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800.13.03

By blurring the line between documentary photography and portraiture, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs and videos address issues of propaganda, politics, and the importance of individual identity and agency. Over the course of the last decade, Frazier’s practice has manifested as an investigation of the social, economic, and environmental deterioration of her home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, experienced through the tangible and psychological effects of these circumstances on her immediate family. Once a center of the American steel belt, Braddock experienced a massive downturn following the recession of the 1980s, when many of the mills vital to the local economy were either closed or downsized. The resulting economic instability drove many to flee the region, causing urban blight and widespread underemployment. The residents that remained, including Frazier and her family, witnessed their community fall into disrepair.

Momme is one in a series of collaborations between Frazier and her mother. The title, a conjunction of “mom” and “me,” references both the collaborative nature of the project and the seemingly conjoined appearance of the sitters in the photograph. Frazier’s mother appears in the foreground, peering downward, her profile parallel with the frame; LaToya’s face is split by her mother’s profile as she looks out sternly toward the viewer. With both sitters dressed casually and sporting matching hairnets, the dual portrait highlights the similarities between two generations of women living through the travails of impoverished communities. However, the photograph also serves as a personal meditation on the relationship between mother and daughter—one that appears to be fraught with tension as well as mutual admiration.

Along with other works in the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of photography, including those by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Roe Ethridge, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Thomas Ruff, Momme examines the complexity of identity by referencing the tradition of portraiture.

2014.06

Since the early 1980s Willie Doherty has made photographs and video installations that meditate on the political Troubles in Northern Ireland. Having witnessed the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of unarmed nationalist civilians by British paratroopers, he began taking black-and-white photographs of his home town of Derry, with which he sought to counteract the images of political violence prevalent in the press. Doherty’s photographs and videos address issues surrounding the representation of landscape, territory, history, and the expression of identity. His work navigates the relationship between memory and subjectivity and presents them as sites of contestation and conflict. While Doherty’s work often focuses directly on the political impasse in Northern Ireland, he also makes work that is more metaphorical.

Factory III depicts an industrial yard filled with debris—segments of twisted metal pipes and broken fragments of wood—with the front of a dilapidated factory in the background. Cropped so only the yard, front windows, and roll top door of the factory are visible, the landscape gives off an eerie feeling that some sort of violence or devastation has taken place. As with many of Doherty’s works, Factory III stands as an archetypal scene of terrorism and political violence. The work activates universal emotions by playing off of the paranoia, anger, and desperation that rises to the surface when one encounters the detritus and broken windows of abandoned buildings. Yet the ambiguity of the photograph leaves the work open for multiple interpretations.

The addition of Factory III to the ICA/Boston’s collection expands the museum’s strong holdings in photography. Doherty’s work combines landscape photography with images that deal with terrorism and political violence. Alongside work in the collection by Paul Chan, Nan Goldin, and Mona Hatoum, Doherty’s Factory III will add to the diverse ways in which artists are dealing with issues of violence in their work.

2012.27

Willie Doherty has been a pioneer in contemporary photography since the 1980s. Born in Northern Ireland, the traumatic history of the region has been a major focus of his work. Doherty’s photographs explore post-conflict settings that suggest a troubled past, addressing issues of collective trauma, memory, and subjectivity. The scenes of isolated or abandoned places are often from his hometown of Derry, a city that was deeply divided by religious and political partisanship in the 1960s and ’70s.

Suspicious Vehicle depicts a red car that has been abandoned on the side of a darkened road. It is unclear if the vehicle was intentionally abandoned by its driver, whether the driver was taken from the car against their will, or if the car itself is a weapon. Regardless, through the combination of the title, darkness of night, and lack of human presence, the image conveys an unsettling scene that suggests some sort of unfortunate incident has (or will) occur.

The addition of Suspicious Vehicle to the ICA/Boston’s collection expands the museum’s strong holdings in photography, joining another photograph by Doherty (Factory III, 1994) as well as photographs by Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin that suggest a pregnant narrative moment.

2012.28

Tacita Dean’s explorations of the relationship between analogue media and the vicissitudes of time, history, and our natural world have made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Film, photography, and drawing form the foundation of her practice, and in each instance the chosen medium amplifies her themes. At its heart, Dean’s work is grounded in the material, temporal, and associative qualities of 16mm film. In poetic works that luxuriate in slowness, concentration, and the soft colors and tones of film stock, she approaches iconic architecture, portraits of artists for whom time and movement are critical components of their work (Merce Cunningham, for instance), and the manufacture of film stock itself. Interspersed with these occasionally monumental pieces (she pioneered an almost three-story film projection in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall) are lyrical series of photographs, drawings, and prints that mine the historical presentation of place and history.

Dean’s The Russian Ending is a series of prints that depict the aftermath of an unspecified disaster. Explosions, shipwrecks, funerals, despoiled landscapes, and ambiguous events are annotated by the artist, suggesting possible scenarios. The series takes its title and theme from a tradition in early twentieth-century film production in Denmark (then a major generator of films) in which alternate endings for films bound for U.S. or Russian markets were offered. While the U.S. received films with happy endings, Russia received films that ended in disaster—one conclusion for the land of Disney and an entirely different one for the land of Dostoyevsky. In Dean’s series, the effects of industry, mechanized labor, and war play are rendered in deep, atmospheric tones, underscoring their ambiguity and suggesting history’s inherent subjectivity. The wry title both conjures the last century’s forking path of shared experience for the U.S. and Russia, and announces the end of the Soviet Union.

The Russian Ending is in dialogue with many works in the ICA/Boston collection. It makes an intriguing pair with Boris Mikhailov’s sardonic, sometimes bleak depictions of Ukrainian citizens, but also connects with serial investigations into the subjectivity of identity by artists such as LaToya Ruby Frazier and Cindy Sherman. The representation of war, conflict, and trauma are recurring themes in the works in the collection, ranging from Doris Salcedo’s poetic sculpture to Trevor Paglen’s depictions of twenty-first-century war.

2015.34

Since the late 1970s, Sophie Calle has made work that explores the sphere of human relationships. Most closely associated with conceptual art, Calle employs provocative methods and a wide range of media, including books, photography, video, film, and performance, to investigate subjects such as identity and intimacy. She is well known for her voyeuristic and detective-like projects, which have featured others’, and, several times, her own, life  in its emotional and psychological dimensions. In her documentation and presentation of these performances, she often uses text and photography in ways that redefine notions of truth, fiction, and narrative.

The Doctor’s Daughter is a photograph from Calle’s larger project by of the same title that tells the story of a doctor’s daughter, a little girl named Sophie, who grows up to become a striptease artist. The black-and-white photograph print depicts a woman (presumably the character Sophie, who is played by Calle) lying on the floor on a bed of rumpled clothes and strewn belongings. Below the photograph is a text written in the first person recounting the subject’s work as a striptease artist, including a dramatic and violent encounter with a fellow stripper “on January 8, 1981” that led to her leaving the profession. The text functions as a caption, endowing the sexually charged and seedy scene with a degree of authenticity. Together, text and image construct the fictive protagonist who elides with the artist’s own biography.

This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photography, especially work by artists who examine identity, such as Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Catherine Opie.

2014.04

Brooklyn-based artist Erin Shirreff examines how memory and photography may affect our perceptions and experiences of viewing art. Using a vocabulary of modernist forms, Shirreff manipulates objects to create temporary assemblages that she photographs. The artist often further manipulates the printed photographs, bending, folding, or breaking apart the images to create novel artistic forms.

In A.P. (no. 9), Shirreff made tabletop-scale compositions that evoke mid-twentieth-century modernist sculptures. For this series, she references the outdoor geometric works of artist Tony Smith and reflects on the different experiences of interacting with Smith’s sculptures in situ and seeing them reproduced in print. A.P. (no. 9) is a photographic image of a maquette made of foam core and plaster. The artist used photo-editing software to slice the picture in half and rearrange the composition. “In a way I don’t think of A.P. works so much as photographs as much as I think of them as pictures of sculptures that don’t exist. They have a strange physicality, they are images of sculptures but then the images themselves have these sculptural components. The pictures are folded down the center to reference this notion of book binding” says Shirreff.

This piece is a unique addition to the ICA/Boston’s permanent collection, which includes numerous photographs, and joins a large sculptural work by Erin Shirreff titled Catalogue, 39 parts (Value Lessons), 2015.

800.14.02

Photographer Jimmy DeSana was part of a countercultural punk community of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village during the 1970s and ’80s. He made portraits of many important figures from that scene, including singers Debbie Harry and Billy Idol, as well as of his friends and lovers, who recur in his photographic work. He also played a definitive, though often under recognized role in the rise of photo-conceptualism in the 1980s—a genre that would question the very nature of photographic representation. DeSana specialized in staged tableaux where he photographed himself and others, usually naked and alone in color-saturated interiors. Striking unlikely poses with carefully chosen props, his body would oscillate androgynously and erotically between subject and object, person and fetish, enabling a visual association of the unconscious. Mediated through the lens of the camera, DeSana’s subjects, iconic and anonymous alike, become pliable forms that move within and among layers of culture and representation.

In Marker Cones, DeSana crouches laterally on all fours, his slender figure poised on inverted orange cones that cap his hands and feet. Photographed from behind, his body becomes a headless, unidentifiable creature comprised of triangles and parallelograms. The marker cones evoke a similar sexual indeterminacy, gendered feminine as makeshift stilettos and masculine as the detritus of roadside construction. Dramatic lighting cast his skin in a feverish and sexy glow. A glittering field of tinsel-like artificial grass adds to this surreal photographic composition.

This work is an important addition to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photography and art of the 1980s. Joining holdings of work by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Willie Doherty, and Roe Ethridge, Marker Cones adds to the debates surrounding photography and the idea of truth.

2013.06

2012.21

Richard Prince is one of the most influential American photographers of his time, having come of age during the 1970s and the heyday of appropriation. While the artist also creates paintings, sculpture, and installation, his photography has made the most lasting contribution to contemporary art history. By the early 1990s, Richard Prince and his iconic Marlboro Man images had become synonymous with the genre of appropriated photography and the problems of artistic authorship. During the mid to late ’90s, the artist moved from New York City to upstate New York, and his focus turned to more personal and immediate subject matter.

Upstate comes from a series Prince made to document an environment and lifestyle completely separate from the locus of the art world and excesses of New York City. These stark images of above-ground swimming pools, abandoned cars, and grassy fields highlight an isolated yet strikingly common vision of rural America. Prince finds moments of beauty in these overlooked and undervalued features of the landscape. For instance, the single-story, personal storage facility has a row of orange roll top doors—their serial quality evoking Minimalism—and sits within a bleak landscape. While Prince’s photos of his environs draw on a long history of photographers locating decisive scenes in unremarkable places (i.e., Walker Evans and William Eggleston), Prince’s focus on the rougher aspects of rural life distinguishes his work.

This work joins the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of photographs by artists such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, Thomas Ruff, and Collier Schorr. As an artist, Prince represents an important piece of the history of appropriation, bringing his work into conversation with that of Dara Birnbaum, Lorna Simpson, and Cindy Sherman.

2013.10