Vernacular pictures do have a shocking way of making history real. Nothing
like a line of National Guardsmen firing rifles at Kent State protestors to
make you realize how much things have changed. Can’t even process National Guardsman
finding a college protest threatening enough to fire upon. For that matter,
this entire show is quite a stark contrast to the blood-free domestic coverage of
recent American wars. If you can imagine an iconographic picture of the Vietnam
War, it is in the show, but is this art? I would for the most part say
no, but it is wonderful how Henri Huet and Horst Faas use a celebratory sense
of light to transform battlefield scenes into something more contradictory. Which
should negate any real claim that pictures are just documents that express
something factual.
I enjoy Leo Rubenfin’s pictures, but after seeing a giant
collection of very terrible things happening, his landscapes and still-lifes of
a post war Vietnam seem downright trivial.
Through November 30th
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