School of Life

Through Feb. 19, Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, 1616 Walnut St., No. 100, 215-545-7562, fleisher-ollmangallery.com.


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Published: Jan 19, 2011

Unwrapping packages and sorting through frames stacked in the back room of Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, director Amy Adams describes its new exhibit as "absolutely wrong and beautiful."

Opening tonight, "Off Camera" is a compelling survey of nontraditional photography from the 1960s to present. Placing little-known, self-taught artists alongside higher-profile, heavily schooled photographers, it crystallizes the subconscious dialogue between the two camps. This work isn't just alternative process, it disregards process.

"I always thought of photography as very pristine, perfectly printed, no dust on the images, you don't touch the work with your fingerprints," muses Adams. "This is the antithesis of that."

After seeing the work of Czech artist Miroslav Tichy at New York's International Center for Photography last spring, Adams says she was inspired to stage a similar show. A studied painter, Tichy was self-taught when it came to photography. He built his own cameras and shot pictures of unknowing women in his hometown of Kyjov, printed off-focus and cropped awkwardly to just their legs or chests. It's voyeuristic as well as transformative, and Adams says she was drawn in by the brazen defiance of visual convention.

Ten of Tichy's photographs show in "Off Camera," along with work that similarly disregards other rules of photography. A dozen pieces are by Joe "40,000" Murphy, a Chicago usher who had a penchant for getting his snapshot taken with famous faces he encountered on the job — from Charlton Heston to Grace Kelly to a four-star Army general. After getting the shots developed, he would write on top of the print — in colored pen — identifying each person, sometimes shading in lips or eyebrows, or filling in contours that might be lost in an overblown exposure. When he was working with an odd-shaped frame, Murphy cut the image to fit. If he found a location he would rather be seen in, he cut out himself and whomever he was shot with, and pasted them in the new scene.

May Wilson also inserted herself into improbable scenes — in her work, and in her life for that matter. The Baltimore grandmother moved into the Chelsea Hotel at age 61 to focus on her art. Her Ridiculous Portraits series collages her face into scenes from history. In Sarah Presenting Hagar, Wilson smirkingly stands in a painting of an Old Testament court. Likewise, Lee Godie took photo booth images of herself adopting different thrift-store personas and inset them into larger, brighter watercolors. And so rather than look entirely at the self-taught, "Off Camera" brings in the work of contemporary artists and photographers working off similar impulses.

Like Godie, John Wood insets small black-and-white photos into larger, lushly sketched work. Birds and Racer blends flighty images with faces that are printed in negative, or photocopied to the point of distortion, creating a washed-out, surreal dreamscape.

Letha Wilson's photos of woodsy trails and canyons (pictured) are mounted on aluminum, then sprayed with dots of colored paint in neon-rich hues. A stack of rocks found on the Appalachian Trail drips with purple; the orange rocks of Bryce Canyon have one single, silver dot at center. Like Murphy, Wilson shows no fear of leaving direct marks on her image.

Brion Nuda Rosch takes this a step further, covering up landscape photos on found book pages with mysterious cardboard rectangles. The overlaid shapes in Two Side Portraits, One Sticking Out Tongue could be two abstract geometrical grimaces; it also evokes censorship, where the focal point may be blocked out, a frustrating missing piece of information.

It doesn't seem right, but it's hard to look away.

(john.vettese@citypaper.net)

Off Camera | Through Feb. 19, Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, 1616 Walnut St., No. 100, 215-545-7562, fleisher-ollmangallery.com.