Breaking the Surface

My nephew is learning the names of things: "truck," "cat," "Daddy," "tree." He points to a bur oak tree (Latin name Quercus macrocarpa), distinguished by large fringed acorn cups that resemble the spiny burrs on a chestnut. Pioneers planted bur oaks to shade the open prairie grasslands. But my nephew says only "tree." Perhaps someday he'll learn there are many species of trees and that all species contain individual trees whose appearance and history are unique and, therefore, splendid. Reductive thinking is appropriate for a child. It is not appropriate for an adult. For years I have strived to be an adult, but after attending two photography exhibitions I confess that a child still resides within.

Full Frontal: Photographic Portraitsat Jan Weiner Gallery and Seokjung Kim: Museum Projectat the Society for Contemporary Photography provide tough but invaluable lessons in the subtleties of human prejudice -- racial, sexual, social, historical. The lessons are for everyone because it is human nature to size up, weigh, assess, label; it is how we first enter language. But only the willfully ignorant refuse to question their initial judgments, to move from the general to the specific, from Homo sapiens to human beings.

"We live in an open, pluralistic society," says Pok-Chi Lau, one of eight photographers featured in Full Frontal. "Subconsciously, however, we make stereotypes of people we do not know." Lau's nine black and white portraits, titled "Love Me All the Same: Mixed-Race Children Series," grew out of his own misconception of racial distinctions. "I came across a racial mix that was quite unusual. These unexpected 'new' races surprised me by their appearance; they did not fit my image of what looks Chinese."

Lau's close-ups depict people who may or may not be as they appear. For example, I believed "Gabriel Braddy" was a young Latino, based on his skin the shade of café latté, sensual heart-shaped mouth, piercing dark eyes, close-cropped black hair and who knows how many triggers that remained in the unconscious. I was wrong. Gabriel is African-American and Caucasian. Lau states that only "if the viewer is active can the issues of misinterpretation and misidentity be addressed." In other words, it is not enough to recognize the error; we must ask why the error was made. I asked. Here's my answer: Gabriel's features resemble those of my first husband, who was an Argentine of Italian descent. He also resembles the many nameless actors who are cast as Latino street toughs on TV cop shows. Only now do I question how many of those extras were actually Latino.

As I moved from one photo to the next, I found myself comparing and contrasting each new face with those I had (incorrectly) defined before. When there is little or no context provided for our assessments, we rely too heavily on past experience to build our vocabulary of labels.

Yet context does play a critical role in how we judge people -- and certainly how we determine the content of a photograph, as in the case of Zoe Leonard's "Jennifer Miller Does Marilyn Monroe." Leonard's pin-up (the large-scale photo is literally pinned to the wall, unframed) depicts Jennifer Miller, a real woman who has a real beard. She's sprawled naked on red satin in the same unmistakable pose as the famous Monroe, but combined with Miller's black facial and body hair the pose also brings to mind seventeenth-century paintings of Jesus crucified. In a society where many women, and now even men, are self-conscious about body hair and consequently spend hours plucking and shaving, Leonard's burlesque asks, "What is sexy?" and "Who the hell decides for us, anyway -- the makers of Nair depilatory?"

Speaking of hair: In Art Miller's six black and white photos from his "Bears" series, hirsute men congregate at outdoor events. These are masculine guys, beefy and hard-muscled; some are tattooed. "I want to get people to become open-minded about others," explains Miller, "and see them not for what they are but who they are." Who they are: individuals socializing on a sunny afternoon. What they are: gay. The photographs are unposed, taken at a variety of gay events. "I could go to a football game," Miller says, "or a straight rodeo or barbecue cook-off and shoot the same amount of straight guys, and put all of those groupings together and no one would be able to tell the difference." Except, he later clarifies, other gay men.

Without the viewer's self-examination, however, Miller's work is nothing more than interesting portraits. Analyzing my own history with homosexual "types" revealed that when I hear the word "gay," I first think of effeminacy even though most of my male gay friends are masculine or "neutral," falling somewhere between overtly masculine and overtly feminine. "Because mainstream society is comfortable with the gay man being very soft or very effeminate, when they see a gay man who looks and acts and behaves and has similar interests as the guy that just came and fixed their kitchen sink ... when they find out that all of their assumptions are wrong, that confronts them."

But what happens when our assumptions are right? When the signs we use to distinguish one person from another -- race, gender, clothes -- turn out to be accurate symbols of something deeper? Julie Moos' contribution to Full Frontalis a collection of large-scale color portraits of high school students paired by relationship, "Friends and Enemies," her response to the Columbine High School shootings. "I was moved to do something to help bring forth a discussion about school relationships, i.e., cliques, nerds, popular kids." Moos consulted teachers, counselors and yearbooks at a Birmingham, Alabama, high school before pairing unsuspecting students as either friends or enemies. Because the photographs are titled with only the students' names, such as "Buck and Jonathan," the viewer must figure out the relationship based on superficial clues.