Because virtually every visual permutation has already been exploited by someone, the critical factor in producing new or significant work is intention. Why were the images made? What questions -- implicit or explicit -- generated their production? What is the photographer's attitude toward his/her subject? How does the photographer define his/her own process? Jump Color, now at 20x20 Gallery [in San Francisco], introduces four young photographers who might add something new to our visual lexicon. In this exhibit, they succeed or fail in direct proportion to their relative clarity of intention.
Jan Browman and Ira Sandler photograph people within distinctive American-youth subcultures. Although these groups are ostensibly quite different, they share a common symbiotic relationship with media: each is structured by popular entertainment and advertising; both enact their rituals largely in public; in both, media scrutiny, feedback and even production are an integral part of the lifestyle. Browman's ongoing series, Beach Children, consists of deceptively simple portraits of teenagers -- mostly white middle-class girls --hanging out at the edges of the Southern California beach scene. The images are formula full-length portraits that concentrate on gesture, expression and costume.
Browman's use of the term "children" here is ironic: the teenagers, caught in that excruciating hiatus between child and adult, have little childlike freshness or innocence in their confrontation with the camera. Their apparent definition of adulthood is perhaps logical and inevitable in an advertising-determined culture that offers only consumer goods by which to individuate the self as "adult" (i.e. sexual) being. In a number of the photographs, signs and mottoes direct the viewer: a blond in red shorts sports a T-shirt pronouncing its contents "A Sweet Handful"; two girls in front of a sign promising something "on a stick" pose provocatively -- one lifts her baggy yellow T-shirt to expose her bikini-covered crotch, and her companion holds a paper cup suggesting that the viewer "Take Up the Pepsi Challenge . . . " In Two Parisian Girls, the girls pause near a sign reading "Frostee." Barely dressed in the de rigueur halters of fake leopard skin or glitter and string, and decorated with feathers, gold chains and makeup, they are delectable -- anything but frosty!.
Among teenagers, individuality is frequently expressed through wearing identical outfits. In Two Girls in Stripes, a thin, tired girl is wearily past puberty. Her chubby companion is not: she fills out her matching black and white swimsuit with baby fat. In Leopard and Blue Girls, the uniform of bikini-with-waist-ties is worn by one sultry child in very full bloom and by another with no bloom whatsoever. In some of these portraits, the allure of the costume contradicts both the expression of the girl and the maturity of her body. Girl in Black Skirt is a gaunt, very solemn waif in a split-to-the-waist halter that reveals her bony girl's chest. California Girl, bursting the seams of her familiar blue bikini, is hardly dressed for the roller skates she wears. She personifies the ambiguity spotlighted through the series: the child at play is also the woman going about the very serious business of seduction; the posturings and expressions mimic those of advertising.
Only three boys appear in this selection. One sleek young guy with a near-erection poses in front of a sign promising a "Catalina Cruise." The others, Two Latino Boys, wear utilitarian work trousers, generic sneakers and plain white undershirts. The plump one is simply clumsy; the skinny one is determinedly macho. Their costumes allude to an unmistakable class and ethnic separation between them and the beach girls.
Browman has undertaken Beach Children as a questioning, in retrospect, of her own Southern California beach childhood. Thus she photographs from a position uniquely inside and outside this social milieu. She has produced an intense document of a life-style that seems constructed equally of dressing up in mother's clothes and of professional streetwalking. Perhaps only someone who has utterly rewritten his/her own memories of entering puberty could claim that adolescence is really about discovery and wonder; there is far too much genuine anguish involved. The hardness of many of these teenagers is rather depressing. Wearing blatantly revealing costumes on thin or pudgy bodies and taking seductive poses and expressions borrowed from the media, they seem but clumsy imitations of the most superficial aspects of sexual maturity -- just one more variety of consumable. The young of every species learn by imitation; as a culture we have not give our young much as exemplar.
Ira Sandler, exhibiting photographs from two oeuvres, also works from a position simultaneously inside and outside of a particular subculture. In his photographs of punks, taken predominately in performance settings, Sandler plays the role of official chronicler. He is part of the proceedings, but as a recorder rather than a performer. This is by no means a subordinate role; the punk experience requires comprehensive media accompaniment. For the most part, however, the performance photographs are merely typical of the genre: loud music, loud stylized costumes, loud garish colors, and a lot of sweaty action. For the viewer to whom the Cramps, D.N.A., and Breakdown are not yet household words, these are little more than publicity shots. Sandler's strength consists in stepping back from or forward into the action to find that relatively quiet moment in which some personal observation can be made. A photograph of the Lounge Lizards' enraptured keyboardist transcends its occasion by suggesting the erotic intensity of making, rather than just performing, the music. The Undead, a photograph of a punk couple standing huddled together under coats on a deserted street corner, betrays a romantic sensibility in the photographer. Seen against a long, ravaged wall of graffiti, the two share some secret; the viewer glimpses only the tight black pants, fuchsia and black hose, and stiletto pumps of the girl, and the long black trousers and sneakered feet of the guy. This moment is more genuinely sexy than all of the beach children together.
A second cultural group which Sandler documents can loosely be described as street people. Two violently complementary images from one street event are inexplicably hung at some distance from each other. Super Bowl #1 features a brittle cheerleader wearing a red T-shirt praising the "Forty Fuckin' Niners," red cinch belt and garter, and long, blood-red nails; Super Bowl #2 includes two cops bending over a bloodied, long-haired victim of that same celebration. There is an edge of violence and fear in many of these images. In Child Rearing, an apprehensive baby peers over the top of a back-carrier while his father aims a rifle at an arcade target. A man in a fake-leather vest, in Market Street, peers into a darkened ticket window next to a sign advertising "$3 Evenings." His hand -- placed firmly on his blue-jeaned groin -- suggests what the entertainment will be. The outstanding image of this group is of a small, barefoot person, in Baggy Pajamas, who runs into a crazily tilting, rainy and gray North Beach street. In the distance, illuminated by the photographer's flash, are signs warning One Way and Stop. The genuine surrealism of this photograph embodies the curiosity inherent in the best of Sandler's seeing. More conscious editing and sequencing of his themes would provide more intimate access to that seeing.
Gary Bogus and Richard Felix both concentrate on the landscape -- places and things. Bogus has included ten very handsome prints of carnival and circus scenes which seem vaguely ambivalent. Nearly all of the images include some kind of midway entertainment in the process of installation. In Demon at Great America, the giant loop-the-loops are contrasted with two scrubby trees and a heap of dirt; in Super Loops Rising, the bawdy magnificence of the ride is diminished by our view of the truck, tools, and junk which attend its erection. The patently fake rocks that provide a run for a small, sleepy lion in San Francisco Zoo are typical of the underpinning which Bogus points out in this body of work. Boardwalk at Santa Cruz is a triumph of artifice in which the attraction is reduced to a neon blur in the upper right corner, above a concrete beach with shuttered refreshment stands and a red steel fence. Far in the distance is the ocean, a thin remnant of the nature on which the reputation of Santa Cruz was built. Unfortunately there are too few images here to form a definitive vision (although more of these exist), and the editing for this exhibit has included too many similar rides under similar purple skies.
Felix's seven prints from Visual Dialogue are another kind of landscape entirely. These very large, hand-colored prints with applied paint are probably an accurate reflection of urban overload. They include crowded backyards with movie lights and a juggler, a San Francisco street corner with flower vendor and construction crew and equipment, and a mobile home with piles of logs. Each of these is overlaid with scratches, thick applications of paint, numerous translucent appliquŽs of musical scores, small birds and animals, and formulae. Intended to generate a dialogue, the proliferation of objects and substances on the surface instead produces a cacophony. In a dialogue, it is impossible for everyone and everything to speak at the same time; in these works, unfortunately, the effect is overwhelming rather than evocative or instructive.
Jump Color delineates the effectiveness of works that are clearly conceived and executed, as well as the problems of works that attempt either too much or too little. Neither traditional galleries nor establishes museums are involved with such new works as these, and there are precious few genuinely alternative spaces around. This is a propitious exhibit for 20x 20 Gallery -- not a perfectly resolved group of images by any means, but filled with energy and potential, and some genuine excellence.
