Photo Shows, Way Out West

SAN FRANCISCO: Who says senile is necessarily gross? Taking my first trip to San Francisco since I got my Medicare card, SamTrans 7F bus whizzed me from SFO to Timothy Pfleuger’s grand Transbay Terminal in a half hour—for two bits! There I hopped the MUNI 38 bus out to Richmond for 15 cents! And the MUNI gives you a free transfer with two hours’ worth of bopping around on two more buses.

Bay Area Rapid Transit sells senior a card for $1.60 that’s good for up to ten rides across the Bay. It used to cost me more than that just to get to the Oakland Museum.

The place was popping with delectable photo shows, beginning with a splendid look at Ansel Adams’ first book, Parmelian Prints, at (where else?) the Ansel Adams Center. What an odd name, I thought to myself. It seems that the publisher of these Ur-Sierra shots thought a book of photos wouldn’t sell, so Adams concocted the fake rubric from the Latin for Alpine lichen. The dear man anguished over this little peccadillo for years because it meant pretending about the art form he wanted to be entirely without pretense.

Next door was James Balog’s “Survivors.” For two years and 80,000 miles, Balog tracked down 233 animals from 96 species in danger of extinction and fabricated a new environment for each shoot. It’s a curiously successful deconstruction of falsely romanticized Nature photography.

By photographing these animals—not against a sunset, but against the visual grain, so to speak—he aims to “separate the truly priceless” from the meaningless. “One of the cherished illusions of our culture is that animals will always live contentedly in idyllic wildness.” For Balog, the “unspeakable tragedy is that our philosophical evolution will be too slow to save them all.”

But the real discovery for me was Michal Rovner’s suite of six images from Desert Storm called “Decoy” (through March 1). Until you ruminate over chief curator Andy Grundberg’s brilliant wall label, they appear to be just badly shot / framed war pictures. Not so fast.

Israeli artist Rovner “experienced” the Persian Gulf war in New York where, like everyone else, she glued herself to CNN’s tsunami of images. Grundberg explains that “her pictures are about the inadequacies of photographic information as well as what she calls the disparity between visual and emotional experience.

“To her, television hides more than it reveals; its images are, like a decoy, a form of visual deception. By freezing these images with a Polaroid camera, and refashioning them as large color prints, she hopes to reveal their fractures and falsehoods. She describes herself as ‘an artist interested in the limitations of what the eye can see’.”

Bingo. “Decoy” deflates all the self-deluding rhetoric about “standing tall,” about proving we’re still Number One (was there ever a more infantile ideology?), about purging the Vietnam Syndrome (when actually we put into practice what General Curtis LeMay merely threatened: “We’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age.”).

The over to SF / MOMA, understandably euphoric because they’re breaking ground in April for Mario Botta’s new Yerba Buena building. “Helen Levitt” (through March 15) displays a grand swatch of 50 years of that street shooter’s work. She loved kids playing.

In 1936, she bought a second-hand Leica and started cruising the New York streets, especially in the ethnically diverse sections of the city. I don’t relish Levitt’s later color work as much as I always have the black and white. Strangely, she seems now to be more interested in dignified older women sitting on their stoops. Watch for this marvelous retrospective when it plays New York’s Met (April 1-June 28).

Then over to Kevin Roche’s Oakland Museum (in my opinion, the best piece of museum architecture in the 20th Century) to relish the Peter Stackpole double show. The Hollywood stuff is satisfying enough. He was a marvelous schmoozer and could get a wide range of solipsistic stars to drop their pseudo-personae for his lens.

But the peak experience is his stuff on the Bay Area during the ‘30s and ‘40s. it had never clicked before that Peter was Ralph’s son, the premiere local sculptor of the era whose 80-foot “Pacifica” was the ikon of the 1939 World’s Fair on Treasure Island.

Peter sweet-talked his way onto the construction site of the Oakland Bay bridge (and later the Golden Gate—have two grander bridges ever been raised within two short years anywhere else in the world?), where the foreman was so shocked by his teenage chutzpah that he chewed him out—by telling him to come back with a hard hat next time! He could only afford 400 feet of film, but the enchanting movie in which he talks about those titanic creations reveals that he didn’t waste a frame in his scrupulous shooting.

Then I was off to Golden Gate Park to see “The Circle of Life: Pictures from the Human Family Album” (through May 1) at the California Academy of Science. It was an unsentimental update of MOMA’s 1957 show, “The Family of Man,” in which Edward Steichen juxtaposed scores of shots by unconnected photographers to establish a grander theme.

Birth / Initiation / Marriage / Death is the circle, and the 20-minute slide show makes its point very effectively. We’re all in this circle together, but we’ve devised umpteen ways of going the route. Harper / San Francisco has published a substantial book of these photos if you can’t make the trip.

And this isn’t all of it. Waiting for USAir to fly me back to Philly ($99, standby, with senile coupons), I discovered that SFO has gone into the museum biz in a big way. In one area, the Maritime Museum was displaying a few tasty slices of the sourdough waterfront. It put me in a good mood—which I needed in my paranoid choice of a seat at the very back of the 737. Two humongous Pakistani ladies squeezed me in.

I mention their ethnic identity only because our elbow disposition traditions differed radically. Before we were over Yosemite, I had a scheme: “Wouldn’t you ladies like to look at the Rocky Mountains?” They would, indeed. Whew.

That gave me the aisle, where I compensated for the marginal cuisine by chatting up a Princeton 30something whose job is to check on the doctors testing a new asthma medicine around the country. Such a job would itself give me terminal wheezes, but she seemed to like it.

Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, February 19, 1992