ART REVIEWS : Vivid Cases of Photographer-Subject Symbiosis

Voyeurism and exhibitionism go head to head in “Something Tells Me We’re Not in Kansas Anymore,” an exhibition of the work of two American photographers of the 1940s and ‘50s--Weegee (or “Weegee the Famous,” the exalted moniker hand-stamped on the back of every one of his images) and the lesser-known Mickey Pallas.

Weegee (a.k.a. Arthur Felig) plays the voyeur--the newspaper “shooter” who codified the tabloid’s-eye view of American life, prowling New York’s streets at 3 a.m. with a police radio and makeshift darkroom in his car, cruising for murders, suicides, fires and other disasters that have been known to make good copy.

Ever-enamored of the grotesque, he has often been cited as an important precursor to Diane Arbus. Yet Arbus enters into communion--however forced--with the “freaks” who are her subjects; Weegee never pretends to such empathy. His images are no more merciless than Arbus’ are in the end, but they are more immediate, more peremptory and more assaultive.

One particularly striking photograph depicts a policeman removing a man from an empty theater. The man meekly raises a defensive arm; but it is not the officer--who has gently placed a hand upon his shoulder, as if to escort him quietly from the room--of whom he is afraid. It is the man with the camera--claustrophobically, dizzyingly close--who is the cause of distress. So blinding is the flash the photographer levels in his direction that the man’s eyes become strangely blurred; instead of an individual who has been violated, what the camera coldly records is one who seems to be deranged.

Weegee’s lighter side is not overlooked here. Prominently featured are several of his “distortions”--Marilyn Monroe shot up close with a wide-angle lens so that she is all lipsticked pucker and flaring eyebrows, or hundreds of Jerry Lewises forming a nightmarish grid of bulging eyes and hyena-like mouths. Unlike the Surrealist experiments which play with and against the camera’s eye, however, these images are all punch line and no resonance.

Pallas’ photos, by contrast, seem to be all resonance, enacting with good-natured glee the white, middle-class mythology of 1950s America. Here, Hula-Hoopers work diligently to keep it up for the camera; a baton-twirling little girl hams it up on Morris B. Sach’s Amateur Hour; a family poses in front of their suburban home in a brand-new, tail-finned automobile.

The appeal of these images, however, cannot be passed off as mere nostalgia. What Pallas’ photos enact--and with surprising clarity--is the curious mix of pride, insecurity and longing that underlies exhibitionism.

As a Chicago-based commercial photographer working for clients as varied as Standard Oil, the Windy City Softball League, Ebony magazine and the First Church of Deliverance on the city’s South Side, Pallas produced over a quarter of a million images. None is quite so remarkable as the 1956 portrait of a pair of gun shop owners--a sweetly bespectacled husband and wife team, dressed in their finest, posing for posterity among the racks of rifles and neatly stacked boxes of bullets.

Each displays a prized revolver, the man laying his on the counter, the wife deftly handling hers. It is the deliberateness of her grip and the openness of her smile that is at once so telling and so unnerving. With the jaundiced eyes of retrospect, it is difficult not to see parody here. But this is not Pallas’ intent; it is, rather, to fulfill a palpable need.

The photograph indulges the photographer’s desire to see, to know, and to possess--one sees it in the work of Weegee; but, as one sees here, it simultaneously exploits the subject’s need to be seen, be known, and be possessed. This important show demonstrates that the fetishistic nature of photography is a two-way proposition; for this, and for the opportunity to see Pallas’ too-rarely exhibited work, it merits further attention.

* Mickey Pallas and Weegee, at Stephen Cohen, 7466 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937-5525, through May 9. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays.

Photographic Duality: Every photograph constructs an impossible opposition between presence and absence.

The photograph makes unspoken promises--that it will tell us what happened, what was there, what is true.

Yet it offers only approximations, reminiscences, reckonings. For the real that it pursues can never be captured; it is always already gone.

Cindy Bernard’s compelling new work at Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery enacts this photographic duality, inserting the viewer--quite literally--somewhere between truth and fiction, memory and fantasy, suspension and death.

Two large photographs hang upon opposite walls of the gallery’s long, narrow space. The images are similar--both winding roads high above an unnamed city, both deserted, both suffused with the hazy light of late summer.

The strangely vacant images, however, don’t tell us everything they know. What they conceal (as divulged in the gallery’s press release) are two highly resonant spaces--one, the serpentine road down which Grace Kelly sped in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 classic, “To Catch a Thief”; the other, the site of the princess’s fatal car accident nearly 20 years later.

Here, Bernard continues the conceptual project she began with “Ask the Dust,” a series of photographs each depicting a single shot from a well-known American movie--John Ford’s “The Searchers,” Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider,” and so on.

Despite locations, exposures and aspect ratios identical to those used in the shots from the films, the images that make up “Ask the Dust” are profoundly anti-nostalgic. For what is lost between the “original” and Bernard’s carefully researched re-presentation is the fantasy of wholeness, present-ness and inevitability nurtured by Hollywood in specific, and the photographic apparatus in general. What remains is a startling vision not of the American landscape, but of the transformative spaces of memory and desire.

If “Ask the Dust” deals obliquely with the difficult relationship between art and life, the new work does so more insistently. Here, art is not envisioned as a crystallization of life--more full, more complete, and more lasting; rather life emerges as the (perfected) imitation of art.

Turn to the left, and encounter the specter of Grace Kelly, actress, speeding about the French Riviera with paste diamonds twirled around her delicate neck; turn to the right and the reality is even more picture-perfect--Princess Grace of Monaco, presiding at charity balls with her own multimillion-dollar tiara on her head.

Yet what is the nature of this “perfection” if it has no power to forestall death? What is the nature of fantasy once it has been played out for “real”? What the installation creates is an eerie set of resonances between image and reality--the images winking at each other over the viewer’s head, the images half remembered from an old movie, and the reality of the death of a fantasy.

Also included in the exhibition is the first of a collection of photographs of natural phenomena that will be used as installation elements. “The Thumb” depicts a rock formation in the Arizona desert--a hypertrophied vertical thrust set against a bright blue sky. Nature has long been gendered as female; the phallic immensity of this rock slyly suggests otherwise.

Yet it is difficult to tell where or how far Bernard is going to take this. Here, “The Thumb” works as a one-shot joke, or, alternately, as a straight landscape photograph. Since neither meaning accords with Bernard’s larger strategy, one suspects that the image has been exhibited prematurely. It is, in any case, distracting in the context of this very provocative installation.

* Cindy Bernard at Richard Kuhlenschmidt, 1630 17th St., Santa Monica, (310) 450-2010, through April 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Hagedorn’s Nightmares: Night lightning, death’s heads, the crowd, the victim and the warrior reverberate like fragments of recurrent nightmares in the art of Bay Area German-American Edward Hagedorn.

A mysterious figure who showed throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, Hagedorn withdrew into the seclusion of his Berkeley residence from 1940 until his death in 1982. The bulk of his work--which includes pastels, watercolors, drawings, monotypes and prints--was left in boxes in the attic.

Despite their basis in the violent and repressive politics of the 1930s and ‘40s, most of these images feel surprisingly contemporary. Like the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s, Hagedorn comments upon the tropes of Expressionism rather than blindly reveling in them; unlike them, however, he is neither smug nor ironic.

“Brachial Tree” (circa 1930)--a neatly striped form struggling up out of a blackened mound of earth--conjures the elegance and mysticism of Francesco Clemente without falling prey to Clemente’s tiresome hermeticism. “Anxiety” (circa 1935)--a massive heap of cubes hovering ominously over the heads of a blank-faced army of tiny men--presages Robert Longo’s vision of urban Angst without succumbing to Longo’s weakness for bombast.

This tendency toward understatement is due, in no small part, to the graphic media of which Hagedorn was so fond. The great accomplishment of the work, however, is its ability to reconcile the coolly descriptive nature of such media with the hyper-charge of the imagery. That Hagedorn is able to communicate terror and the terrible in the absence of impassioned and/or hysterical brushwork makes his take on Expressionism unique indeed.

Of lesser interest are the drawings of reclining nudes. They are prettily done, to be sure, but both the languid subject matter and the muddiness of the pastel medium contravene that which is most compelling in Hagedorn’s work--the restlessness and the restraint.

* Edward Hagedorn at Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-5557, through April 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.