Larry Towell’s Retrospective at the George Eastman House
E.O. Schaub
Photojournalists, on the whole, get fairly well hosed.
I mean, think about it. At its best photojournalism not only serves to tell us our own history, but- interestingly- makes history in the process of telling it. With such a profound responsibility, it is worth noting that the names of the makers of these images are, clearly, utterly irrelevant to us as a culture. Quick- who took that image of the Viet Cong being executed? The flag raising at Iwo Jima?
Not recent enough you say? Fair enough. How about the image of the mutilated corpses of American contractors hanging from an Iraqi bridge? The flag raising at Ground Zero? See what I’m getting at?
It is as if we think these images are in some way author-less- almost as if they made themselves. Now, if you were the creator of an image that changed the world, affected the thoughts of millions and got made into a big, fat, commemorative stamp, and STILL got the crappy seat by the door at all the big photography shindigs, you can bet you’d be pissed- but that’s pretty much what we’ve been doing as a culture for decades.
Enter longtime Magnum photographer Larry Towell’s recent retrospective at the George Eastman House in Rochester New York (February 16- June 15, 2008). The show is composed of two main sections: a body of personal, family oriented work (i.e. the front porch part) followed by a larger body of his photojournalistic work organized thematically by country, event or topic (i.e. “Palestine,” “September 11″ and “the Mennonites.”) Somewhat misleadingly entitled “The World from my Front Porch,” this schizophrenic show brings to mind this love/apathy dynamic: Towell is clearly both a talented photojournalist and an autobiographical artist who is seeking to push the often highly restrictive boundaries of his medium. The very act of pulling together a retrospective from both his personal and his professional works indicates a desire from Towell to break a certain photojournalism mold and to gain identity recognition as a fully formed artist in his own right- regardless of subject matter. At George Eastman House he does so, but with somewhat uneven results.
Taking a cue from postmodern artists (whose names are, in stark contrast with photojournalists, often more famous and/or notorious than their individual artworks) Towell incorporates installation-esque elements into the gallery. Consequently, in the midst of photographs from war-torn El Salvador and Palestine a high chain link fence divides the gallery space, draped dramatically with flags and martyr posters. Throughout the exhibit, this emphasis on the object-as-evidence continues. Glass display cabinets put on view all manner of the strange detritus of war, carefully collected and displayed by Towell in the manner of a cultural anthropologist: bits of signage, trash, masks, medals, notes, money, crude drawings, and maps… you name it. The point here is well taken- it is a jumble of meaning discernable only in bits and pieces to those who can decipher its iconography… but ultimately foreign and incomprehensible to those of us who remain on the outside of the glass. The objects function as a sort of badge of proof, a dose of physical reality designed to pull us still further through that photographic “window.” We can’t ourselves actually touch these things/experiences, and if we are truthful, we probably prefer it that way.
Ultimately, however, the net effect of such supplements to the photographs is to distract us from them, which is unfortunate. The objects are arranged too carefully in their glass vitrines, encumbered with myriad type-written explanations which are truthfully beside the point; cinderblocks and trash are painstakingly arranged at the bottom of the chain-link fence- (you can almost hear the lawyers calculating liability with a tape measure) achieving less a feeling of war-torn chaos than that of a life-size class diorama: kitschy and contrived.
And although the photographs depicting devastation, destruction and conflict are themselves solid evidence of a lifetime of good, and often first-rate, photojournalism, they are- with the ample help of the myriad distractions- fairly unmemorable.
In the adjacent gallery is Towell’s ongoing series depicting his own family, which comprises the other half of the show. On the one hand, having the personal work (gallery A) side-by-side with the professional (gallery B) provides an interesting counterpoint, (and answers the question: What does a photojournalist do in his spare time? Answer: annoy his family!) on the other hand, the connection between the bodies of work is a strained one. In the “Front Porch” statement posted at the show’s entrance Towell draws the connection between his front porch and the world, referencing connections between land and cultural identity, but his argument feels forced and largely unconvincing.
As in the photojournalistic portion of the show, installation elements are employed in the “Front Porch” gallery as well: a bicycle is quixotically suspended in front of home movies of a bike ride, reams of accumulated family detritus- photo albums, drawings, knick-knacks- fill more glass cabinets, a confusing wall is dedicated to Samuel Smith who “built the photographer’s house,” videotape of son Noah playing the violin is accompanied by incongruous audio of political protest songs… and so on. This makes little sense to us, not because- as was the case in the other room- it is so foreign to us, but instead, now because it is so familiar. That is to say, why should we care about these unremarkable details- the man who built the photographer’s house, or the bike ride or the home videos? Are they so unlike our own houses, bike rides or home videos?
The photographs themselves are very much in the vein of other accomplished family photographers- Nicholas Nixon, Sally Mann, Emmett Gowin- but no new ground is broken here either. Rather than successfully pulling off that leap of empathy, Towell’s more personal work remains mired in fascination and satisfaction with itself- as if he imagined he were the only photographer to live in the country and watch the awe-inspiring process of his children growing up before his eyes.
Here and there an exceptional or poignant image stands out- as in the image of Towell’s daughter Naomi carrying her two-year old brother in her arms at dusk after a swim. This image at the entrance to the exhibition is large- perhaps six feet tall, dark, and enigmatic- the wet hair, the young carrying the younger barefoot on a dirt road, the fuzzy silhouette of a skinny dog in the background, uninterested … all combine to form a heart stopping moment- we imagine, or hope, everything is fine, but the visual cues simultaneously hint at something more ominous.
However, just as Towell’s installation objects distract as much as they inform, the captions here are at once amusing and atrocious. Written in the conversational first person by the artist, they serve to take away much more than they add, diluting it with the banal or superfluous.
Take the caption for the above-described image of Towell’s daughter and son after a swim at twilight. It reads, in part: “Families swim in creeks, rivers and ponds to cool off in the summer time.” Now, this is not a newsflash to most of us. Rather than adding to the effect of this haunting, powerful image, the text hurts it, returning our thoughts from the mysterious to the quotidian with an ungracious thump.
Likewise, in the caption for an image of his son making a painting, Towell writes oh-so-informatively: “Children in the country have to amuse themselves as schoolmates often live too far away to visit each other.” See what I mean about banal or superfluous detail?
In still another section of the show, above a large glass case overflowing with impressive examples of magazines and books he has been published in- Life, Esquire, Elle, etc.- Towell enlightens the audience by letting us know that “Magazine publication is one of the methods by which a photojournalist traditionally accomplishes his work, often ending up as a book or exhibition.” Now, folks, this is at the George Eastman House ferchrissakes. Does Towell really think his audience will be unaware of what a photojournalist does? For that matter, the very fact that he feels compelled to load up the end of the exhibition with a big box of his physical credentials seems like a plaintive cry of “I AM A BIG DEAL PHOTOGRAPHER- REALLY!!!” I mean, why didn’t some bright GEH curator stop him?
It seems to me that Towell works very hard- too hard- at trying to bridge the gap between his various selves: the award-winning photojournalist, the family man’s autobiographer and the wanna-be installation artist are really the same man after all. When Towell lets the confluence of those selves occur naturally, it works far better than when he tries to make these connections by force. We see the best indication of this in his series “The Mennonites”- a section of the show tellingly located at the exact crossroads of the photojournalistic and autobiographical portions of the exhibition- in which he documents the family atmosphere of a community of Mennonite migrant workers in Mexico.
At the very heart of the exhibit a clothesline of Mennonite cotton dresses hangs above and across photographs of the family members, below that a glass case holds relics- crudely carved Mexican children’s toys and empty medicine bottles. Of the entire exhibit, this is by far the most effective use Towell makes of installation: elsewhere in the show the elements are too neatly separated- a glass cabinet over here, photographs over there. Here instead the photographs and objects layer and intertwine just enough to form a patchwork of reality slices which come at you from all sides.
The photographs of smiling children wearing handmade clothes, playing in a bucolic landscape, or sitting down to supper at a wooden table so polished it glows with the reflectiveness of a mirror, are belied by other information: the caption describing the father who cannot afford cancer treatment and so experiments with horse deworming medicine to treat his symptoms, and the disturbingly straightforward infant post-mortem. Here is the one place Towell’s efforts all come together and really work: we are fully enmeshed in his subject matter and it is at once fascinating, heartwarming, and unbearably uncomfortable.
There is no denying Towell’s achievements as an award-winning Magnum photographer, author of ten published collections of his photographs and over three decades of photographing. However, unfair as it may be, these feats alone don’t make his vision unique and don’t break the curse of the unknown photojournalist. Gaining broader, category-transcending artistic recognition under his own name- as opposed to being merely not Sebatiao Salgado and not Sally Mann- remains another hurdle for him to cross. Of all the vignettes in ” The World From My Front Porch,” the Mennonite installation provides the best indication as to what such a transcendent moment, for Towell, might look like.
