The Amon Carter, February 14–May 10, 2009

A study of found objects and found life

I have an idea that a good are review allows readers to decide whether they should go  to the exhibit, and even if they do not, to discuss the larger ideas presented by the work intelligently if it comes up in conversation.

What ever the theme of the exhibit, it apparently didn’t jump right out at you. The Crane exhibit has so far been described as “indulging in curiosity instead of a linear consistency,” and ”voyeuristic” but this didn’t quite explain it for me. It’s photography, yes, it’s eclectic, sure, but there is a theme, isn’t there?

The first room you enter holds polaroids, some arranged side by side under glass, others printed in red and black and an array created of heir orignal packages, which makes one think of the Andy Warhol polaroids still being exhibited at TCU. This is not, actually, typical of the body of work in the exhibit, so don’t just veer off from this exhibit and hit the Remington bronzes one more time. There is more to Barbara Crane than geometry.

Crane revels in the photographing of strangers. Her polaroids from the set entitled “Maricopa County Fair” are shot from behind people walking arm in arm, and quite evocative of the emotion of camraderie. Surely, one might think as the photos are studied, we have seen these people somewhere ourselves. One particular polaroid in that set, featuring a woman wearing a buttery-soft brown leather coat, hugging her daughter, is sumptuous and poignant, catching a parent child embrace and a moment between childhood and adolescence as fleeting and lovely as the purple hour of twilight.

Still, much of the art just left me confused. “Wipe Outs,” a set of images that were overexposed by flash photography and looked like nothing so muchy as the stuff that normal household photographers throw in the garbage, left me more unsure of my reaction, even as the face of a baby bright white on the print both made me feel unsettled and sympathetic to the subject.

And almost everything is black and white. I asked my husband, who was attending with me, about this. “Until recently, when digital came along,” he said. “Art photographers really stuck to black and white. It’s difficult to manipulate color film in a darkroom.”

That explained the black and white preponderance . Still I wasn’t sure I completely understood what was driving the Crane photographic engine, which has been running now for over 60 years.  On the far wall, a black and white image of a huge wasp nest confonted me. I didn’t think it was ugly or dangerous, I just didn’t know what it meant. And when I don’t understand things, I feel anxious.

I was wandering around in the main exhibit room wondering about all this when I saw a woman I know. She called out ’hello’ and began to enthuse: ‘Barbara Crane, I just love her stuff!”

“Really?” I asked her. “Why?”

“She’s just so into the little things, she studies it all and she accepts it all. You know a lot of the stuff she found on the grounds. She’s just a little 80 year old woman, she never gives up, she just keeps going.”

We looked at a black and white print of a cat’s hairball. “That’s what I’m talking about,” my friend said. “Like, to her it’s not just something to thow away, she looks at it and she makes something out of it.”

An idea began to come into focus.  What I had seen initially as a fixationon the blurred and indistinct, the unclear, the puzzle could be reinterpreted as Crane’s window, her “take” on  the world. Puzzling, but intriguing. Perhaps she turned her lens to whatever she saw as an attempt to preserve and instruct.  In that case, the portraits of everyday people become not voyeuristic but sympathetic, the images of unusual objects are an attempt to preserve the forgotten in life … and the laying of negatives to produce effects I initially found confusing could be clarified into a commentary on the confusing nature of the modern life.

Crane’s first photographs are from the late 50’s and she is still working today. She is every inch a modern. But she is modern not only in her technique, but in her philosophy. She seems to want to stop the lens on the everyday, the commonplace, and say “look! This will never happen again in quite the same way!”

It reminds me, in a strange way, of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegone Days published in the 80’s, when the recording of the very commonplace became popular. But Crane’s lens on the common was much wider than Keillor’s radio show and books.

In this Facebook generation, where everyone promotes themselves like they were a movie star, the commonness of the people in the portraits can seem antique, old fashioned, taking shots like these is somehow hopelessly dated and thus the pictures become more valuable. Today, when digital photography makes you shoot until you get one that looks good, the unflattering photograph is truly an anomaly.

I couldn’t help, I told my friend, but feel that there was some disrespect in displaying peole this way.

“She wouldn’t see it like that,” my friend told me. “She’s upbeat, funny and fun. Someone asked her why she took so many photos of things that were found, she was like, ‘because I’m close to the ground.’ ‘Cause she’s short.”

The signature photo, the one that’s on the posters, is a little bit different than most of the photos we have in the exhibit, I pointed out to her. For one thing, it’s in color. For another, it’s printed with a laserjet printer, not in a darkroom.

“She’s always wanting to try something new,” my friend told me. “Someone asked her if she was intimidated by digital, and she said it’s just a new medium to learn.”  The bright green of 20 individual leaves, shot through a fisheye lense and arranged on a black ground, are almost grahic design more that photography. They would make a good web site background. Each leaf could be hyperlinked somehow.

I looked at the individual leaves. “Maybe your’e right,” I said. “Maybe what she’s inviting us to do it look closer, and with more affection, at whatever is in front of us.” If that’s the case, I give the exhibit my wholesale stamp of approval.