The Haggerty scores twice with Soth lecture and "The Truth is not in the Mirror"

Alec Soth began his talk in Marquette University’s lush new Eckstein Hall Wednesday night by quoting David Hockney: "photography is great if you're a paralyzed cyclops." Succinct and dramatic, that describes a common limitation of photography, which traditionally assumes a static viewpoint with a single lens. Many photographers have employed a variety of strategies to overcome this limitation, including Hockney himself who famously fragments his subjects with multiple images, evoking the analytic cubism of Picasso and Braque. Soth creates a body of work with a narrative arc that ties individual images together, albeit often rather tenuously.



David Hockney
Mother 1, Yorkshire Moors

Hockney and Soth are just two of the many photographers featured in the Haggerty's outstanding exhibit, "The Truth is not in the Mirror." The title of the exhibit refers to its theme of portraiture in contemporary photography and its thesis that many portraits today involve "highly constructed artifice." Formal portraiture, in which the gaze is direct and the pose deliberate, has always had to deal with artificiality, but, according to the catalogue essay, these photographers "challenge or trick the viewer into looking deeper into issues of identity, with those portrayed serving as ciphers for the photographer's point of view."

In his talk, Soth took up that last point directly, expressing his personal preference for situations in which he knows little about the subject he is photographing. He likes to project his own imagination onto them. This flies in the face of a conventional wisdom practiced by many photographers who often go to great lengths to know their subjects as intimately as possible. A personal favorite practitioner of this latter style is Mary Ellen Mark, who, for example, once spent three weeks living inside the maximum security section of a psychiatric hospital in order to establish personal relationships with the patients in Ward 81. Soth, by contrast, relishes brief interactions. The image below, which is in the exhibit, took 15 minutes, he said, and he knew nothing about the woman, except that on Ash Wednesday the mark on her forehead was made with cigarette ashes. Soth likes to create narratives, but he wants them to be his own ("artificially constructed") narratives. His subject is indeed a cipher for his point of view.

Alec Soth: Adelyn, Ash Wednesday

The complete title of Soth's talk was "The Paralyzed Cyclops in the Democratic Jungle." Showing a screen capture of the 2 billionth photo uploaded to flickr, he made a compelling case for the obsolescence of the idea of the "democratic jungle" explored by William Eggleston and since then countless people with cell phone cameras. In a book called "The Democratic Forest" Eggleston pointed his camera at anything and everything, the ordinary and the familiar, democratically. But, Soth says, it's been taken too far. If everything is interesting then nothing is. His solution is to cut through the democratic jungle with "the narrative machete," or images that point to a larger story. That his narratives are fabricated rather than journalistic is the reason his work fits so well into "The Truth is not in the Mirror."

The title of the show recalls "Mirrors and Windows," the legendary 1978 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski (which I still remember seeing when it came to what was then called the Milwaukee Art Center!) Szarkowski identified two strains of photography: it can be a mirror, reflecting the mind of the photographer, or a window, through which one sees the external world. The exemplary collection of images in this exhibit seem to take a more nuanced position, to challenge the distinction between mirror and window. They are windows into a kind of reality, but one that can't be trusted to represent anything other than the artist's intentions.



Alec Soth
Patrick, Palm Sunday

"The Truth is not in the Mirror” continues through May 22. There will be a panel discussion about the exhibit next Wednesday, Feb. 2 at 6 pm. Additional programming and other information available at Haggerty Museum of Art.

With two runs already in, the lineup at the Haggerty makes it look like they will score again.