of life, and as such are without nostalgia or sentiment. They have in common an approach to nature found in Japanese sumi ink paintings, particularly in his works in which the color is so desaturated as to border on tonalities of blacks and grays; and a liquid light seems to come almost from within.
In our fast-paced culture, when no one has any time, and everything is instant, McGinley’s photographs are a perceptual and esthetic intervention. They demand that the viewer stop and look, not for a passing moment, in which case we would surely miss what is there, but for the time it takes to be as present as he was in his observations. They ask us to become aware of the very act of seeing, and of the immense span of a single breath.
Jacki Apple is a visual, performance, and media artist, writer, producer, (www.jackiapple.com) and a Professor at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA.