In High Museum exhibit, five photographers reframe truth of things

“Truth Told Slant,” on view at the High Museum of Art through Aug. 11, presents the work of five contemporary photographers who push the limits of the documentary genre even further.

Credit: Courtesy of High Museum of Art

Credit: Courtesy of High Museum of Art

By refusing to be dispassionate observers, these artists inform their story with personal history and experience. They rely on memory, autobiography, performance or archival appropriations to achieve their lyrical propositions — and are not afraid to stage their images at times.

Although very different in their approaches, they collectively generate work that is simultaneously provoking and intriguing. Their poetic and lyrical approach to photography is fittingly reinforced in the exhibit’s title, which takes inspiration from Emily Dickinson’s famous poem: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

Jill Frank’s work opens the exhibit with the installation of three of her recent bodies of work confronting the issues of youth, identity formation and the rites of passage. Working mostly with a large-format camera, Frank challenges the traditional form of portraiture by shifting our attention to fleeting moments.

In her “Cotillion” series, she took formal portraits of young participants of a cotillion class, but, instead of photographing the dance itself, she photographed the students before their classes began, capturing their internal state as they fidgeted in anticipation.

This approach is repeated in her two other series. In one, she took large-scale formal portraits of young adults right before they performed in a talent show that she initiated. In the other one, portraits of college students were taken while they were being formally photographed before their homecoming dance. The ephemeral emotions she captured do not traditionally register as “serious,” yet, in her views, they are equally significant and revealing of an internalized experience.

As much as Frank’s work is deceptively formal, Rose Marie Cromwell’s installation is raw and deconstructed. The Miami-based artist happily mixes images referencing the chaotic life of her city, far from the glitzy and glamorous image with which it is often associated. The result is similarly chaotic and disorienting. But the installation shines when it is taken as a unified body of work rather than a contemplation of individual pictures.

Credit: Courtesy of High Museum of Art

Credit: Courtesy of High Museum of Art

For instance, in one combination of images, Cromwell superimposes a large format photograph of a palm tree leaf over a large mural depicting a detail of a wall, partially obstructing it. On the lower left of the composition sits a photograph of someone’s knees, bleeding, a scene that the photographer staged.

Another way Cromwell challenges our perceptions is by experimenting with the materiality of her photographs, mounting her images on raw plywood or commercial vinyl.

With “American Mother, American Father,” Zora J. Murff presents a different conceptual approach based heavily on the use of autobiography. His images incorporate photographs of his relatives, self-portraits and appropriated snapshots, which, taken as a whole, form a family album of sorts that explores the myths and stereotypes of the Black family.

In one striking photograph, “The Reflection of Most Visible Wavelengths of Light,” he digitally overexposes the image of a sculpture of a white family, using it as a metaphor to suggest that whiteness, for many people, is invisible and the default image of American racial identity.

Kristine Potter’s black-and-white series, “Dark Waters,” conjures up Southern gothic landscapes as places of violence, especially toward women. Weaving together mythologies and folklore, she alternates images of noirish landscapes with evocative portraits of women who are imbued with a sense of ever-present danger.

Augmented by the songs and music videos of “murder ballads” played in an adjacent room, the rendering is sober, if not chilling, and reflects on some of the darkest moments of American history.

Credit: Courtesy of High Museum of Art

Credit: Courtesy of High Museum of Art

Tommy Kha’s work concludes the exhibit with a slightly lighter tone, at times introducing humor to tackle difficult issues of identity, visibility and cultural representations in our society.

Kha, who is queer and the son of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants, combines eclectic images of his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, with portraits of himself with his mother and photographs of other family members to construct a very personal narrative of what it means to be of the South, beyond the familiar stereotypes.

To delve deeper into the slipperiness of photography’s connection to truth, the High will present a series of events in the coming weeks, including conversations between the featured photographers on April 13 from 1 to 4 p.m. Registration required.

ART REVIEW

“Truth Told Slant”

Through Aug. 11. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, noon-5 p.m. Sundays. $18.50; children under 6, free. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404-733-4400, high.org

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Virginie Kippelen is a photographer, multimedia producer and writer specializing in editorial and documentary projects. She has contributed to ArtsATL’s Art+Design section since 2014, writing mostly about photography. And after living 25 years in the United States, she still has a French accent.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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