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READ REVIEWS GET IN ON THE TEEN SCENES TEEN REVIEWERS AND CRITICS LINKS TO OTHER COOL STUFF |
Lauren Gallo Saving Face: Lauren Reviews Reviews Only Skin Deep at the International Center of Photography  The Great American Melting Pot is being reintroduced for a limited time at Manhattan's International Center for Photography, but with new flavor. Our country is no longer welcoming people from all different countries, races and religions with open arms; it is no longer a place to find new freedoms, opportunities and a better way of life because it fails to embrace multiculturalism. No, the trend now is toward assimilation, and those who fail to do so run the risk of contaminating the entire stew. Only Skin Deep: Visions of the American Self, currently running at the ICP, aims to astonish and succeeds. Because color and appearance really are "only skin deep," but our American state of mind has kept us, for centuries, from ever truly grasping this concept, and the consequent suffering, documented in this exhibition, is appalling. Take, for example, the exhibit's first piece "Evolucion del hombre" (The Evolution of Man) by Miguel Calderon. The series of six photographs shows a man, initially crouched and naked, coming to stand straight, wear clothing, and possess increasingly more dangerous weapons: a stone, a butcher knife, and finally a pair of machine guns. On the adjoining wall, Carrie Mae Weems' "From here I saw what happened and I cried" is displayed as a group of four images, inked in black and red, of African American faces. Each, though similar, claimed its own label, "Scientific Profile," "Negroid Type," "Anthropological Debate" and finally, "Photographic Subject." These four, like the previous piece, are important not only because of the technical skill involved in creating them, but also because of the reaction elicited from the reader. We're humbled by our fascination with the degradation of the subjects photographed (unwillingly, as their expressions suggest). A notable piece on the lower level extracts a similar response from viewers. It is composed of a giant sheet of black paper, with two horrific photographs at its center. The photographs, of the gruesome lynching of a black man accused of killing a white man, are aided by the black paper, scrawled on with words of disgust and shame in white chalk and finally, "how can this picture exist?" The photographs were published in Life Magazine without any credits -- they were taken by a human being, a human being who witnessed the site and stopped to photograph it. Such insights line the walls of this exhibit, making it impossible not to realize how our needs to preserve uniformity of culture and race have led us to appalling extremes. But the whole of the gallery is what makes it a success. Photographs dating back to the 1860s of young a Native American girl in "traditional dress" and "tribal dress" juxtaposes one taken only several months ago of a Mexican American woman with a poster of John F. Kennedy on the wall behind her. A series of "German Indians" adorns one wall, facing another with a pair of images from 1854-1870: "As We Found Them" and "As They are now," boasting philanthropic interests. The "Emerging Man, Harlem," ironically emerges from a sewer, crawling out of a manhole into the light of 125th Street. And Life Magazine's "How to tell Japs from the Chinese," demands attention from nearby visitors pondering a photograph of a "routine" check at San Ysidro. Individuals are depicted struggling to maintain their identity, to create their identity, to understand their identity, and to dictate another's identity. What this exhibit does is succeed at emphasizing the ignorance and the misunderstanding behind these complicated responses to multiculturalism. This is America, and the American Self is one that is at once unquestionable and indefinable. We exist in a place where a self, an individual, is free to exist, and yet is unfairly and unjustly forced to conform, to assimilate to someone else's ideal, though this ideal is vague and impossible to define. This exhibit preserves the face ultimately with one pair of floor-to-ceiling self-portraits. They are identical, side-by-side, and yet labeled differently: "exaggerating my black features" and "exaggerating my white features." These photographs are exactly the same. This exhibit saves the face that is real, the one that exists without the exaggerations and the distortions and the labels that make it less of a face and more of a grotesque ideal. |
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