Review: Witness or Participant: Bertien van Manen at MoMA, and Collier Schorr at Roth Gallery in New York

BY PRADEEP DALAL | DECEMBER 15, 2005

Published almost 15 years ago, Larry Sultan’s groundbreaking project about his parents—“Pictures From Home,” included striking yet intimate portraits of his parents at their suburban home in California, sequenced loosely with snapshots from family albums, color saturated and grainy stills from home movies, and even images from a corporate brochure where his father worked. Into this visual stew he included forthright and riveting commentary from his father and mother, and disarmingly his own reservations about photographing his parents: “What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has more to do with love than sociology, with being a subject in the drama rather than a witness. And in the odd and jumbled process of working everything shifts; the boundaries blur, my distance slips, the arrogance and illusion of immunity falters. I wake up in the middle of the night, stunned and anguished. These are my parents. From that simple fact, everything follows.” ( Sultan, Larry. Pictures from Home. New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc., 1992. p. 18)

Two current exhibitions in New York help us revisit the witness-participant debate and explore it some more.

Bertien van Manen: Give Me Your Image

The photographs of Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen currently on view at the “New Photography ‘05” show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York are more in the witness mode, developing on a single theme—a photograph of a photograph—a strategy that Sultan also used. At MOMA, thirty photographs from van Manen’s new book project called “Give Me Your Image,” are arranged in two long rows of fifteen prints each, in a tight grid with no space between the frames. The focus of each photograph is a family photograph taken with bits of the larger environmental context included in the frame. The captions mostly identify locations. In “Stockholm, Sweden,” a casual, off-kilter view of a snapshot of a joyous conga line of nine smiling women and men in beachwear, hands on the shoulder of the person in front of them, ham it up for the camera. This snapshot is propped against a window with a hazy view of river, bridges and buildings, making time and place fluid, imprecise.

While van Manen appears to be comprehensive, by including an Auschwitz image (“Budapest, Hungary”) and another of a SS officer (“Munich”), the ones I found most interesting were taken at immigrant homes in neighborhoods outside Paris. In one photograph identified as “Immigrants from Algeria, St. Denis, outside Paris,” you see the bottom corner of a shiny gold foil frame with a partial view of Mecca, a sea of pilgrims in white. Tucked below the frame are two little snapshots, fluttering like ribbons, of a child in ceremonial clothes. Did his parents wish he would make the journey to Mecca someday? Are such desires from the old country welcome in the new Europe? The recent protests by poor migrants from Africa and the Middle East in France, perhaps from these very same suburbs of Paris, add a bitter poignancy to these images. 

Van Manen took these images between 2002 and 2005 in Prague, Tirana, Belgrade, Rubiera, Yorkshire, and other places in Europe. The wall text at MoMA describes her process: “van Manen finds the snapshots amid domestic clutter—hanging on walls, propped on untidy desks, taped to mirrors and windows. With permission she sometimes removes the snapshots from the original contexts and places them on kitchen shelves, coffee tables and chairs to create amusing, touching and bizarre arrangements that highlight the juxtaposition between the world described in the pictures and the world the pictures inhabit.” Along with this single-note, new world-old world contrast, the decision to move the family snapshot against backlit, gauzy windows or amidst pretty teacups is also a pictorial move, and this aestheticizing impulse then seeps into other seemingly arbitrary compositions, weakening the premise of the entire project.

While the limitations of telling a nuanced story in a single register are particularly evident when comparing van Manen’s photographs of family snapshots with a multi-layered project like Larry Sultan’s “Pictures from Home” which uses several different kinds of images and texts to build complexity and a semblance of reality, there is also some inexplicable delight in old family snapshots regardless of culture and geography. This may help explain that despite the modest and conventional nature of the van Manen project, it holds up against the more inventive and up-to-date works by the other photographers in the MoMA “New Photography ’05” show, including Carlos Garaicoa’s large photographs of buildings and bridges that are cleverly built-on using pins and thread with understated finesse, or the photo-grids of Robin Rhode that document various performances like stripping a car in a jumpy, stop-time sequence. 

Collier Schorr—Jens F.

Collier Schorr’s new artist book project “Jens F.” currently on view at Roth Gallery in New York takes us a bit further into the “witness-participant” dilemma. An artist known for exploring gender identity with large, terse portraits of young men - high school wrestlers in her previous show at 303 Gallery - [Schorr] embarks on something quite different in this exhibit of smaller scaled, intimate works, incorporating collage, text, and portraits of a cast of lead and supporting characters. The collages are made up of contact prints (35mm, 21/4, and 4x5) supplemented by handwritten text. Many are views of a single figure—Jens F.—mostly in different poses in the landscape—against trees and on grass, and inside rooms lying on a bed or silhouetted against a window. Some of the images have been further cut up and reassembled in strange ways—a figure lying on the grass pinwheels with another torso morphing out of it, and in “On His Knees,” the entire body of Jens F. is carved into—head, hands and chest—with a surrealistic odd effect. The notes scribbled along the edges of images include fragments of poems or sentences such as: “I felt the country, the house, Germany, the dreamy moist, rich female smell—the whole thing AW it is really fresh really American.”

Schorr explains “The volume became something like a log or sketchbook, the antithesis of photography where the viewer sees only the finished and perfected photograph. Here they see hundreds of attempts. Each page compiles years’ worth of shots, the same picture taken again and again over time. The camera formats change; the boys body changes; the light changes. Levels of intimacy change. The boy’s sister is added as a substitute for Helga’s daughter. The boy grows further away from the soft curves of femininity yet closer in his comfort and collaboration.” (Schorr, Collier. Jens F.  Steidl/MACK, 2005)

The collages are not so artful as to be overly precious, nor are they entirely casual and unselfconscious. I get the sense that the public is expected to look over Schorr’s shoulder and peek into her sketchbook. “Her collages are different from artists like Hannah Hoch in that they are not formal or pictorial but are more about a kind of note-taking,” offers Andrew Roth.

The exhibition at Roth is particularly valuable because it describes a fuller arc of Schorr’s process. In Plexiglas cases against one wall of the gallery are the original collages assembled and presented with related materials (letters, contact sheets, notes, unframed prints); in separate cases in the center of the room are German photo books and albums that have image types inspirational to Schorr. A nice and intimate touch is the inclusion of a contact sheet or unframed print loosely placed on the pages of a book, reinforcing the personal library aspect of the display. And all the images framed on the walls are not exactly from Schorr’s artists book, but developed out of this notebook process. There are lush portraits of Jens F. as large as 31 by 24 inches and smaller collages varying in dimensions from 11 by 9.5 inches and larger. Finally, there is the certainty that lush portraits such as “New Emotions,” and the dense—almost busy—collages are both needed, simultaneously, to deliver the emotional complexity the project strives for; neither can do it alone. 

The Schorr exhibition reminds me of last year’s superb show—also at Roth—David Wojnarowicz’s “Rimbaud in New York 1978-79.” Modest black and white framed prints of most of the Rimbaud series were exhibited together with Wojnarowicz’s intense and densely packed journals, and contact sheets. Something of the fragility of the artistic enterprise is revealed, and the weight shifts a bit towards the participant in the witness-participant continuum.

Images from the Exhibition: Bertien van Manen

Images from the Exhibition: Collier Schorr

Pradeep Dalal received an MFA from the International Center of Photography-Bard College Program in Advanced Photographic Studies. He has exhibited his work in Baltimore, New York, Washington, D.C., and in Accra, Ghana and Havana, Cuba. His articles have been published in Artwurl, EGO Magazine and the Village Voice. He is on the faculty at the International Center of Photography in New York.