Mirrors and windows

Before David Sims, before Richard Avedon, there was Philippe Halsman happily shooting what he specifically termed ‘jumpology.’ He said, “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.” He collaborated with Salvador Dali in the late 1940s on a series of works that were published in 1954. They feature 36 different views of the artist’s distinctive mustache!

When presenting images of societal and environmental problems, it’s often hard not to repeat the same cliches of poverty and despair that might be most readily available and understood. Like Viviane Sassen, Chris Jordan has found his own way to represent something we hear a lot about: the environmental destruction we’ve wrought on the oceans and their wildlife. Specifically, he has documented the deaths of baby albatrosses on Midway Island that have been mistakenly fed by their parents the plastic floating on the waves. That area’s become infamous as the North Pacific Gyre, the short-hand term for where the ocean’s currents slow and the world’s plastic builds up, after having made its way down rivers, into oceans and flowed for thousands of kilometers, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces over time.

The approach has a couple things going for it. The shots are pure and simple. The series is disciplined; it seeks to show one thing, and it does that very well. And there’s a certain element of mystery with the images, where the viewer is naturally drawn to finding out where and why this is taking place, which is most certainly the point of all of this.

What immediately struck me about Viviane Sassen‘s work is her unique perspective on portraiture. Her staging involves arrangements of bodies over bodies, hair over faces and deep, and smatterings of rich shadows like droplets of crude oil. Too often, documentary plays into pre-determined responses from the First World as we view Africa and the developing world as a disadvantaged place, rather than a unique place with things to offer irrespective of economic development. She creates her own world of Africa and so we have another angle with which to view it.

Anoush Abrar did an excellent project on women seeking success in Hollywood, a fantasy land that draws pretty girls from around the world with the lure of fame and fortune. A cynical view is that these women are all expendable, all to be used by the media machine for their faces and bodies and then discarded. And that does happen. But that’s not the focus we as Americans have. Our focus is on the winners, on the success stories. Because that’s the story of America, a land of unrealistic optimism that should by all means not work, but somehow does.