thePULSEPhotography at Worcester Art Museum
by Leon Nigrosh
What’s with Worcester and photography anyway? There are more photo exhibitions in this town than you can shake a stick at. Every little coffee shop, luncheonette, and bar is having a photo show. People wander around the town lugging everything from wooden 8×10 bellows cameras to medium format Hasselblads and Nikons to twin lens reflexes or SLRs. There’s even a growing cult of folks who use that cheesy plastic Holga camera and think they’re taking art photos. And then there’s the growing number of people taking pictures with cameras that are ~ dare I mention the word ~digital. Private photo classes and salons abound and there are courses at just about every public institution around, from high schools to colleges. And in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit to taking some of the blame, since right now I’m teaching three sections of basic photography at Quinsigamond.
In recent years there’s been an unbroken line of photographer/teachers from Minor White to Irene Shwachman through Ron Rosenstock, Stephen DiRado and Peter Faulkner. And the list continues to grow. How did this all this photographic frenzy come about in the first place? It seems that not long after the invention of easy-to-handle photographic equipment, a group calling themselves The Worcester Camera Club met for the first time in 1885. Because a number of the members were influential in the formation of the newly opened Worcester Art Museum, they were able to convince WAM to hold its first major photography exhibit in 1904. And photography exhibits have been a staple there ever since. A little over a year ago, the museum celebrated the 100th anniversary of the original event with a major retrospective, “Keeping Shadows,” showcasing some 100 images drawn from the museum’s ever-expanding collection.
All this brings us to the current photo show at WAM. “New to View, Recent Acquisitions of Photography” presents 51 works purchased or acquired in the past five years. Included are many classics from the 1800s, including portraits of luminaries Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Pictures of bucolic farmlands appear in stark contrast to images of the ravages of war that are being shown along with the usual close-ups of flora and fauna. Then there are a few surprises, like the informal shot of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac taken by Allen Ginsburg in 1953. Who knew then that these three would go on to become such important icons of American writing?
Heavy political images like Ernest C. Withers’s “I Am A Man,” a photo of striking black Memphis sanitation workers taken in1968 ~ at an incident that was the precursor to the entire Civil Rights movement ~ share space with Judy Dater’s ever-amusing shot “Imogen and Twinka, Yosemite,” in which the internationally famous 91 year old photographer comes face to face in the forest with the internationally famous young nude model.
The show also represents curatorial attempts to reach out to younger photographers like American Brian Finke. His two images of high-schoolers, one a sweating football player intently listening to his coach, the other a cheerleader lost in a moment’s reverie, brilliantly capture the drama of these teenage rites of passage.
German photographer Thomas Kellner assembles myriad images taken from different angles to produce a magical picture of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, while locals Robert and Shana Parkeharrison stage and manipulate a gloomy portrait of Everyman on wobbly stilts, wearing wings of twig in their image “Guardian.”
And the placement of Richard Misrach’s sweeping landscape of Lake Mead, right next to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s view of “Europa Near Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” exemplifies just how far and wide the realm of photography has extended.
