WINCHESTER — Collectors who collect randomly aren’t really collectors. They’re acquirers. Collecting, as an enterprise that’s more than just acquisition, requires a sensibility of some sort, and that sensibility lends a coherence to the collector works.
If that coherence is too coherent, the collection has a sameness that might please the collector but won’t do much for viewers of an exhibition of works drawn from it. Ideally, a collection is the visual equivalent of something in music, a theme and variations — the theme being the sensibility and the variations being the works of art.
Frazier King is a collector, not an acquirer, and his collection reflects a distinct — but not limiting — sensibility. There are more than 50 photographs in “The Collector’s Eye — Collection of Frazier King,” all drawn from his holdings. They include three photographs by King: He’s a practitioner as well as a collector. The show runs through Dec. 8 at the Griffin Museum of Photography.
King likes constructed photographs, the result of procedures ranging from in-camera assemblage to darkroom fiddling. Many of the results verge on abstraction or embrace it outright. When a photograph does explicitly engage with the external world, it stands out. That’s the case with the three examples here from Peter Brown’s “On the Plains” series. That said, if there’s ever a landscape that verges on abstraction, it’s the Texas Panhandle.
Those three photographs are in color, albeit of a fairly subdued sort. Chromaticism doesn’t seem to matter much to King. Only 13 of the photographs in the show are in color. So they, too, stand out. cqSuzette Bross’s “Blue Sky,” from her series “Commute: Trucks,” is a particularly vivid example (though note how much it resembles an abstract painting).
Nearly all of the works in the show are by contemporary photographers. There are also a few familiar names from the past: Jerry Uelsmann, Imogen Cunningham, Hiroshi Sugimoto (familiar but still very much alive and working), and André Kertész.. The Kertész is a famous one, cq“Satiric Dancer.” There’s nothing abstract or constructed about the sight of that woman happily curled up on that Parisian sofa.
Kertész took the photograph in 1926. Five years later, cqJo Sandman was born. “Jo Sandman: A Life in Art” is a fitting title. Sandman, Newton born and Brandeis educated, went on to study with Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, spend time at cqBlack Mountain College at the height of its avant-garde glory, and work for the architect Walter Gropius.
Sandman trained as a painter, and that background is evident in the 28 works in the show. Painting favors form over content as photography rarely does (Frazier King might demur), and the degree of formal variation here reflects Sandman’s background. There are photograms and darkroom prints as well as standard prints on paper. Painterliness really comes into play with the many examples of mixed media. There Sandman variously applies graphite, paint, gouache, and pastels. She also sometimes prints on acetate, Mylar, and aluminum.
If it’s true that any good collector needs to have a sensibility, then it’s really true of good artists. For all the formal diversity that’s on display, an unmistakable sensibility unites these images. Sandman’s work is chilly, detached, imaginative, spectral-spooky, more than a little otherworldly. As anyone who’s seen a print emerge in a darkroom can attest, an otherworldly quality is intrinsic to photography; and Sandman’s work very much evokes that otherworldliness.
Otherworldly is not the same as ephemeral. Sandman’s use of various processes implicitly emphasizes something about the medium that tends to get overlooked: that a photograph is itself an object. Thing-ness matters in the medium, and thing-ness has its place here, both as subject and object. It’s hard to imagine something thingier than a bicycle chain, the subject of a Sandman photograph. And then there are two sculptures, which are thingy even by sculptural standards: They’re automotive radiator hoses filled with plaster. So these are objects of extreme thinginess. The materials they’re made of also mean they’re very black and very white. Chances are they’d photograph very well.
On Nov. 16, Frazier King and Griffin director Crista Dix will participate in a discussion at the museum, followed by a book signing.
THE COLLECTOR’S EYE — Collection of Frazier King
JO SANDMAN: A Life in Art
At Griffin Museum of Photography, 67 Shore Road, Winchester, through Dec. 8. 781-729-1158, griffinmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].