![A color photograph of a piebald brown and white pigeon in midflight against a field of pale blue.](https://www.icaboston.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ethridgeuntitledbirdhr.jpg)
Roe Ethridge, Untitled, 2002. Chromogenic color print, 40 x 50 inches (101.6 x 127 cm). Acquired through the generosity of Niki Friedberg. © Roe Ethridge
Roe Ethridge’s work interrogates the relationship between commercial and fine art photography to reveal a shared language. He is celebrated for subtly manipulating banal subjects—from rotting oranges to suburban families—to heighten their intrinsic drama.
Untitled is part of a series of images of pigeons that Ethridge began in 2000. Using a high-speed flash, he captures the bird mid-flight. Connected to the history of photography, specifically the photographic experiments investigating animals’ motion conducted by Étienne Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, Ethridge’s series appears to monumentalize and eternalize an ordinary urban animal. The pigeon depicted, however, is no ordinary bird, but a trained “extra” rented from Universal Studios, set against a studio backdrop that mimics the blue of the sky.
Untitled joins other works in the ICA/Boston collection by this prominent contemporary photographer, whose work was featured in a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005, offering an opportunity to showcase its breadth and diversity.
2008.2
Roe Ethridge is both a commercial photographer and a conceptually driven fine art photographer, and he uses each side of his practice to nourish the other. His photographic work displays the extremely high polish and sharp clarity of the print technology available for promotional photography today, yet his handsomely rendered views of people, places, and animals come across as things that are as alien as they are familiar.
County Line Meadowmere Park, one of sixteen photographs included in Ethridge’s solo exhibition at the ICA/Boston in 2005, is from the series County Line, which records views of a quiet ocean-side community located on the Nassau County line in Queens, New York. As this photograph demonstrates, though the artist uses a particular location as a touchstone for this series, he balances specificity with generalization. This handsome view of boats, water, and foliage topped by a generous swath of blue sky and puffy clouds is reminiscent of a classic Dutch landscape, but it is edged with signs of contemporary life, such as the boats’ instrumentation and engines. Duality is further marked by the sky’s subtle shift in tone near the center of the image––Ethridge’s wry reference to the county line marked by the waterway shown. In these seductive images, dividing lines that are present but not fully visible keep the viewer at a certain distance.
The addition of County Line Meadowmere Park to the ICA/Boston collection complements existing holdings of photographic works by Ethridge and other seminal contemporary photographers, including Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Rineke Dijkstra.
2007.6
Since 2001, when the ICA/Boston organized one of her first solo museum shows in the United States, Rineke Dijkstra has become known for her incisively direct photographic and video portraits of individuals in the midst of change. Through series like The Bathers, showing awkward adolescents in swimsuits, New Mothers, documenting women minutes after giving birth, and others recording military recruits on their first day of induction and child refugees newly displaced, she exposes subjects at moments that capture the poignancy of their transition and transformation. To suggest both the self-conscious and the unconscious self, Dijkstra concentrates on gazes, poses, and gestures that project an uncertain mix of confidence and vulnerability.
Exemplifying Dijkstra’s subtly revealing portraiture, Odessa, Ukraine, August 11, 1993 presents a young boy in shorts and sandals who clutches two unclothed dolls to his bare chest. Standing in front of an urban stone wall, he is smeared and dusted with street dirt, his tan skin offset by the dolls’ pale pink bodies: their pert plastic smiles and bright eyes call attention to his comparatively stone-faced expression. Juxtaposing the childhood joy implied by the toys with a premature resignation glimpsed in her subject, Dijkstra hints at the fragility of hope, the fleetingness of youth, and an innocence soon to be lost.
Odessa, Ukraine, August 11, 1993 is an early work by Dijkstra that joins a number of other photographs in the ICA/Boston collection, rounding out the museum’s holdings of this seminal contemporary photographer’s work.
2013.05
Philip-Lorca diCorcia has been acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential photographers of the past thirty years. Often labeled a member of the so-called Boston School (he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with David Armstrong and Nan Goldin), he has created a highly individual and influential body of work that spans documentary photography and staged tableaux linked to postmodern image construction. Known for their taut cinematic quality, his photographs build on the tension between fact and fiction, and stillness and flux, to picture the uncertainty, even contingency, of life on the threshold.
Ralph Smith; 21 years old; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; $25 exemplifies diCorcia’s subtle yet incisive reflection on the currencies of fantasy and desire. With grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts, diCorcia made multiple trips to Los Angeles, where he scouted locations, staged scenarios, and located male prostitutes on Santa Monica Boulevard who agreed to pose for his camera for the same fee they would receive for their more typical service. As curator Bennett Simpson writes, the image shows “a movie-star handsome man seated on a patch of grass in front of a Del Taco drive-through sign. It is night, and the man appears to be waiting, possibly bored or deep in thought. In a sense he blends in perfectly with his surroundings: an advertisement for some fantasy, a product for sale, another fragment in L.A.’s landscape of come-ons. Even as car lights smear by in darkness, the man’s face—like the fast-food sign—remains perfectly still, a figure of desire raised out of its moment to stand for a more universal instability.”
The ICA/Boston collection includes numerous works by Boston School photographers, and the addition of this print enriches the museum’s capacity to tell the history of Boston art and artists. Furthermore, this work offers a bridge between the controlled approach of diCorcia’s early work and the flux and spontaneity of his later Streetwork series (represented in the ICA collection by Igor, 1987, and London, 1995). A major survey exhibition of diCorcia’s career was held at the ICA in 2007.
2007.5
2013.04
Philip-Lorca diCorcia has been acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential photographers of the past thirty years. Often labeled a member of the so-called “Boston School” (he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with David Armstrong and Nan Goldin), he has created a highly individual and influential body of work that spans documentary photography and staged tableaux linked to postmodern image construction. Known for their taut cinematic quality, his photographs build on the tension between fact and fiction, stillness and flux, to picture the uncertainty, even contingency, of life on the threshold.
Igor is a classic image from an important transitional moment in diCorcia’s career, when he shifted from highly constructed interior tableaux to exterior street photography. It depicts a man on the New York subway, holding a goldfish in a water-filled plastic bag. Like many of diCorcia’s figures, the man appears motionless, lost in thought; one is not sure if he has been posed or found by the artist. A contrast between the speed of the subway and the blank stillness of the man’s body and face lends the image a psychological quality—as if he, like the fish in his bag, were trapped in a larger, hurtling world around him.
The ICA/Boston collection includes numerous works by Boston school photographers, and the addition of this print enriches the museum’s capacity to tell the history of Boston art and artists. Furthermore, this work offers a bridge between the controlled approach of diCorcia’s early work and the flux and spontaneity of his later Streetwork series (represented in the museum’s collection by Igor, 1987, and London, 1995). A major survey exhibition of diCorcia’s career was held at the ICA in 2007.
2013.03
In her studio-based photographic practice, Anne Collier brings the objective approach of technical and advertising photography to emotional and psychological subject matter drawn from books, posters, or magazines. As Collier explains, for her the studio is “both a framing device and … a ‘stage’ for various kinds of photographic tableaux.” Many of her photographs are shot with a rostrum setup that allows her to capture static objects from above. The technical requirements of this process—to avoid distortion, the body of the camera and the object being photographed must be perfectly parallel—give her photographs an exaggerated sense of flatness.
The series Open Book presents photographic tableaux of anonymous hands holding open books of photographs against a white background. In Open Book #3 (Island Wilderness), endpapers show a serene ocean view, the image reminiscent of a stock photograph that might be used for calendars or postcards. The crease at the book’s spine and the volume of its underlying pages slightly misalign the seascape. Viewers are acutely aware of looking at an image of someone looking at an image. As Collier comments, “there is a kind of doubling at play, where the real subject of the work is the activity of looking.” Playfully voyeuristic, the photograph also highlights the unbridgeable distance created by representation.
Anne Collier’s Open Book #3 (Island Wilderness) introduces a new artist to the ICA/Boston collection and augments the museum’s strong photography holdings, joining works by artists such as Leslie Hewitt, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, and Sara VanDerBeek who also use found and stock imagery in their work.
2016.11
Noriko Furunishi is known for her otherworldly depictions of deserts, mountains, ridges, and riverbeds through a combination of traditional and digital photographic techniques. Many of her photographs have vertical formats and layered compositions and recall traditional Japanese and Chinese landscape painting. Rather than provide a fixed point of view, Furunishi’s work invites the viewer’s eye to wander across the photograph, allowing the photographic image to freely recede and advance.
Furunishi took the source photographs for Untitled (Grey Dry Stream) near Death Valley, California, using a 4 x 5 viewfinder camera; she photographed several different locations, each from multiple angles and positions. She then scanned these negatives into a computer, using the digital files to compose and collage multiple views. With digital technology, the landscape becomes a flexible medium that Furinishi can manipulate at will—eliminating details, adding others, mixing perspectives, and even blending different locations or times of day. Nature’s vibrant colors and varied textures are the raw materials she uses to create her compositions. Untitled (Grey Dry Stream) presents a disorienting, dreamlike view of the world. It hints at terrain or topography we may have visited or seen in a photograph; at the same time, it moves beyond this familiarity and suggests another dimension beyond our sight or time. The photograph is part of her Landscapes series, in which space and earth are warped, twisted, and distorted, confounding viewers’ points of view.
Untitled (Grey Dry Stream) adds to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photography, joining works by Catherine Opie, Richard Prince, and Shannon Ebner that also reinterpret the landscape in powerful ways.
2017.24
Nan Goldin is known for candid photographs that capture intimate moments in the lives of her friends and family. When she visited Tokyo in 1992, however, she was struck by the beauty of the city and people and for the first time photographed strangers on the street: “I sensed change in the air, things boiling up from underground, people coming out, and women emerging with new attitudes.” She returned to Tokyo in 1994 to work alongside her Japanese counterpart, the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Together, they published an artists’ book of their photographs of Japanese youth, titled Tokyo Love. In the book, Goldin reflects on the similarities between her formative years in the US and the rebellious Japanese youth she encountered in Tokyo, and remarks, “I fell in love with face after face. What started as a documentary project emerged as a journey back into my own adolescence, a rebirth of innocence, a time before my community was plagued by AIDS and decimated by drug addiction, a return to the garden.”
Many of the images in the Tokyo Love series celebrate youthful energy and romance as well as the subjects’ evolving and fluid sexuality. Takaho After Kissing, Tokyo is a sexually charged portrait of a young man reclining on a leopard-print sofa wearing only white underwear and a fishnet scarf. Glancing sideways, he smiles widely, red lipstick smeared across his mouth, capturing the emotionally charged state “after kissing.”
Takaho After Kissing, Tokyo joins a number of works by Goldin in the collection and adds depth to photographic portraits by such artists as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Boris Mikhailov.
2010.2
2009.4