Photographs That Shout Out

Some people say that photography can change the world. I’m not so sure. Not so sure that the photographer making the picture of the drowning child shouldn’t have first extended a hand. While my own private jury is out on that matter, consider the current show at Hotchkiss’ Tremaine Gallery called  “Outspoken: Seven Women Photographers.”   According to the curator, Marky Kauffmann, the photographs by seven women of different ages, cultural experiences and artistic sensibilities all “ask the viewer to question assumptions about what is fair, right, or possible for women and girls ...What happens to the search for identity in a patriarchal world? As a female, do I dare stand out, shout out, be outspoken?” The point, says Kauffmann, is not for the pictures to change the viewers’ world but for the act of photography to give voice to the photographer. Kauffmann, a feminist and a retired high school photography teacher, says that photography “is a way for photographers to proclaim what matters to them, the pictures are a way to scream and shout.” 

Kauffmann,whose own work in the show titled, “Lost Beauty,” examines the common experience women have as they age.  She says, “In contemporary Western culture, the desperate attempt to look young trumps all.” In life, women change their appearance either by nature or by choice, and her silver gelatin portraits of women portray faces changing or disappearing. Kauffmann pours potassium ferrocyanide over the prints which bleach and disfigure the original portrait. This process, she says,  “is a metaphor for the erasure of the woman.”

In a series called “Ms. Behavior,” Nancy Grace Horton places a woman on an ironing board, a clothes drying rack and a stove in a very intimate, close-up way. — we don’t see the woman’s face — only a body part and a domestic tool associated with womanhood. In one of the most powerful images in the exhibit, a woman’s feet teeter on an electric stove perilously close to the heated coil. 

There are documentary pictures of children on an Indian Reservation by Emily Schiffer, portraits of girls in fairy princess dresses by Blake Fitch, images of girls becoming women by Tira Kahn, and girls in their rooms by Rania Matar. 

The work that spoke the loudest to me were the collages by Nadine Boughton. In these pictures of mid-century women and men as they were portrayed in popular magazine advertisements of the day – Boughton is asking who really has the power. In a piece called “At Home,” a woman in a fashionable belted sheath with matching pumps (circa 1962) stands expectantly at her unset dining room table and a gang of four men wearing overcoats and hats holding briefcases march down the big stone steps of the New York Stock Exchange into her perfectly appointed dining room. In another, a room of powerful unsmiling men in suits sit poised at the boardroom table with an enormous pointy-brassiere-clad woman looming behind them in outer space. Boughton’s statement says, “This series is an homage both to the handsome men in Fortune who look like all the fathers I watched in their big suits and briefcases, carpooling to a foreign land; and to the community of mothers who served egg salad sandwiches on the green lawns of suburbia.” Without having to invent anything she juxtaposes real advertising images to tell the story of male patriarchy and the women who helped them. 

Since 2014, the exhibit has traveled to galleries throughout the Northeast, mostly at secondary schools and colleges and will be at Hotchkiss until January 13, 2019.

Tremaine Gallery at The Hotchkiss School 11 Interlaken Road., Lakeville,  Conn. Open Tues.- Sat. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. www.hotchkiss.org/arts.