The Peabody Essex Museum recently hired Phillip Prodger as its first photo curator, and this week debuts Surfland: Photographs By Joni Sternbach, the first exhibit under his direction. I went down to Salem last night to check them both out and found both Prodger and the exhibit trying to straddle past and present. The museum, too.
The genial and well-credentialed Prodger grew up partly in New England and partly in Hong Kong and visited PEM as a boy. He says he's excited to be joining the museum at "a pivotal time in its history." It will be interesting to see just how it turns. Since the PEM built its new building and contemporized its approach a few years back, there's no doubt that exhibits like Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, which ends this weekend, have dramatically enhanced the museum's profile and done so with substance. They've (mostly) been spared the criticism that has followed the Museum of Fine Arts' crowdpleasers with sportscars and sailboats. But there's been grumbling locally about research and archival operations in areas like maritime history taking a backseat. This generally affects backstage departments that are invisible to the general public (and thus not likely to produce revenue).
Prodger said Thursday that his position was created in part to have someone specifically responsible "to make sense of and build on" PEM's "vast and wonderful collection of 850,000 photographs" dating back to the dawn of photography. What that means in the implementation, he said, is that the museum "will be engaging that collection in interesting and creative ways" in three or four exhibitions a year also featuring photography by contemporary artists. "We want to be sure we remain a dynamic and contemporary museum" showing the "best and brightest" of today's photographers, he said. Serving both the collection and those plans would seem to make for a tall order. (He offered to share plans for several upcoming exhibitions, apparently some not yet announced, and we'll be taking him up on that.)
In that context, Sternbach's pictures are an interesting choice.
Several years ago, making landscape photos on the beaches near her Long Island home, she found surfers getting in the way; eventually she started photographing them instead, there and in Southern California. She uses the 19th-century tintype or collodion process, which is a logistical pain in the ass, especially outdoors on a beach, and imposes a number of limitations, including shallow depth of field and long exposures of up to three seconds. The tintype images are developed right on the spot, on pieces of aluminum, and are monotypes, i.e. she can't run off a bunch of prints. (She does provide each subject with a digital copy of their image, she said.) Most of the tintypes are 8x10, although the diminuitive Sternbach does some at 14x17, when she has an assistant to lug the larger, heavier camera.
The images themselves are weirdly beautiful and seem to exist outside of time. The surfers pose with their boards in stances and expressions that suggest much about their character. Boards, wetsuits and bikinis reveal that the images are contemporary, but there are no other current signifiers - no iPods, no cellphones, no coolers. Instead the surfers are usually caught toe-deep in water or wet sand, surrounded by driftwood or bare rocks. The images suggest 19th century anthropological photos - look at this strange, primitive tribe! While some of the faces (and body types) are decidedly 20th century American, others look ageless. There's not much difference between a weathered old hippie and a Gold Rush-era explorer, it seems.
The tintype process enhances this temporal confusion, with its sepia tone and the way moving water is softly blurred rather than crystal clear - "an ethereal cloud," Prodger said. Darkroom (dark tent?) artifacts multiply the aged look, with triangular corners, blobs along the edge of some photos and the occasional imperfection. None of those are exactly intentional, Sternbach told me, yet they are part of her method.
"Part of reason I work with collodion, besides that I think it's
totally beautiful, is that it has certain sensitivities to light, it
doesn't have the same sensitivities to light as standard film has, and
so it renders your subjects somewhat differently from what you can see with your eyes," Sternbach said.
When the process makes something spooky and intense out of blue eyes or
reveals a bunch of faint freckles as dark spots, "there's part of the
person that is revealed or obliterated," she said. Take that as a
metaphor for the whole enterprise.
PEM's collection is "engaged" in the exhibit via a couple of displays of tiny tintype portraits from the 19th century.
Sternbach's pictures "for me bring to life some of these earlier materials," Prodger said. "I don't know about you but when I look at some of these 19th century photographs, the people seemed like they had been sucked dry of their life and energy. I know full well in the 19th century people were every bit as dynamic and interesting as they are today. But they don't come across that way, and one of the reasons was the process, the way it makes people look. It has a transformative effect, and I think Joni uses that to full effect."
It will be interesting to see what transformation the curator works on photography at the PEM.
Nice story Joel. Please remain committed to committing jounalism. thanx, chip
Posted by: chip wyser | May 15, 2009 at 09:01 PM