Teenage Kicks at the Houston Center for Photography

Teenagers are everywhere recently. At CAMH, where their art impressed me mightily. In Rania Matar's photos at De Santos Gallery, which got praise from Dean Liscum. Now Matar is part of a group show at the Houston Center for Photography called Teenagers: Portraits of Identity and Expression. This show has a bit more of an edge than Matar's solo show. Some of the work, including Matar's, is political. Some is unnerving. Don't mistake me--the work isn't shocking or transgressive. This is not a Larry Clark show. But the viewers aren't meant to be completely comfortable with the images.


Matar specializes in photographing teenage girls in their rooms. In this selection of eight photos, four of them are girls in the Middle East (Beruit and Jerusalem) and four are girls in New England. There is not enough information to draw conclusions (not to mention the small sample size). Some of the Middle Eastern girls seem fairly prosperous. But the biggest difference is how much stuff there is in the American girl's rooms, especially on the walls. This contrasts mightily with the most affecting image, Marwa 18, Shatila refugee camp, Beirut Lebanon 2010.



Rania Matar, Marwa 18, Shatila refugee camp, Beirut Lebanon 2010 from the series A Girl and Her Room, Archival inkjet print

She has a computer, but otherwise her room is so barren. This may reflect her status as a refugee women (probably born there--Shatila has been a refugee camp since 1949). The room has two beds, extremely close to one another. She may have a roommate (a sibling?). She is casual, connected to the world with her computer. But her room looks like prison cell--a rather feminine cell with pink walls and teddy bears. The American teenagers, in contrast, have a horror vacui. They tend to cover as much of their walls as they can.


Rania Matar, Helen Mei 18, Boston 2010 from the series A Girl and Her Room, archival inkjet print 

But putting lots of stuff on the walls isn't an exclusively American thing. Natan Dvir also photographed Middle Eastern teenagers, specifically Arab teenagers in Israel.


Natan Dvir, Dina (Jaffa, Jewish-Muslim) from the series Eighteen , Chromogenic print, 2010


With each of his portraits, he provides a detailed biographical statement from the subject. Dina writes:

I was born in Ukraine to a Jewish Russian mother and a Muslim Israeli father who met in medical school. I moved to Israel with my family at the age of five. My family lives in Taibe, a Muslim city in the triangle area that is heavily populated by Arabs. I didn't really like living there and felt oppressed as a woman in that culture. My mother could not work as a doctor and had to open up a boutique for brides. Boys and girls remain separated. There are hardly any places to go out. I was able to hang out with my friends only at our homes or in Jewish cities.


I joined the Communist Youth Movement, but everyone was always trying to prevent me from organizing activities. My parents encouraged me to leave Taibe and find a place where I felt more comfortable socially and professionally. I am now living in Jaffa in a collective of Arab and Jewish human rights activists and volunteer in various organizations.


I don't really care if I live with Arabs or Jews. I guess I kind of did that all my life anyhow. I appreciate people for who they are and have little regard for that kind of categorization. I am both jewish and Muslim; both Russian and Israeli. I can't be defined any way that makes you feel comfortable, but if you ask me, I would prefer not to be called any of the above.--I am a human rights activist.

But like an American teenager, she has a lot of stuff on the wall. We see images of Che Guevara above her, and a grouping of disparate images to her left.



Natan Dvir, Dina (Jaffa, Jewish-Muslim) From the series Eighteen (detail) , Chromogenic print, 2010

 We see fashion photos and a still from Amelie alongside a pointed Egyptian political cartoon. Her wall is her biography.


Natan Dvir, Ehab (Be'ine, Muslim) from the series Eighteen, Chromogenic print, 2009

Ehab's story is that of a soccer-mad Arab boy whose opportunities for playing at a high level are frustrated by politics. But his ambition shines through in both the text and in his defiant stance.



Alison Malone, Marshall, Age 14, PA from the series The Daughters of Job, Chromogenic print, 2008


These were the weirdest photos of the show. Alison Malone was a member of a Masonic organization for girls called Job's Daughters. She returned to the organization as an adult to photograph its members and record it as it slowly dies out (membership peaked in the 1970s). My first reaction was that this was some cult-like thing, but reading about the organization and hearing Malone's account of her project gave me a different perspective. (You can hear Malone describe her project by dialing 713-300-9919 ext. 5.) She sees Job's Daughters as one of the first groups that a girl joins on her own (as opposed to being in her parents' church or going to school), and training for adulthood in that the groups are self-organizing (although on a rigid pattern, as in all Masonic organizations). Perhaps Job's Daughters is dying out because all old-school voluntary organizations like the Masons are dying out (see Bowling Alone). 



Alison Malone, Fourth Messenger, Age 15, MN from the series The Daughters of Job, Chromogenic print, 2008


Malone also spoke of being attracted to the costumes and the ritual and the role-playing that went with being a Daughter of Job. The costumes are what is striking in the photos. I wonder if taking these photos and displaying them might not give Job's Daughters a boost? Or does membership in Job's Daughters depend on having an adult Mason sponsor you?


All the photos from this exhibit can be seen online, but it's worth going to the HCP to see the large, vivid prints--and in the case of Natan Dvir's photos, to read the statements by the subjects.





 

Totally Real Live Girls on Richmond

by Dean Liscum. All images courtesy of Rania Matar and De Santos Gallery website

"Can I take your picture?"

It's an ostensibly innocent question...until you put it in context. Then the age and social position of the photographer and the photographed come into play. Then the location becomes important, the other subjects and observers even more so. Realize the relationship (parent-child, adult-teenager, moneymaker-moneytaker, etc.) and the power dynamic becomes paramount. As a photographer, you're an amateur but you know about light, composition, and perspective and how to meet or at least mitigate the photographic challenges presented by the situation. But for the life of you, you can't get that stupid expression off of the face of the subject.

"Relax," you say as if it's simple magic, as if even after 30-plus years of psychoanalysis that word doesn't still put you on edge.
"Don't smile."
"You just told me to smile."
"Not like that...Now don't frown. And don't raise your left eyebrow or curl your lip like your uncle."
"Because he's in prison?"
"Because it doesn't look attractive on you."
"His facial expression when he used to kick your ass at ever game you ever played or the specter of prison?"
"Just don't smile or look into the camera."
"Anything else."
"Could you stand better and not flare your nostrils."
"This is how I stand."
"For posterity's sake."
"Who's that? Someone else who used to intimidate you?"
"How about I just take a couple random shots and you show me how to use Photoshop?"

Chances are if your thumbs aren't your most dexterous digits and your entire life isn't encapsulated in binary code in "the cloud", you've faced this challenge many times. If so, you will love the photographs in "A Girl and her Room" by Rania Matar at De Santos Gallery.

The show is nothing more than it advertises: pictures of girls (mostly Americans) between the ages of 16 and 21 in their rooms. In our reality obsessed, live 24 x 7 culture, that sounds pretty unremarkable, so two-seasons ago. It would be if televised "reality" was authentic. Yet, like butt implants or Botox smiles, it only appears so at first glance.

Matar is an excellent photographer as her website attests. She's a professional. She's a teacher. Of course, the technical aspects of these shots are of the highest quality. But their allure lies neither in their formal composition nor their post-production values. The power of this show lies in its authenticity.

These aren't drama shots. No one's being harmed or violated or confronted or molested. No one's being prompted or provoked. The subjects are simply "being" in their own personal sanctuaries, in their locus of control, in their rooms.

The images feel like Matar and the subject are having a conversation. Randomly, Matar asks, "can I take your picture?" The subject looks away for an instant, then says "sure," and continues the conversation. It's this level of casual intimacy that makes these pictures so radiant. For me, it's where the genius of this exhibit lies. These images are much more revealing than the celebrity portraits (some would say costume farces) that made Annie Leibovitz's career. These images cut through the drama (of Leibovitz and Reality TV) and get to what I suspect both are after, totally real live people. 

Matar captures these young women in the chrysalis of their rooms. (True, the butterfly metaphor is trite and hackneyed and the self-actualizing, bad-ass adolescent women of today resemble the praying mantis more than Monarch pupa. But mantises molt, and the metaphor falls flat.) It's Matar's ability to gain access to this inner sanctum--physically, emotionally, psychologically--that's makes these images' power possible.

In some pictures, the subject is physically surround on one side by toys of childhood (stuffed animals) and on the other side the tools of adulthood (make up and images of models, actors, singers, and sports figures). 

In others, the subject's shyness or complete comfort allows you the viewer through Matar's indirect gaze to see a perspective you might never be allowed to see or might fail to pay attention to if you were. The challenge is not to construct a narrative from the photographic evidence before you but rather to absorb the complexities of the one laid bare.

Matar's website has a quote from Constantine Manos of Magnum Photos that attests that her photographs aren't political. Don't believe it. They are political with a small "p". Her photographs shed light on the beautiful, the ugly, the routine aspects of life that hint at why we endure the burlesque that is politics with a capital "P".

The images included in this review are just a sample of what's at De Santos Gallery. Drag a surly, uncooperative adolescent to see the photos. Afterwards, you'll view both of them in a different light.