Through coincidence, relationships centered on woman as mother, daughter or wife dominate several new photography exhibitions in the Chicago area this month.
One artist emphasizes fathers and daughters, another turns the focus to mothers and daughters. Yet another represents his mother, while another portrays our culture`s perception of woman as wife and mother.
Marilyn Zimmerman, 34, has spent the last five years exploring the father-daughter relationship through photographs. The project came about, she says, through her own relationship with her father and her growing understanding of the father`s role in helping, or not helping, a daughter develop a sense of her own independence and self-confidence in relating to the world beyond the home.
Zimmerman, who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., selected her subjects from her acquaintances and friends. ”I`d hear incredible stories” about their fathers, she says.
The photographs, on display at the New Works Gallery at the University of Illinois, were a ”collaboration.” (”Whenever you photograph another human being, there`s so much interaction that you have to call it a collaboration,” Zimmerman says.)
Most of the pictures do not show the father, but instead represent the father through something about him that is significant to his daughter. Zimmerman worked with each daughter to decide how they wanted to portray her story. She then made the photographs and asked each daughter to write something relevant on the lower half of the picture.
The 11 images are all originals, with the text exactly as it was written by the daughters. So in one photograph a woman is hugging her dog. The text the woman has written at the bottom of the photograph notes that she never met her father. ”He left me with a basic distrust of men,” she writes. ”The only one I do trust is my dog and maybe Sgt. Preston.”
Zimmerman includes a photograph of herself with her father among the other images. ”I had identified with my dad a lot,” she says. ”I absorbed his strengths and his weaknesses. Understanding how my father influenced me has affected me strongly. This project has been my own journey.”
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Connie Samaras, 37, titled her series, also at New Works, ”Paranoid Delusions.” Samaras, who also lives in Michigan, combines black-and-white photographs with text overlays to evoke a political awareness.
Using photographs taken from television commercials, broadcast news, films, prime-time television shows and sometimes magazines, Samaras makes collages out of small, identical photographs attached to a black background in grid form, with an enlarged photograph attached to the center of the piece.
She then uses white ink to write a narrative text of her own composition over the collage. She chooses to superimpose the text on the collage rather than next to or under it to make a political statement: ”In television, the image often overrides the words; this is a reversal of that,” she says.
Samaras believes that there is a political component to all art, so she shies away from the term ”political art.” She hopes that her work will encourage people to question how they construct their belief systems.
”This work is not intended for passive consumption,” she says. ”You have to stop and really look at the images and read the text. It`s
participatory in that, by mixing fiction and fact, it gets people to wonder where the political truth is.”
Samaras says that she has been an activist feminist since her high school days in the `60s. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees were in painting, drawing, print-making and video.
”I began working with photographs because I was interested in framing social issues,” she says. ”It`s hard to reconcile activism with making art. I`m interested in making art that`s complex both theoretically and esthetically.”
Samaras` subject matter ranges from nuclear war, the shuttle disaster and fingerprinting the population to medical insurance, terrorism and the poisoned Tylenol capsules.
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Early in 1986, Aperture invited photographers to submit work for a visual exploration of mothers and daughters in America. From the deluge of photographers who responded (more than 600, with a total of more than 3,000 images), Aperture selected 88 photographers and 128 images for the exhibition. Some of the images are included in a book, ”Mothers and Daughters”
(Aperture, $24.50), based on the exhibit.
This month the traveling exhibit, which includes most of the photographs from the original exhibit, opens Wednesday in the Field Museum, where it will be on view through March 13.
Photographs-including manipulated images, black and white and color-take a broad look at women in America through their relationships as mothers, daughters, or both. The exhibit represents the diversity that is peculiar to this country: three large women standing with their daughters on a Coney Island beach, sharing pop and sandwiches; an Indian mother bending over her baby, bound in a cradle, as her older daughter looks on; an elegant Chinese mother and daughter being photographed in their home in Los Angeles.
A haunting image of a mother and her two daughters carrying buckets back to their Appalachian home contrasts with a manipulated image of a mother holding a laughing baby in her arms as they vacation at the seashore.
The show also depicts a broad spectrum of the emotions mothers and daughters share: the closeness of a baby at her mother`s breast, the cheek-to- cheek tenderness of a woman and her young teenaged daughter; the search for autonomy as a daughter confronts her mother, hands on hips.
A young mother lifts a giggling baby into the air in one photograph, and in another three generations of women touch hands. Some of the photographs are solemn, some are pensive, and others show the casual, everyday life of the subjects.
”Mothers and Daughters” includes text by some of America`s well-known women writers about the mother-daughter relationship, as well as writing by some of the photographers or their subjects.
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Photographer Jack Demuth is exploring a different sort of relationship involving a mother. Demuth, 41, who was abandoned by his mother when he was 2 years old and saw her only once after that before her death in 1980, has used photographs of mannequins to portray his mother through the various seasons of her life and his.
The images, all black and white, were taken at night, through shop windows, often in run-down neighborhoods. Thus the mannequins sometimes show signs of wear: a crack in the head, a broken finger. The 15 photographs at Northwestern University`s Dittmar Gallery, Evanston, are from a series, ”A Vision of Abandonment.”
”I take my camera out and just shoot, and then I see what`s there,”
says Demuth, an Evanston-based photographer. ”Mannequins kept appearing in my proofs. I went from (photographing) groups of mannequins to individual ones. I focused generally and then became more specific.” Demuth says that he didn`t know why he was photographing mannequins until one night when he and his wife were out for dinner. ”All of a sudden I said, `I know what the project is about. It`s my mother,` ” he says. ”It`s what using art as self-discovery is all about.”
The photographs were all taken in shop windows in Chicago and Milwaukee. None of the backgrounds is manipulated; there are mannequins in situations that represent feelings from different parts of Demuth`s life. One is a photograph of the head of a mannequin, dressed elegantly, looking down. Demuth calls this one ”Crib View 1” and says that it represents ”my very earliest memorable experience from my crib of abandonment.”
Some of the photographs show the shadows of chains or a grid on the face of the mannequin; others focus close in and show only the face or part of a hand. In one the mannequin is in a bridal dress; in another, a young boy is shown, a crack in his head (Demuth titles this one ”Bad Seed” and says that it refers to himself).
The one time Demuth remembers seeing his mother, he saw her through a screen door, where the wood in the door formed a bar over part of her face. He has portrayed that memory in ”False Hope,” a photograph of a mannequin`s face partially concealed by a metal bar.
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Sharing gallery space with Demuth is New York photographer Joni Sternbach, 34, who exhibits 15 color photographs from her series, ”something between the two of them.” Sternbach was a professional photographer before she married and became a mother. Facing society`s stereotypes and expectations of her new roles, she decided to turn her camera`s eye on herself and her family to explore the reality and the fiction of cultural expectations of women in the 1980s.
Sternbach stresses that the work is not a documentary. All the situations are constructed, with Sternbach often exaggerating the roles. This lends humor along with intensity: one photograph shows her and her husband in bed. He`s asleep, his back to her; she`s watching television in an old nightgown, munching on snacks. In another, she and her husband are locked in a passionate embrace on the beach, the water surrounding them. In a third, with her baby on her hip, she hangs clothes on an outdoor clothesline.
Sternbach had worked primarily in black and white before this series, but she wanted to use color for these photographs to give them a greater sense of reality. ”I wanted the viewer to look at the image and think that it could be real.”
What: Photographs by Connie Samaras and Marilyn Zimmerman
Where: New Works Gallery, Architecture and Art Building, University of Illinois at Chicago, 845 W. Harrison St.
When: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. weekdays through Feb. 5
How much: Free
What: ”Mothers and Daughters”
Where: Field Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive
When: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily, Wednesday through March 13
How much: Free with museum admission-adults $2, students $1, seniors 50 cents. Free on Thursdays.
What: Photographs by Jack Demuth and Joni Sternbach
Where: Dittmar Gallery, Norris University Center, Northwestern University, 1999 Sheridan Rd., Evanston
When: Noon-8 p.m. daily through Feb. 7
How much: Free
