Slava Mogutin, J.Jackie Baier, Alex Da Corte, Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroek / Exactitudes,
Versus Collective (Gihan Tubbeh, Musuk Nolte, Renzo Giraldo)
"When you think we're lost, we're exploring, What you think is worthless, I'm adoring." - Robbie Williams
During the 2010 Berlin 'Europäische Monat der Fotografie,' art space "Kunstraum Richard Sorge" is the setting for a photography exhibition that maps the complex area between empathy and exploitation, identification and voyeurism.
According to the Urban Dictionary, "streeple" denominates street people. The show's photographers mainly view their subjects as protagonists, not models; they are chosen and documented for what they are, and not brought to play any kind of role. Photographed (or casted) in the streets, they (and we, the viewers) are made aware of their specialness.
Placed at the center of attention, the protagonists are drawn into a dialog with the photographer based on the gradual development of trust. At best, this process leads to empowerment: "claiming the right to a face," as photographer J.Jackie Baier puts it, of street kids, the homeless, prostitutes, hustlers, gangs, addicts, transsexuals and others living on the fringes of society, and beyond. This complicity is described by the Versus Collective as a willingness to be there forever, beyond the moment catched; for not remaining indifferent; a state of permanent caution to these omnipresent situations we often forget.
While the subject's integrity is important, streaks of mischief run through works like the Exactitudes, tough self-images are being pierced, as they are in Da Corte's Sessions with guys approached in public, where vulnerability and intimacy appear after days of photographing. Eschewing such ironies, Baier shares a sense of family, with her protagonists, which allows for a direct, intense and intimate rapport.
Some of the photographers mimic the capitalist market exchange ethos by paying their protagonists to play themselves, thus increasing their sense of self-esteem, and showing that there is posing involved in every photo, no matter how "straight-up".
Alex Da Corte has been noted to "reinvent and humanize the queer gaze," his Activities in his own words, 'break down ideas of fantasy, stereotypes, power roles and develop the idea of the other as someone not very different from the self.'
Versluis/Uyttenbroek also use mise-en-scene to make the real more truthful, adopting a way of working that is more a kind of staged realism than documentary. The self-image of their young protagonists is significantly shaped by cultural role models, studied poses, and unconsciously stored gestures. The duo is fascinated by the way in which young people occupy public space and by the poses they adopt. Such street poses/dress are ethnographically documented, researching the origins of self-presentation in an interconnected international youth-cultural "zone" ranging from LA, Rotterdam, Marseille to Bristol.
All participants in the exhibition are artist rather than photographer; their relation to the "photography business" is slight, or nonexistent.
Mogutin creates his photography work alongside his work as a prolific writer and visual artist.
Versluis/Uyttenbroek use photography in a highly conceptual way as a sociological tool.
The grainy work of Baier, who started her first series, Sexwork, almost accidentally, capturing her colleagues while working as a prostitute in a brothel, may just as well be described by comparisons to Impressionism as to documentary photography.
Da Corte makes his Activity series as a side project -one that is gaining epic proportions however- to his brilliant activities as a sculptor. As a sculptor he works with found objects, as a photographer he works with found people, Coolhunting noted.
By and large too unsparing, poetic or conceptual to be easily digestible as reportage photography, the full depth of the works of the Versus Collective photographers is best experienced in an art gallery setting.
Kunstraum Richard Sorge, Landsberger Allee 54, 10249 Berlin.
Oct. 17th - Nov. 13th 2010, Wednesday - Saturday, 2 - 6 pm.
Opening reception: Oct. 16th, 7 pm.
Closing reception: Nov. 13th , 7 pm.
Visit the Facebook event page.
Kindly supported by the Dutch Embassy.
