Fall Waning Back to School Moon
David Little has blown into town with contemporary photography and new media at his back. His energy gives a new breadth and depth to the photography collection.
Embarrassment of Riches demonstrates both. He recalls seeing an Annie Leibovitz photograph, an advertisement. Mikhail Gorbachev sits in the back of an expensive car, his hand somewhat anxiously on the door handle, looking at the Berlin Wall. Sitting on the seat next to him is a Louis Vuitton bag. The image exploded. What would be the equivalent, if say the USSR had won the cold war, Ronald Reagan in a Soviet limo with a gold hammer and sickle sitting next to him, perhaps looking at the same wall from the other side?
The global reach of capitalism and the vastly increased wealth around the world had wrought an unimaginable change in an icon of our former blood enemy. Was this how global wealth looked? In an investigation into how photographers portray wealth and its cultural influence, Little made an interesting discovery. Documentary photography had focused on the poor, those without wealth, and also without the power and perhaps the understanding to control their own images. Photographers could access the despairing mother of the depression era, the projects of Chicago’s southside, the barrios of Latin America but the wealthy knew had to handle the paparazzi. Deny them access.
Imaging wealth had a taboo feel, but wealth at unprecedented levels must have resulted in some images. Where were they? He knew some of them already, but had to search for others, especially others that dealt with wealth from an objective perspective, neither glorifying or chastising. This show, which takes its name from a Simon Schama book of the same name, aims to show that other side of life, the life of those with power and money, but to show it in situ.
A traditional problem of photography, of art in general, lies in how to show the invisible, then how to do it and not be obvious, heavy handed. The photographs in the currency section of the show wrestle with that problem and have several different answers. Gleaming oil pipelines, stacks of gold bullion, an uber power lunch, a stock exchange, an inventory of lamps all suggest rather than tell, reveal yet also conceal. They are not didactic, at least not in any propagandistic way. Value, critical to each image, is ephemeral and socially determined whether by Arab men selling stocks and oil futures or the market for gold or the power carried by top level business leaders gathered in one room.
Art, too, is a currency of sorts. It has a market, is sold in galleries and at auction and through private transactions. Curiously, though, it has no intrinsic value, lumps of marble, paint on canvas, ink on paper, images on photo paper. The value of art is purely transactional. So, in this sense, each of the photographs in this exhibition participate in the thing they depict, especially since the world of art tends to be the world of the rich and powerful.
This exhibit is as much about photography and photography as art as it about the contents of the images in it, more so because the images show only a minuscule slice of the lives of the rich and powerful. So the title Embarrassment of Riches carries at least a double meaning, it describes what the images contain, but it also describes the images as art. Worth seeing.