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On Their Own
John Haberin New York City
Photography, the Kornblum Collection, and Close Enough
Entering the Helen is like stepping into a privileged enclave. A century of women photographers lies behind a partition at the Museum of Modern Art.
As "Our Selves" in the plural, they may deny outright anything so self-involved and exclusive as "ourselves." They create a space to themselves all the same, and so do the women at the International Center of Photography, in "Close Enough." There, too, I had entered private, even forbidden territory. At the very least, I had come close enough. Yet the twelve woman and three generations of Magnum Photos would not let me stand apart. Could that be what makes them photojournalists? 
Justine Kurland captures an enclave right on the way into "Our Selves." Introductory text to its side never so much as hints at her photograph, as if it were too good to share with others. Kurland shows half a dozen bathers in 1998, swimming apart in a broad, muddy lake or on spots of land like forbidden islands. No men need apply. What, though, does it mean to be girls and women on their own? The remaining photos lie behind, facing in toward one another and daring one to ask.
Stepping around the barrier is like stepping behind a curtain, and who knows what it might reveal? A single room has space for eighty works, because many hang in clusters, salon style, and so it is for eleven photographs on the partition's back. Match them to the grouped labels at your peril. A self-portrait by Alma Lavenson from 1932 shows only her hands cupped around her lens. I am a camera, it seems to say, but nothing else that you should know. Still, they are a gesture expressive of more.
If they are also a mask where one might expect a face, the cluster consists entirely of faces, hands, and masks. It might be a mask of lowered eyes for Margrethe Mather, of woven shadows for Gertrud Arndt, or of a stage role, like that of a dancer for Lotte Jacobi. It might be sheer color hardening a woman's clothing and skin for Lorie Nova and Rosemarie Trockel. It might be hands and faces working together in a cryptic sign language for Claude Cahun. In each case, it is what Tatiana Parcero calls Interior Cartography. There will be physical masks yet to come, but not to hide the gestures and marks of a woman.
Gestures, artifice, and masks
The exhibition breaks with the floor as whole, otherwise reserved for works from MoMA itself up to 1940. Still, it connects to a renewed attention to permanent holdings, including the "Skylight Project" at the Met and a rehanging of American art in Brooklyn. It comes to MoMA as a gift, and it builds on the 2021 "fall reveal" with its stress on film and video. It also follows a broader survey of women photographers at the Met. That show made them a microcosm of the past century, from fashion photography to photojournalism and beyond. It took them out from behind the camera, as "The New Woman."
That must seem a long way from gestures, artifice, and masks. Where the Met saw the new woman and the "modern look" as the embodiment of modernity, MoMA sees modernity and gender as contested ground. What does it mean to be on one's own? Is it, as for Justine Kurland, nudity and nature—both of them traditionally identified with femininity? When Carrie Mae Weems shows a mother and daughter in 1990, at a bare kitchen table with their make-up, is this female bonding, indoctrination into gender roles, or an interrogation chamber? Barbara Probst photographs two women in a New York alley in 2010, from a distance and in close-up, which brings them physically closer but emotionally further apart.
It is an affecting portrait all the same, in a show that does its best to keep the male gaze out. It leaves men largely behind after catcalls in Florence and a boy telling stories, in postwar photos by Ruth Orkin. Besides, sure enough, the boy does much of his storytelling with his hands. Photogravures by Lorna Simpson contain labels for female attributes, but she has chosen them for the apparent disconnect. She shows only hands, too. The show's largest grouping does indeed concern masks and mannequins, including a creepy array of smiles from Marie Cosindas, a puppet show of police from Tina Modotti, a look of longing from Dora Maar, and a lottery vendor from Inge Morath at siesta with a newspaper over her eyes.
Orkin comes right after the partition, in a group of faces alone. They include iconic Depression-era woman from Dorothea Lange, Nell Dorr, and Margaret Bourke-White, but also photos from as late as the 1980s by Anne Noggle and Mary Ellen Mark—and who would dare tell them apart? Personal histories, they seem to say, trump photojournalism, and they are what constitutes a woman. They may not trump politics but rather enable it. The very next photo, by Susan Meiselas in 1978, shows a traditional Nicaraguan mask as a strategy for insurrection. When the show ends with photographs of dance and performance, it has come full circle.
As curators, Roxana Marcoci with Dana Ostrander and Caitlin Ryan are duly devoted to contemporary art and its "Inheritance"—including a Native American in full regalia from Cara Romero and a trans portrait by Catherine Opie. Yet the need for disguises and personal histories precludes a simple lecture. Amanda Ross-Ho prints her portraits in invisible ink. Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie appears "Aztec style" but on TV. When border people for Tracey Moffatt look at the sky, who knows what they are seeing? You may or may not notice that a classroom in the segregation era from Frances Benjamin Johnston is all white.
This is not a conventional history, in chronological order, but it is not altogether a new history. "My work," says Weems, "endlessly explodes the limits of tradition," but can MoMA? Johnston's penmanship class in 1899 leads to a typically grand old-world library from Candida Höfer. Nature turns up again only in still life, like cornstalks for Barbara Morgan, and as a step toward abstraction. They are "arty," and they show art and artifice as a process of discovery, fruitful but tense. It will be a long time before a woman for Sharon Lockhart completes her jigsaw puzzle.
Closing in
I was closing in at "Close Enough," even as the world had closed in so uncomfortably on so many places and so many lives. Susan Meiselas sought out victims of abuse in the Midlands, in the UK. Have they finally found, in her play on a classic of women's literature by Virginia Woolf, "A Room of Their Own"? Perhaps, but one sees only unmade beds and empty rooms. Could a "gentlemen's club" paying for sex be among the abusers? In the text accompanying photos by Cristina de Middel, the men sound eager to speak but no more comfortable in what they say.
Carolyn Drake enters a Knit Club practicing its Southern Gothic arts, but one may remember only the plaster covering one face or the folk art hiding another. For Olivia Arthur, a child's face has the pallor of a mask. Lua Ribeira catches up with "tap and drill dancers," but for her their ecstatic release is only The Agony in the Garden. Lebanon has seen its share of traumas, from civil war to a port explosion, and stolen pleasures, like a lesbian kiss, and Myriam Boulos takes them personally. She sees her photos as an "answer to my failures." Still, she can enter an abandoned theater for the plush red seats once buried in darkness—and for the graffiti hearts and semblance of blood that someone once claimed as her own.
The photographers, all of them women, may stick to what they know so very well. Bieke Depoorter follows a club performer to Paris, Athens, and Beirut, with Agata's poetry as a guide. She can go far, but some things "you are too tired to fix." Newsha Tavakolian has accompanied two cousins in Iran for twenty-four years, for short glances of precious smells and passing joys. Others turn to strangers, although strangers may not remain so. When Hannah Price stops black Americans on the streets of Philadelphia for "prolonged encounters," she could be speaking for the entire show.
Is it because they are journalists or because they are women? They belong to Magnum Photos, a pioneer of photojournalism, but the emphasis is on the present. You may think of the agency, if at all, as a thing of the past. You may know only its fabled history, like that of Robert Capa in the Spanish Civil War, also on view, or an earlier survey of Magnum at ICP. The show owes its title to Capa as well, but he, too, speaks to the present. "If your photographs aren't good enough," he said, "you're not close enough."
How close, though, can you get, and what is photojournalism anyway? Does it demand objectivity, from the photographer or the camera, with a cool distance amid the turmoil of breaking news? Or does it touch the lives caught up in events, for the news behind the news? Capa cared about both. He made no secret what brought him to Spain, to the front lines and behind the lines, and whose republic was at stake. The curator, Charlotte Cotton, comes down on the side of human stories, but intimacy, too, has its unresolved or unhappy endings.
An ingenious layout takes one further behind the scenes, in all their variety. One might have entered the room with Meiselas for her photos high on a wall—or come ever so close to Drake's, hung tightly at staggered heights. Sabiha Çimen covers the folding screens of an Arab woman's private quarters, Nanna Heitmann in Ukraine a folding book. Alessandra Sanguinetti in Argentina slows to the pace of video, but you may remember only steam rising from a highway or eyes on the brink of tears. Is it all For the Sake of Calmness? Once again, close enough.
The Helen Kornblum collection ran at The Museum of Modern Art through October 2, 2022, "Close Enough" at the International Center of Photography through January 9, 2023. Related reviews look at twentieth-century women photographers at the Met and recent photography by women.