|
Reviews
|
||
|
Portfolios:
|
The Savannah Morning News |
|
|
Robert Herman doesn't like skyline photographs. He knows that most New York photographers find themselves compelled to shoot the city's legendary skyline, with silhouettes of skyscrapers etched against the clouds. Herman prefers to shoot the action on the ground, taking intimate, revealing photographs of people living in the city's interlocking neighborhoods, drawn to the seductive energy of the street.
"The skyline is sort of a cliche," he explains. "When you get into the details of the neighborhood, you find something more unique and more individual -- and yet more universal."
In "40 North x 73 West," a photography exhibit currently at Mercury Lounge, Herman chronicles three decades of New York streetscapes in moody gelatin-silver black-and-white prints and in vibrant cibachrome. Herman's use of texture, color and light evoke a sense of individuality within a lonely crowd. The title of the exhibit refers to the latitude and longitude of New York City, but the focus of Herman's photography is the spirit of the city's neighborhoods.
"New York, to me, has always been a collection of neighborhoods," he says. "Wherever I lived, I would spend a few days a week shooting and responding to what was in front of me. I had the feeling that you didn't have to travel halfway around the world to find something interesting."
What Herman found during those excursions through New York can be viscerally understood by viewing the photography at Mercury Lounge. In a series of color and black-and-white photographs, Herman maps interconnected moments of desolation, solitude and loneliness frozen within a kinetic, often frenetic, streetscape. From the jubilance of children playing in the waterfall unleashed from an open fire hydrant to the connection between two barefoot women drinking coffee and chatting on a park bench, oblivious to the graffiti and clotheslines above them, Herman celebrates humanity in everyday moments.
"Waiting for the Light to Change" captures a fleeting moment of a boy and his mother standing at an intersection, both dressed in bright red clothing. Through this photograph,
Herman reveals the connection between the mother and son as well as the unexpected poetry in this random, seemingly mundane moment.
Some of the most powerful images in this insightful exhibit are those that explore the paradox of loneliness in the Big Apple. "Man Reading Menu," a photograph taken in Soho in 1981, focuses on an old man in trench coat and gloves sitting alone at a luncheon counter, pondering a menu in shades of gray. We see the elderly figure through a plate-glass window, the lights from cars and from the street reflected in the glass. Herman finds beauty in moments of solitude, suggesting that, in these moments, we are truly ourselves.
"It's really important to find that thing, that spark or starting point that makes a good picture," he explains. "It's that realness. The inner invisible heart that comes out when people are themselves."
"Winter Cowboy," a 1984 black-and-white urban portrait of a man in a cowboy hat, his face obscured by a scarf, conveys a sense of dislocation and disjunction in a scene that could have been plucked from the movie "Midnight Cowboy." The blurred, kinetic streetscape whirls around this lone cowboy, who appears to be far from home, stranded in the big city.
Herman's use of color self-consciously accentuates the narratives he tells in his documentary photography. "St. George," a 1984 photograph taken on Staten Island, focuses on a woman in a red hat and red coat sitting on a bench at a children's playground that has been mercilessly defaced with graffiti. Bright crimson berries, like Christmas ornaments or holiday lights, adorn the trees overhanging the playground, their shimmering hues contrasting sharply with the gray sky above, fighting off the desolation of the neighborhood with the power of color.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Herman grew up on Long Island and attended Boston University before graduating from New York University with a degree in film. He worked for a number of years as a production still photographer, but eventually discovered a passion for street photography. "The neighborhood was more interesting than the movies," he explains.
Herman lives and works in New York City and exhibits his work in galleries across the country. His work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and numerous art galleries.
Even in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy, Herman continues to document the tiny miracles that take place across New York every day. "With all this sadness and misery and unhappiness that we all feel, we have to be reminded of that moment when life itself is so good," he says. "And the reminder is in the details."
"View from the LIRR" shows a solitary building on a street corner, the last remnant of what obviously was once a thriving block. The building now stands on an island between an elevated highway and a street. The graffiti-sprayed first floor wall is partially constructed of glass blocks, while above it are an additional two stories of red brick. Green, tarnished metalwork at the building's street corner apex adds yet another dimension of color and texture to the shot. The building is shot from the shadowy confines beneath a roadway overpass, allowing dark railings and ramps to frame the image from the top, bottom and left sides.
"Painter's Hat" also invited the viewer to examine the details of a larger scene. The image draws its title from a man wearing a brilliant white painter's hat as he rounds a street corner. But that is only a small part of the whole. The man is sandwiched between a bright red stop sign and an equally vivid, though darker, rust-colored brick wall.
A building wall that dominates the background, and thus the majority of the shot, is typical downtown New York -- whitewashed brick and dingy industrial strength windows. A retracted fire-escape ladder angling across the middle of the shot casts its pattern on the side of the building, as does the arcing neck of an unseen street lamp.
Both shots feature graffiti-covered walls, probably what attracted the photographer to them in the first place. If these old buildings can be considered part of urban archaeology, then graffiti and old posters can be seen as hieroglyphics.
Many of Herman's other works in the show are also close-up shots of such details -- peeling paint caught in strong sunlight, the street corner collage that comes from layer upon layer of posters and the splatter of hastily scrawled slogans.
"Blessed" is one such photograph. Many images vie for attention in this work, in which snippets of torn posters intermingle in bright, shadow producing sunlight. The high angle of the light serves both to accentuate the textures created by the glued scraps of paper and to brighten their colors.
There is a delightful visual chaos about the work --a man's hand reaches out toward a phone booth in the middle of the shot, but before you can take in the scene completely, a swatch of torn white paper obstructs it. The word "Blessed" is seen repeatedly in shards going across the top of the shot, while in the lower right hand corner an evil-looking black and white parody of the bath soap character Mr. Bubble wails for survival against a slather of old paste.
It is the visual equivalent of channel surfing or spinning the radio dial: What you get is snippets of information in a brief period, thought the difference is, you are free to take the time to ponder the individual fragments and use your imagination to figure out what they must have originally meant.
"REW" relies more on the textures created by layered, mostly white poster paper and a brown brick wall beneath it for the strength of it imagery. The photograph draws its title from the "REW" that survive as a fragment of poster.
The diptych, "Earth, Monte Alban, Mexico," shares a stylistic link with its New York cousins in that Herman uses sunlight and shadows to bring out the textures in a wall. In this case, the colors and shapes of the right panel are provided by layer upon layer of peeling paint and chipped adobe. They provide a festival of color, large patches of white punctuated by splotches of pale blue and rust red next to areas where red is dominant, and blue and white struggle to make it to the surface all on one print. In the left panel, the rust, white and blue theme is repeated with a rough-hewn hole added to the mixture.
It is only appropriate that a self-portrait by the artist contains many of the qualities seen in his other works. In this large, colorful image Herman is reflected in a slower shop window, the street scene behind him reversed by the glass. Daylight coming into the window illuminates the plants inside. These different visual elements work much the same way as the torn posters and peeling paint do in the other photographs, creating a collage in which the image of the photographer is but a small part.