I am a fan of John Lehr’s work. He is very good at something
that is very difficult, which is making very formal and often-graphic pictures
interesting. He has achieved this mostly through a keen eye, a great deal of
skill and applying talents to highlighting little unloved tracts of American
society, like weathered signs, empty display windows and advertising of all
kinds. Lehr created a powerful world where abandoned working class
neighborhoods seemed to be careening into a reality of nothing but billboards
for fast food and low cost luxuries. But like many photographers I come to love,
I eventually find myself in the position of writing critically about their
work. I love John Lehr’s pictures but I don’t love this show. You could see that
his work was moving in a more formal direction and maybe he felt he was relying
too much on subject matter, but I am just not that thrilled with this sparse
show of attractive but ultimately emptied out pictures. They are lovely to look
at and actually more so than anything he has done up to this point, but if he is
trying to see how little he could show but still communicate some greater
meaning, I think the formalism has won out. This isn’t to say there isn’t value
in formalism for the sake of formalism, it’s just not really my bag. Weirdly,
at the same time, the whole show makes me very interested to see where he is
going.
Through Mar. 23rd
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