Val Telberg (1910-1995) used several negatives to produce “Palmetto Gnome” (c. 1948-50); a solarized photogram was also involved. The resulting image has a human face on the palm of a hand with palmetto leaves draped on the head and shoulders. Telberg was influenced by Surrealism, the art movement that hoped to tap the unconscious, and the overall effect of “Palmetto Gnome” is of a figure that is primitive and exotic.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-truth-photography-after-the-shutter-review-the-ever-evolving-image-11550923201
‘Beyond Truth: Photography After the Shutter’ Review: The Ever-Evolving Image
An exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art reveals the malleable nature of photography.
Trevor Paglen’s ‘Human Eyes (Corpus: The Humans)’ from ‘Adversarially Evolved Hallucination’ (2017) PHOTO:HOWARD AGRIESTI, CLEVELAND MUSEU
Cleveland
Barbara Tannenbaum, the curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art, not only organized “Beyond Truth: Photography After the Shutter”; she is in the exhibition as well. The show explores the means by which photographers from the 19th century to the present have manipulated their images in ways both large and small, and their reasons for doing so. Since nowadays everyone with a smartphone is a photographer and all phones have programs to fiddle with their pictures, the museum invited the public to submit selfies that had been altered, and a selection is shown in a rotating digital display in “Beyond Truth.” Ms. Tannenbaum’s anonymous selfie is one of those included; it is recognizably her, but as if from another planet.
Beyond Truth: Photography After the Shutter
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Through May 26
Through May 26
“Dawn and Sunset” (1885) by the Englishman Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), the earliest work in the show, has a woman with an infant by a window on the left and an elderly man staring at the fireplace on the right. It is a fine example of Victorian sentimentalism and there is nothing on the surface of it to indicate that the print was made by combining three separate negatives. Robinson had to use multiple negatives to overcome the technical limitations of the available materials that prevented him from producing as natural an image with a single negative: The artifice was necessary to prevent the appearance of artificiality.
Most of the photographers on display were, however, under no similar necessity, and it is obvious that their works have been manipulated. Like Robinson, Val Telberg (1910-1995) used several negatives to produce “Palmetto Gnome” (c. 1948-50); a solarized photogram was also involved. The resulting image has a human face on the palm of a hand with palmetto leaves draped on the head and shoulders. Telberg was influenced by Surrealism, the art movement that hoped to tap the unconscious, and the overall effect of “Palmetto Gnome” is of a figure that is primitive and exotic.
Zanele Muholi’s self-portrait ‘Somnyama II, Oslo (Dark II, Oslo)’ (2015) PHOTO: ZANELE MUHOLI/YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY/STEVENSON CAPE TOWN, JOHANNESBURG
Anton Stankowski’s “Photo Eye” (1927) also has a Surreal aspect, but it is not so much the product of the unconscious as of meticulous calculation. Stankowski (1906-1998) created “Photo Eye” as an homage to his teacher Max Burchartz. The large eye that dominates the right side of the image comes from a photograph Burchartz took of his wife, and the wee figure of Burchartz himself that stares up at the eye from the lower right-hand corner comes from a photograph by Stankowski. The irregular dark shape that runs up the middle is Burchartz’s hairline. Besides montage and multiple negatives, Stankowski had to use a brush and pigment to fill in some blank spots by hand.
“Portraits of My People #319” (1990) by Willie Robert Middlebrook (1957-2012) is a meditation on race. The African-American photographer cropped a portrait so that only the nose and eyes were included and then, rather than developing the print in a tray as is usual, he brushed, sprayed, rubbed and dripped the chemicals onto the paper; they run down the face in streaks. The effect is ambivalent: Are the dark streaks meant to be read as tears, the result of the subject’s sorrow? Or as spatters from an assault on the image by an attacker with a paintbrush?
Loretta Lux’s ‘Isabella’ (2000) PHOTO: LORETTA LUX/YOSSI MILO GALLERY
The South African Zanele Muholi (b. 1972) also deals with race in her black-and-white self-portrait “Somnyama II, Oslo (Dark II, Oslo)” (2015). She has on her head an enormous pile of something curly that flows down over her shoulders and satirizes the huge wigs seen once upon a time in paintings of white European nobles when they went to court. But Ms. Muholi is not especially dark-skinned, so she tweaked her complexion to a glistening black to make the contrast emphatic.
Twenty-two artists contributed 34 works to “Beyond Truth.” Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (1899-1968) used a trick lens that functioned like a kaleidoscope to make “Mr. K (photo distortion of Nikita Khrushchev)” (about 1959). Jerry Uelsmann (b. 1934) printed the naked woman in “Seaweed-Womb” (1972) upside-down and reversed the tones so it printed as a negative. A huge “Michael Murphy” (1965) peers through the window into a room shot on a smaller scale by Irving Achorn (1920-2011). “Human Eyes (Corpus: The Humans)” from “Adversarially Evolved Hallucination” (2017), a 48-by-60-inch color print by Trevor Paglen (b. 1974), is the most abstract image in the show; one artificial-intelligence program trained to identify humans was tested on images that another AI program created specifically to contain the least amount of information necessary for them to be identified as human. This image passed the test—two creepy little eyes in a mass of flesh.
Val Telberg’s ‘Palmetto Gnome’ (c. 1948-50) PHOTO: ESTATE OF VAL TELBERG/LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY
The manipulation of photographs with the intent to deceive raises ethical and philosophical concerns, but that is not an issue with the works in “Beyond Truth”; mostly their intent is simply to delight.
