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Real People / Real Places: Photographs of
Community by Allen Spore
Bedford Gallery,
Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek
July 1 - August 26, 2001
reviewed by Marcia Tanner
Reality Rocks
For a culture that
witnessed the release of A.I. and The Final Fantasy in a single week and
is enthralled by "reality" TV shows like Survivor, Big Brother, and The
Real World — not to mention around-the-clock Webcasts from stranger's
bedrooms — the term "real" has to be a pretty fuzzy concept. What
does it mean to be a real person, what is a real place, in a time and
a place like the present?
Real People / Real Places — Allen Spore's remarkable series
of large-format color portrait photographs of his friends and neighbors
in the affluent Northern California suburb of Moraga — invites serious
inquiry into those questions. As much a suburbanite as anyone could be,
Spore has lived in Moraga for the past thirty years and raised his family
there.
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| Tennis
Ladies (2000), Allen H. Spore |
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At first glance these are alluring, dignified images, respectful of their
subjects' individuality and informed by empathy — affection, even
— an acute eye for composition and detail, and subtle wit. But prolonged
scrutiny reveals something disturbing about them: an ineffable strangeness,
a faint yet pungent whiff of hyperreality. They begin to look like photographs
of habitat groups in a natural history museum. The figures are unnervingly
lifelike yet immobilized, frozen, like compelling examples of the taxidermist's
art. They seem to represent members of an endangered, if not already extinct
species in what appear to be painstaking reconstructions of their pleasant,
if bland, synthetic environments. The images project an elegiac, idealized
quality, a sense of in memoriam
Spore achieves this subtle estrangement of vision partly by exploiting
photography's capacity to arrest a moment in time while conveying the
illusion of verisimilitude. He enhances the effect with computer manipulation,
subtly sharpening and cleaning up the foreground image, making it resemble
a two-dimensional cardboard cutout set against a background slightly out
of focus. Those "tennis ladies" — are they really made of flesh?
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| Father
and Son (2000), Allen H. Spore |
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As interesting as what's inside each frame is what is absent: not a single
black or brown face and only one Asian one, no one apparently gay or transgendered,
no one pierced or tattooed or — except for the four adolescent boys
in hip hop gear — no one dressed or coifed with the slightest sense
of style. No cars or workplaces, no evidence of poverty or homeless people
or conflict. No dirt (apart from acceptable mud on a boy's baseball uniform),
no joy, no pain. It's Leisure World: the tennis court, the playing field,
the golf course, the patio, walks in the park with the dogs — the
suburban pastoral idyll. The adults look contented, or tensely aware that
they ought to look contented. The kids look comfortable, well fed and
clothed, and bemused. There's a vague feeling that all these good people
are living in a fool's paradise, on borrowed time.
Spore has arrived at a formal equivalent for the
quintessential suburban artist's vision in these pictures: that of the
insider who simultaneously feels him/herself to be an alienated outsider.
In an earlier body of work, produced while he was earning his BFA in photography
as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Spore paired images of
the Moraga Country Club, where he lives, with images taken in Viet Nam
thirty years before, when he served as an officer, aviator, and surveillance
photographer in the U.S. Army. It was his first attempt to resolve artistically
those contradictory realities for himself, an essay in reconciliation.
With Real People / Real Places he allows those tensions implicitly
to coexist: an act of generosity to viewers who may take from these images
what they will.
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| Three Young
Boys (2001), Allen H. Spore |
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Commenting on August Sander's photographs of German social "types" in
relation to Joel Sternfeld's photographic portraits of contemporary Americans,
SFMoMA curator Doug Nickel wrote, "Historically, the portrait photograph
has functioned as both personal commemoration and sociological document."
While Spore's portraits clearly function in those ways, they are conceptual
as well. They present visual analogues for our uneasy navigation among
the contradictory realities which simultaneously co-exist in our consciousness,
as we wonder which is more credible: our memories, our fantasies, our
intuitions of alternative realities, or what we see when we look out the
window?
"A successful work," wrote Theodor Adorno, "is not one which resolves
objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses
the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and
uncompromised, in its innermost structure." Spore has achieved that negative
harmony in Real People/Real Places. It's an impressive debut.
Real People / Real Places: Photographs of Community by Allen Spore
is on view at the Bedford Gallery, Dean Lesher Regional Center for the
Arts, Walnut Creek, California through August 26, 2001. For more information,
visit http://www.dlrca.org/gallery.info.html
or call 925/295-1417.
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