People Watching

What Makes It Great? / Featured / August 10, 2023

By Suzanne Révy

Part III

I hit the photography jackpot last week on a day trip to Portland and Brunswick, Maine! We are excited to present three reviews over three days this week:

My first stop was “Drawn to Light” at the Portland Museum of Art, a survey of the educators who have taught at the Maine Media Workshops and College over the past fifty years, which I reviewed on Tuesday. Yesterday, I discussed Rose Marasco’s “Camera Lucida” at the University of New England’s art gallery, showcasing the breadth of the artist’s creative process that has mined domestic and feminist ideas. Today, I review an extraordinary show at the Bowdoin Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, “People Watching: Contemporary Photography since 1965,” which brings documentary, studio, conceptual and even landscape photography together to celebrate humanity, drawn from the College’s impressive photography holdings.

People are endlessly fascinating. They come in all shapes, sizes, ethnicities and personalities. Ever intriguing, they often behave differently depending on location or mood, putting on a theatrical air in public and only peeling away their facade among those close to them. And they can be frustratingly stubborn, but are rarely boring in photographs, even as they leave their imprints in all the places they have touched. People Watching: Photography since 1965, is on view at the Bowdoin Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine through November 8th, 2023.

“Untitled (New York)” by Mitch Epstein, 1998, chromogenic print, © Black River Productions, courtesy of the artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NY, and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.

New York City, 1967-1972 by Garry Winogrand, four gelatin silver prints from the exhibition People Watching: Contemporary Photography since 1965, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

“Facebook, Menlo Park” by Alec Soth, 2013, archival pigment print, from the exhibition People Watching: Contemporary Photography since 1965, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

The exhibition is organized into six parts. The first two, “On the Street” and “On Assignment” feature classic street photographs by Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand alongside work made for publication by Larry Burrows and Alec Soth. From the time Winogrand was making pictures in the canyons of New York in the 1960’s and 70’s to Soth’s view of a lone worker on the Facebook campus in 2013, we have seen enormous shifts in public life. We were far less conscious of ourselves and the camera in the era before surveillance and social media, where our every move in public might be recorded and shared. Mitch Epstein seems to anticipate a blurring of lines between public and private spaces with his image of a woman in the back seat of a car. Since the late 90’s, it seems we have become more culturally isolated from each other.

“Angel” by Alfredo Jaar, c-printed on mounted Plexiglass, © Alredo Jaar/ Artist Rights Society, courtesy of the artist and the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.

“Mya Khaing” by Chan Chao, 1997, c-print, courtesy of the artist and the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.

“Woman in Leopard Print” by Farah Al Qasimi, 2019, archival inkjet print, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

“On Assignment” also includes several images made around the world. Alfredo Jarr’s transcendent “Angel” feels hopeful despite the challenges of his city, Luanda, Angola, that grew due to a booming oil economy, even though the largesse did not impact most of the population. Or Chan Chao’s striking portrait, “Mya Khaing,” from the book Burma, Something Went Wrong, where Chao sneaked into Myanmar to photograph those rebelling against a repressive regime. And world affairs find their way onto the streets of New York City in Farah Al Qasim’s “Woman in Leopard Print,” a global citizen’s sartorial expression that adds vibrancy to a multicultural city.

“Elizabeth and Bengt, On the Night of… ” by Donna Ferrato, 198-2, six archival pigment prints, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

“Naptime” by Sally Mann, 1989, gelatin silver print, © Sally Mann, courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery and the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.

The next section of the exhibit, “At Home” might feel more welcome, but includes the first images that Donna Ferrato made for her seminal work on domestic violence, “Living with the Enemy.” It raises questions about the dynamic between the photographer and her subject. Could she have stopped the attack if she were not making the photographs? Should she? Who would believe the battered wife without the photographic evidence? Similar questions linger around Sally Mann’s work, whose languid print, “Naptime” shows her youngest daughter on a bed with her older siblings. She photographed her children, sometimes without clothes, at play in the hot Virginia summer. The pictures are an imaginative and honest look at childhood and when her book, Immediate Family was published, it was met with accusations that she was exploiting her own family. Because of this power dynamic between a photographer and subject, whether in private or in public, one naturally questions how much of a voice the person being photographed has.

“The Hand of Miles Davis” by Irving Penn, 1986, gelatin silver print, © Irving Penn Foundation, courtesy of the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.

“Pele” by Andy Warhol, 1977, Polaroid print, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society, courtesy of the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.

“Ghada” and “Sayed” by Shirin Neshat, 2013, digital pigment prints, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

Perhaps models or sitters have more say in the following section, “In the Studio,” where the interaction with the photographer is clearly collaborative. Irving Penn’s lush silver gelatin print of Miles Davis’ hand or Richard Avedon’s equally rich black and white group portrait of the “Young Lord’s Party” are sublime. Andy Warhol’s SX-70 Polaroids democratize the camera by showing unidentified sitters in the same light and manner as the famous. Perhaps most striking are Shirin Neshat’s “Ghada” and “Sayed” from 2013. These portraits made in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 are from her series “Our House is on Fire,” in which the artist has added a faint layer of Persian calligraphy across the faces in an effort to picture grief and loss.

“When The Storm Ends, I Will Finish My Work” by Meryl McMaster, 2021, © Meryl McMaster, courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery and the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.

“Demons, Tlazoteotl ‘Eater of Filth,’ p92 from Indigenous Woman” by Martine Gutierrez, 2018, C-print mounted on Sintra, hand-painted artist frame, © Martine Gutierrez, courtesy of the artist, Ryan Lee Gallery and the Bowdoin Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.

“Self-Portrait (Hands Spread on Knees)” by John Coplans, 1985, gelatin silver print, installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

The final two sections look inward with self-portraits and outward to the implied presence of missing people. Meryl McMaster’s surreal composition is dreamlike while Martine Guitierrez asserts her fluid identities in a riot of color that is both fanciful and genuine. And John Coplan’s gritty hands and knees honestly addresses the aging of the body. The exhibition concludes poignantly with a selection of landscapes that have been touched by humanity. Richard Misrach’s abandoned pool at the Salton Sea is a reminder of the hubris of man’s attempt to bend nature to his will while Dawoud Bey’s haunting “Sugarcane II” pictures fields where the enslaved toiled without any hope of escape. The exhibition affirms humanity’s variations through a careful curation and sequencing that creates a robust dialog between the works. Insightful and thought-provoking, this is one of the most satisfying shows I have seen this year.