Photo exhibitions: From the commonplace to the momentous

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

L.A. County Museum of Art

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Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s art treads the ground between old-fashioned street photography and postmodern portraiture, said Christopher Miles in the LA Weekly. For his “Hustlers” series (1990–92), the artist hit the streets of Hollywood and “trolled the neighborhood for mostly male prostitutes.” He then invited them back to prepped and lighted locations in diners, motels, or parking lots. The resulting portraits show edgy characters who seem to be cast in a movie of their own lives. The photographer’s recent “Lucky 13” photos show strippers clinging to dance poles. “But these are not action shots.” Instead, the dancers hang there, frozen like classical sculptures, looking outward with oddly upside-down faces that “vary between pandering and mostly vacancy, and perhaps even distant reverie.” But diCorcia doesn’t deal exclusively with seedy subjects: For “Streetwork” (1993–98), he photographed passersby on city streets. Beggars and businessmen “go about their business—most of them too consumed with their thoughts and routines” to notice the camera. Similarly, for “Heads” (2001–03), he used telephoto lenses to catch pedestrians’ “private expressions up close.” For diCorcia, all the world’s a stage, and the most interesting roles are the ones we play when no one is watching.

Bill Wood probably never thought of himself as an artist, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. Working as a commercial photographer in Fort Worth starting in the 1930s, Wood “did it all: babies, pets, weddings, dead people in their coffins, retirement parties, and recitals.” The 200 images at the International Center of Photography are a laconic chronicle of his time. A few “could be mistaken for the work of more sophisticated artists.” But most are interesting only because time has introduced an ironic distance that makes them seem appear humorous or surreal. “Two trumpet players in identical blazers and bow ties look so nervous you’d think they were posing for a police lineup.” A girl smiles anxiously through her dental retainer, while the image of an uptight supervisor lecturing janitors “is like a still from a zombie movie.” It’s all hypnotically fascinating, but you can’t help feeling that the curators are condescending a bit—to Wood’s subjects and, perhaps, to Wood himself.

Brett Weston was the son of one of America’s pioneering photographers, said Deborah K. Dietsch in The Washington Times. Brett began photographing alongside his father, Edward Weston, at 13. Soon he adopted one of his father’s favorite techniques: zooming in on ordinary objects until their images resemble abstract forms. “Weston’s extreme close-ups made even the ugliest elements—cracked plastic, broken windows, dried mud—appear beautiful.” During the 1940s, he experimented with industrial and urban scenes, relishing occasions to document nature poking through the concrete. In one of his pictures from 1945, for instance, the silhouette of a tree against a city wall “looks nearly identical” to a photo he would later take of a tree in front of a stone canyon. But for the most part, Weston preferred scenes from nature: “Some of the most sensual photos” in the exhibit at the Phillips Gallery are of rippling dunes at Point Lobos, Calif., “their curves accentuated in inky shadows resembling birds and snakes.”

Before August Sander’s art was banned by the Nazis, he envisioned creating an “encyclopedic inventory of the German populace,” said Leah Ollman in the Los Angeles Times. To be called “People of the 20th Century,” it would include portraits of men and women from all walks of life—from farmers and factory workers to intellectuals and Gypsies. A selection of 127 portraits at the Getty chronicles a complex and diverse German society that the Nazis worked to suppress. The wizened peasant woman, the “fiery-eyed painter,” the pompous member of parliament—all are on display here. So are waitresses, coal carriers, and “dwarfs in their Sunday best.” Portraits of persecuted Jews hang beside one of an SS chief, “posed in full, daunting regalia and photographed without any visible irony”—even though Sander’s son had been imprisoned as a communist agitator. Sander’s purpose wasn’t political but artistic, and he “brought order, precision, and a spectacularly sensitive eye for character to his self-appointed task.” Though the photographs here constitute only a small fraction of his never-completed project, they summon “the spectrum and spectacle of humanity” all by themselves.

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