Installation view of “Still Life with Fish” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Don’t let the title of this show fool you: there are not many photographs of fish in Still Life with Fish at the Hammer Museum. This exhibition of West Coast photography offers a comprehensive look at conceptual photography from the 1960s to the present. Drawn from the Hammer’s permanent collection and the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Still Life with Fish offers little-to-no surprises, but that’s not a bad thing.
Collier Schorr, “Die Zwei (Spring Break) (C)”, 1995-97 (detail). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Gift of Patrick Painter and Soo Jin Jeong-Painter. © Collier Schorr, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.
The name of this show is taken from a 1982 series of photographs by Jo Ann Callis. In the images, she photographs a table, a bowl of liquid, slides of bread, and a plate of sardines. One wonders if the show itself is conceptually dry, or was that just the nature of photography at that time? Or could it be a little bit of both. Another photograph by Callis called “Salt and Pepper and Fire” casts dramatic lighting on salt and pepper shakers and a cup of coffee against a plate of something that’s on fire. There are many layers to this show, though the inspiration for its title is rather mundane.
Jo Ann Callis, “Salt, Pepper, Fire”, 1980. UCLA Grunwald Center of the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum. Gift of the artist.
Another one of the artists in this show is Amy Adler who lives in L.A. and currently works at UC-San Diego. She takes boyhood as her subject matter in the series Problem Child, which she created in the mid-90s. In six silver gelatin prints, she captures a (white) boy in various states of being, such as standing somewhere shirtless while balancing cups on his nose, eyeing a collection of marbles, being a good little drummer boy, and playing with a model train. All but one of the boyhood images capture him a state of concentration, deep in his inner world.
Also: Giorgio Andreotta Calò and His Venetian-Californian Dream
Lewis Baltz’s stark photographs, on the other hand, capture the bleakness of the industrial landscape of Southern California in the mid-1970s. Baltz was known for his role in the New Topographics movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which departed from more traditional takes on the American landscape (e.g. the Hudson Valley school), instead capturing this great land of ours in a stripped down, minimalist view.
In a completely different room of the exhibition, recent MacArthur fellow Uta Barth captures the interior landscape of home and memory in her photographs “Ground #63” and “Ground #66”, both minimalist shots of interiors bathed in a sort of blurry/warm inviting glow. They are part of a series called Ground which was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art LA back in the mid-90s.
Amy Adler, from the Problem Child series
Another type of L.A. drama plays out in artist Eileen Cowin’s cheeky photograph “Untitled” (part of the Family Docudrama Series), 1983. Here, the artist stages an emotionally heightened yet not-at-all-believable moment from a possible fake TV show, bringing viewers into this place between fiction and reality. If reality is one’s own fiction, however, who’s to say what’s “real”?
Early photographs by Catherine Opie also make an appearance, including two self-portraits of her as a young, confident queer woman in the 1970s; in one photo, she is flexing her arms, and in another she’s gazing back at the camera, as if to say: “Look at me, I am here.”
This survey photography exhibition doesn’t leave many stones unturned. Still Life with Fish offers a great run-through of many West Coast artists working in photography, but like any show of this nature, we can be sure that someone was left out. Still, what’s on view is a nice snapshot of West Coast artists to be familiar with.
