Art I'm Seeing #40

One of the shows that I went to the NGA to see was a collection of portrait photography by Robert Bergman. For nearly two decades, he's taken photos of the people he's encountered in the cities and forgotten places of America. They are all anonymous. They are all printed from his digital camera on an inkjet printer. And they are all utterly amazing.

There is a catalogue that can be purchased, but it's not just from this exhibition, although it seems to include all of the images found in this two-room show. Housed as all photography shows are at the National Gallery of Art in the basement of the West Building--like some dungeon or set of dark rooms. Yet this venue feels very appropriate. While none of the images is the least bit lurid, they are all so fucking intimate that you find yourself trapped by competing emotions. One is to avert your uninvited gaze and the other more powerful feeling is to move closer and to allow yourself to be absorbed into the soul of the person before you. Observing my fellow gallery mates I witnessed both extremes. I watched people giggle nervously and move quickly from image to image, skipping some completely, and I saw one young man sit and stare at the photo of little boy with such steely conviction as to create between them a space separate and wholly there own in our midst.

The catalogue contains no writing from the artist. His voice remains as anonymous as his images. It does, however, come with an introduction by Toni Morrison and an afterward by Meyer Shapiro. The introduction is worth the price of the catalogue as Ms. Morrison paints the image of an encounter with an anonymous woman that is as deep and rich and demanding of your engagement in the ideas that it births as are Mr. Bergman's images. And there is also a quote from Isabella Stewart Gardner, a turn of the 20th century Bostonian philanthropist and art collector who died in 1924 and who left that city a museum with her name upon it to house her amazing art collection. The name made me intensely curious as to the relevance of her thoughts in connection with these portraits. Here's her quote:

"If there is a theme with which I am particularly concerned, it is the contemporary failure of love. I don't mean romantic love or sexual passion, but the love which is the specific and particular recognition of one human being by another--the response by eye and voice and touch of two solitudes. The democracy of universal vulnerability." ~ Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1840-1924

So why did I choose this particular image to sum up the whole?--because no one image can or does. Two reasons: 1) The eyes. The eyes are so endemic of way the artist captures the soul of the subject. He time and again shows you the way our eyes are like galaxies of light spinning within the mystery of a dark universe. And 2), I thought he looked like Abraham Lincoln.