There is something
about photography that allows the viewer to associate it with what it
represents. There is a kind of transparency that allows the belief that somehow
the photographic image is unmediated. It’s as if when we look at a photograph,
we are in the presence of the thing itself. Of course, we all know that it’s
just a picture and that what and how we see what is pictured depends on the
person behind the apparatus.
Nevertheless, the
photograph still has something to do with truth — or at least some kind of
connection between what’s in front of the lens and what we see in the
photograph. This is true no matter how manipulated the image may be. Somewhere
in an image, there’s the object that was photographed.
This relationship to
the real has, since its invention, made photography connected to the depiction
of society “as-it-is.” As such, photography easily became the tool of the
social documentarian to reveal the ills of a world
that was corrupt, unfair, and uneven. The concern for
how the other half lives has had many manifestations throughout photography’s
history, but mostly it comes from an attempt to humanize, and therefore, to
confirm how the other is really us. Since everything out there has
something to do with us, we are, in the end, always looking at some form of the
social. Realism and the everyday are always already present in every photograph
— even in the most blurry one.
The work of
Israeli-born Orit Raff, currently on view at the
Rochester Contemporary, is anything but blurry. Actually, her photographs are
crisply defined images of bakeries here and in Israel.
They are, per the artist, explorations of bread not only as sustenance but also
as a metaphor for creation itself. But, like much contemporary art, Raff’s work
is fragmented. And strategies of isolation and its resonance are, in fact,
normal strategies of avant-garde works of the 20th century.
Raff’s images are not
populated by the people who bake the bread but instead are montages of tightly
cropped ovens, aprons, and walls — all potentially discrete and metaphorical
subjects in their own right. The most palpable reference to a human presence
can be found in a series of three photographs, Untitled (Insatiable #3, #2, #6), each consisting of a used white
apron (or aprons) hung on a white wall. They are beautiful in a minimalist kind
of way but also cool and detached. Like ready-made canvases that have been
removed from their stretchers, the aprons beg for a wall — not in a bakery,
however, but in a gallery.
Indeed, the
photographs are insatiable. Yet, the sense of insatiability is not that of the
hungry who greedily eat the bread that comes out of the ovens. It is in the
photographs’ need for space and for us. They need us to look at them, to love
them. In a way, they are not really even for us, but are for their own sake.
Maybe that is exactly what Raff is trying to say.
In a video diptych, A Roundabout and a Roundabout, a
constantly rotating commercial oven filled with bread plays alongside the
artist tearing up a small, round loaf of artisanal
bread. We are told in the press release of the associations that come from the
juxtaposition: “fecundity, conception and birth, impurity and lust, creation
and destruction flow into the bread-stomach kneaded by the woman, who is
dressed in white like a priestess.” Sadly, what is lost here is the very basic
exchange between baker and eater. In all the pseudo-mystification, the social
is effaced and we have art — pure, clean, and untouched and untouchable.
Something we cannot eat.
Meanwhile, in the much
smaller Members’ Lab Space at RoCo is an exhibition
of photographs by Joel Swartz. In an instance of brilliantly synergistic curating, part of the series includes several photographs
of handmade breads from different local bakeries. They’re small photographs and
they’re also for sale; $50 will get you a nice slice of homey truth to hang on
your wall. It is refreshing work that attempts to deal with the everyday, which
in our culture has a tenuous relationship with this “thing”
we call “art.” But it’s only in our culture that it is this way.
Orit Raff Insatiable through May 21 | Rochester Contemporary, 137
East Avenue | Gallery hours:
Thursday through Sunday 1
p.m. to 5 p.m. For more info call 461-2222 or visit
online at www.rochestercontemporary.org
This article appears in May 3-9, 2006.
