Zoe Strauss has been killing it of late. Her billboard
project in Philadelphia, which ran in conjunction with her retrospective at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, was a populist masterpiece. The billboards and her previous
impromptu shows of ink-jet prints under I-95 that were distributed to people
who showed up, were the closest she has come to art in traditional sense. Unfortunately
despite some recent noticeable improvement in her image making, her pictures
still feel formally simple, lacking any real use of light or perceivable understanding
of three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional medium (but in her defense the Andrea
Rosen summer show only just went up). What is more, she occasionally tries to compensate
for these deficiencies by making overtly artistic pictures by reducing the world
to a flat assemblage of two-dimensional shapes that would be high art only to
intro-level photography students.
Strauss lacks the visual grace and dignified skill of some other
untrained straight photographers, who choose to embrace social issues. Like
Alex Webb, Gilles Peress and a hoard of old-guard Magnum types. Despite her weaknesses
(not to mention her inability to edit down her output), she has put together a
stunning body of pictures that bring an ever-isolated art-going public face to
face with the dirty, horrifying, and stunningly unembarrassed inner city
poverty. A population that no longer has the wherewithal to be within passing
distance of most Manhattan residents. What is startling about her work is that
the poverty isn’t ennobling, it doesn’t form a close-knit community, it doesn’t
make people more authentic, it just beats people up and turns them into
something distressingly foreign. While not reducing the people to a victimized
other, she proves herself ale to pull this effect out of the world with her
flat and plainspoken visual style. Those blunt and dumbly center-weighted
frames have found a perfect subject matter. There is none of the visual poetics
or black and white affectations that mitigate so much of the best of
photojournalistic pictures, where things that are hard to look at are seen only
through the best looking of eyes. It’s hard to argue that Strauss even has the
flair for color of a Nan Goldin. She just has a great pair of eyes and the ability
to push the button, as Lisette Model once suggested, when you feel the most
uncomfortable. I also suspect she isn’t being weighed down by a visual ethic of
the previous generation, which may have had more qualms about making a career of
showing poverty as an ugly fact of society. What separates her work from
conventional photojournalism is her ability to match a formal language to the
understanding of her subject matter. That separates her work from photojournalism
and puts her right smack in the history of photography’s sweet spot between
practical application and art.
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