Lyle
Rexer Review
Alyssia
Lazin: Seeing and Seeing With
Almost from the beginning, there was a tug of war going on in
photography, and inside photographers themselves. One side said:
the world captured is enough. What is more fascinating than seeing
things rendered as they are? The other side said: things as they
are are never as they are, but transformed as we look, into memories,
feelings, dreams and desires. How do things look when also felt?
To describe or express – which is the greater truth?
Alyssia Lazin’s photographs insist on both potentials. The
place, the moment, the physical situation of the artist is only
a jumping off point for images that are open-ended and suggestive,
elegant images that allow memory and association to take over
in the viewer. She indicates her intentions by the titles of her
series. First, Abstraction. Lazin deliberately restricts the visual
context of the photographic subjects in this series, providing
intriguing detail but withholding pictorial information that would
allow us to place ourselves and what we are looking at. She works
in a rich tradition here, of Edward Weston, Minor White, Aaron
Siskind and many others. Yes it’s a wall, or a stairway,
or the side of a church, but cropped to emphasize a texture or
an element, or seen in watery reflection. The goal is to move
us away from the particular to the general, without losing the
evocative textures and light of the real. To see something and
see with it. To renew sight, and perhaps re-enchant the world.
Reflection, the next series, adds a deliberate level of metaphor.
Here nothing is seen simply or directly. Every image combines
at least two views, sometimes more. Perhaps because their own
technology has until recently involved mirrors (inside the camera),
photographers can’t stay away from mirror imagery. Such
images comment on the mediated character of any photograph, how
it cannot be taken simply as a faithful rendering of a neutral
reality but must always be approached as a double of the photographer’s
vision. In Lazin’s case the caution is more of a celebration,
and a summons for the viewer to reflect on what appears in the
image. We recognize that the process of seeing is active, adding
another level to the image, a layer of reflection that cannot
be seen – that of our imagination.
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Which brings us to the third and decisive series, Transformation.
In these images, the photographer no longer has to guide us, no
longer seeks to open our vision by complicating our sight and surprising
our expectations. Here things are shown directly and we are asked
to engage them as a kind of oracle, as what they are and yet more.
The images have a character: they often describe places, objects
and people (rare in Lazin’s work) in states of transition
– decaying walls in a ruined house, a man standing on a dock,
a piano covered with dust in a nearly empty room. It makes sense
that such work would come out of Italy, where the artist lives,
for Italy is a country whose modernity can never be more than half
finished, so burdened is it by its own monuments, its own picturesqueness.
Its transformation is always in progress and always looks like decay.
But
we are not talking about is a world in transformation but something
else: artist and audience in transformation. The practice of making
art has re-presented the world to Lazin with the injunction to see
it as extraordinary. To be a photographer is to allow the world
to give you a gift, and to learn how to pass that on to others.
Yet the artist does not merely point but frame and in framing, transform:
transience into permanence, instants into eternities, experiences
into memories, images into symbols. No wonder, then that in this
series, references to art and the artist’s process proliferate.
Those transformations are confirmed and heightened by the surface
of the print, on paper appropriate to gouache. Is it a work of the
eye or the hand? Of observation or imagination? Of digital technology
or primordial impulse?
Is it, after all, really only a photograph?
Lyle Rexer
Art Critic, curator and author of numerous books and essays on
photography and art, Brooklyn NY
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