We will assume that Nicholas Nixon never asked his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters to pose in the manner of the stone saints flanking the west facade of the Royal Portal of the Chartres Cathedral in France.
And no one has suggested that the 19th Century firm of the Bisson Freres photographed those saints every year like Nixon has photographed the four Brown sisters since 1975.
But forget the photo history for a moment. The stone saints do appear to fraternize like family when played off against the Brown portraits. And who could resist grouping them for a whimsical tour through a photography collection? Certainly not David Travis, curator of the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Travis has invented an exhibit of such irreverent visual liaisons that suggest just how far photography has gone to come full circle to places it has been before. The show, “Distant Relations,” includes more than 50 artists and runs through July 18.
“Collectors in their homes do this kind of pairing all the time,” Travis says. “It gets you to look at these photographs differently. Once you start on this it’s just unbelievable what the coincidences are.”
Indeed. Diane Arbus photographed the exotic hats being sported one season in New York City just as 19th Century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron photographed the ladies in Ceylon carrying clay water jugs on their heads. Arbus said it all about the hats except, perhaps, that the jugs were a lot more practical.
“There are two peculiar ways to think about the work of photographers from the past. The first is that the photographers who went before us stole all our best ideas. This is the humble view. The second is that the photographers of today create their own precursors. This is the self-confident view,” notes Travis.
He doesn’t suggest that the contemporary photographers were directly influenced by earlier masters with which they are paired, though in some cases the influence of one on another makes sense.
Paul Strand’s 1953 portrait of the Lucetti family in Italy mirrors the people in “Portrait of Two Men” and the “Portrait of James Nasmyth” photographed by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in the 1840s.
“Strand actually saw work by Hill and Adamson in Alfred Stieglitz’s collection. But it’s hard to say whether they influenced him,” Travis says.
Grouping the famous portrait of twins by Arbus, who sought out archetypes in our society, with twins by August Sander, who sought to photograph an encyclopedic study of the German people, certainly has validity. Arbus studied Sander’s work, and an unflinching, head-on scrutiny of the human community grounds the work of both of them.
Joel-Peter Witkin’s photograph of Siamese twins taken against a darkly draped backdrop eerily echoes the scene in a set of Victorian portraits of children. Witkin’s flourishes of flowers and lace only parody romanticism amid the precarious world suggested by the defaced surface of the image. His flowers appear to be the long-dried bouquet used by Chicago photographer L. W. Felt in the portraits Felt took of children sometime after the 1871 Chicago fire. While Witkin may well go through life without seeing the Felt photographs on exhibit, the haunting influence of ceremonial 19th Century styles is obvious in his tableaux.
The exhibit overall underscores Victorian consciousness as a profound force in 19th Century photography and a continuing referrent in 20th Century work.
“Many of the photographers from the very early period were these wealthy amateurs. Photography was new, and you’d have to figure it out and it was fun. The scientists and the amateurs were all in the same societies,” Travis says.
Cameron and children’s writer Lewis Carroll fall into this charmed circle. Cameron was unique for her times, drafting her family and friends to pose for dramatic portraits. In an era that treasured the heroic portrait, her work carried her subjects into a far more elusive realm, as though the camera could see straight through to the soul. One Cameron portrait is aptly paired on exhibit with selections of Ruth Thorne-Thomsen’s “Views From the Shoreline.” In this series, Thorne-Thomsen also suggests seeing through one reality to another with profiles cut out of her own landscape photographs to create Earth goddesses rephotographed in the environment.
Carroll’s photograph of a little girl suggests a precious doll comfortably enthroned in a doll house. The portrait is exhibited with a surreal distortion by 20th Century British photographer Bill Brandt, who seems to visualize the adventures of Carroll’s famous Alice of “Alice in Wonderland.” Brandt, during his career, danced back and forth between Surrealism and brooding documentary of old upper-class traditions lingering between the world wars.
With such a bill of fare, “Distant Relations” has a limerick quality. There’s the rhyming of past and present and the unraveling of the term contemporary photography when old work appears in a context that underscores how strikingly modern it looks.
Take for instance the flower pattern designed in lace and laid on a paper negative in the 1840s by William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the positive-negative process. Talbot made a salted paper print from the negative and sent samples resulting from similar experiments to his friends.
“The man to whom it was addressed would (likely have given) the sample to his wife, thinking it was lace pinned to a piece of paper. Then he’d read the letter and say, `Oh, give it back! Henry’s made a great discovery,’ ” notes Travis.
But Talbot’s experiments resemble the ideas of 20th Century artists such as Imogen Cunningham, who took natural forms to the point of abstraction in photographs of her garden. And certainly Talbot the scientist should be most comfortable in the company of Joan Fontcuberta, an artist whose whimsical photograms of grass are printed right over the kinds of botanic species to be found on wallpaper.
The bond between Mark Klett’s Western landscapes and those made a century earlier by Timothy O’Sullivan is far more intentional. Klett stood where O’Sullivan stood and documented the interference of time in the now-legendary rephotographic project from which a grouping in the show is drawn.
Weegee and Garry Winogrand stand together, a likely pairing, both puncturing social pretensions.
Andre Kertesz and Robert Mapplethorpe stand together, an unlikely pairing of master photographers from different generations. Kertesz was one of the pioneers of modern photography and Mapplethorpe was one of the renegades whose consummate eye could make even a still life of a flower erotic. But both reinvented views of the female body, as shown in their work on exhibit. Kertesz did so with his famous mirror distortions of models and Mapplethorpe did so by taking some of the first serious photographs of female body builders.
At that point, the show seems to cover just about everything, though Travis is certain viewers will come up with lots of alternative combinations. The possibilities are infinite, and on a hot summer day when downtown Chicago turns into an island of simmering concrete, it’s nice to dive into infinity.
What: “Distant Relations”
Where: Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan Avenue at Adams Street; 312-443-3600
When: Through July 18. 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday; 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Tuesday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday; noon-5 p.m. Sunday.
How much: Discretionary admission: $6, $3 for students, seniors, children. Free on Tuesday
