Young Photographer contains
26 four-color plates by artist Amy Adler.  According to the UCLA Hammer Museum
description of her series of pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio, she took photographs
of him in her apartment, then made many pastel drawings of the photographs, and
then photographed some of the drawings.  She destroyed the original negatives
and drawings, which is especially odd when considering that they took months to
do.  For other photographs in the book, she hired models or used photographs in
magazines.  The picture titled "Fox," on the cover of her book, looks
like an out-of-focus Jodie Foster.   The first series inside the book is
"Young Photographer," which shows a boyish child holding pointing a
camera in various poses.  The first image of the series is in color, then the
following ones are in black and white, with a change in the last image in the
series, which is in color, where the figure looks slightly older and more
feminine, although sharing enough features to probably be the same person.  The
DiCaprio series shows headshots of the actor looking vigorous and relaxed.  The
next series, "Centerfold," shows a young woman lounging around
wearing just a checkered shirt.  Then "Unknown" shows a woman
striking various poses in what the accompanying essay explains is Adler’s
apartment.  Finally, at the very end of the book, the single piece "A
Woman of No Importance" shows a woman holding her head on her chin,
looking a little dejected or bored.  This is a perplexing collection of images.

The publisher’s website says her
"photographs examine notions of authorship by exploring the relationships
between artist, subject, and viewer."  The short essay in the book by Cay
Sophie Rabinowitz starts out with the portentous statement that

Amy Adler’s enactment of identity and anonymity
provides an active consideration of the conceptual matters that dominate her
work.  Her capturing and relinquishing of control inspires a mirroring evaluation
of her process.  Adler’s uniquely constructed oeuvre perpetually discloses and
disguises a dynamic that is bound by the alternative forces of control and
vulnerability.

A short piece on the DiCaprio series on the UCLA Hammer Museum
website says that Adler has long been interested "in the psychological and
cultural mediation of identity through mass media images."  All of this
sophisticated language stands in contrast to the rather pleasing simplicity of
the images, many of which look like they could be used to illustrate a
children’s book.  The large size of the book, 14"x17" suggests that
it is important to Adler that one be struck by the visual qualities in an
almost visceral way; in a photograph of the DiCaprio exhibition, it looks like
the hung photographs are considerably larger, being a few feet high.  This
should lead us to question whether this work is really so conceptual as the
above interpretations suggest.  Adler herself writes nothing in her book,
although of course she is probably sympathetic with the ideas in the
accompanying essay by Rabinowitz.  It is important to note that she has chosen
not to include a statement her work in the book, and she has not become an
academic social psychologist or philosopher.  To interpret her work as simply
propounding a thesis about identity has to be largely to misunderstand it or to
condemn it to obvious failure.  Judging from her working methods and her
subjects, it is plausible that Adler is indeed exploring issues to do with the
visual construction of identity, but she can’t be doing it in an analytic way. 

Looking at Adler’s pictures, their
most striking feature is the excellent job she does of drawing human hair with
pastels.  It feels like she has captured every strand on the young
photographer’s head, and it looks so thick and healthy, it needs to be
tousled.  DiCaprio’s hair is so luscious you want to rub your face in it.  She
is also very good with clothes, capturing folds of cloth with photographic
precision.  She is less successful with skin, having to resort to rather clumsy
cross-hatching that takes away its sensuality and softness.  (Of course, this
may all be part of the cunning artist’s master plan.)  Also striking is that
most of the images have solid color backgrounds.  The boy in young photographer
stands out against black, while the woman in  "Centerfold" is against
a hot red-orange, and the woman in "A Woman of No Importance" is all
in a bluish purple.  The colors are major elements of the compositions,
affecting mood and making them unusual.  The background has its own texture,
and has clearly been done very carefully in pastels too.  This approach
foregrounds the human subject and takes him or her out of context, in way that
regular photography can almost never do. 

The commentators on Adler make a
lot of her methods, yet this book says very little about them.  Many
photography books say what camera the photographer used, what size the
exhibited images were, what kind of photographic paper was used, what paper was
used, and other details of construction.  Adler gives no such information.  Her
images are in themselves rather bland and enigmatic — very different from the
works of Cindy Sherman and especially Barbara Kruger,
for example, who leave the viewer in no doubt that their themes are gender and
identity.  It seems plausible that Adler is also interested in gender and
youth, but it is hard to say.  Ultimately, Adler’s pictures resist any simple
or obvious interpretation.  They are interesting and pleasing both conceptually
and aesthetically, but they are not remarkable.  They don’t grip the viewer and
there’s nothing particular radical about the ideas they raise.  Maybe Adler is
being too subtle, or is not helping her audience enough in interpreting her
goals.  She provokes curiosity and maybe there is enough here to make one want
to see what she does next, but it is hard to be enthusiastic about these
works. 

Links:

·       
Twin Palm Publishers

·       
UCLA Hammer
Museum Amy Adler exhibit

© 2005 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: ArtAndPhotography