About Face

For all of its slick, contemporary structure and presentation, The Pilara Foundation’s Pier 24 operates very much like an eighteenth-century Wunderkammer. The institutional expression of the choices and taste of an individual—both in terms of what is collected and how it is presented (like the exclusion of wall text and labels)—is in opposition to the more modern (but not issue-free) concept of the museum as the expression of a team of completists.

The title of the current exhibition, About Face, is then an apt description of the modus operandi of Pier 24. The show, which looks at the tradition of portrait-based photography, is about faces, but it does not pull the hoped-for about face from the accepted conventions of photo history. Instead, the show opts for a generally safe, textbook display of mostly canonical works pulled from the Pilara Foundation’s impressive archive. An example of the missed opportunities to raise questions about and create connections between bodies of work and creators’ practices reside in three separate rooms.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Henry the VIII and his Six Wives (1999) consists of seven black-and-white photographs of wax figures. Sugimoto lights his subjects in a style reminiscent of the sixteenth-century Dutch paintings from which the wax figures are modeled. He divorces his subjects from their traditional museum tableaux and places them in front of a black backdrop.

Similarly, in Richard Avedon’s series In The American West (1979–1984) subjects are placed in front of stark, white backdrops, lit in his iconic style, and stripped of environmental information. It is debatable how much this work is a portrait of the American West versus a portrait of the artist.

Whereas Avedon attempts to present his subjects with a sense of immediacy by working to remove evidence of the technical apparatuses of camera and lights, Richard Learoyd’s

Richard Learoyd. After Ingres, 2011; installation view, About Face, 2012. Courtesy of Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco. Photo: Michael Rothfeld.

painterly color portraits are created with a room-sized camera that exposes directly onto positive photo paper. The technique results in non-reproducible, one-off prints that draw a viewer’s attention more to process and aesthetic treatments than the identity of the subject.

Though each body of work is visually impressive, the insulating display tactics do little to encourage cross-pollination between gallery rooms. Put into physical proximity and contextualized conversation with one another, these works might prompt viewers to consider issues of authenticity in portraiture and the othering of identities.

According to their website, Pier 24’s goal is to “work to advance the creation, scholarship and understanding of the photographic medium.” With such an impressive collection from which to draw, it is curious and frustrating that such tame curatorial tactics were utilized in the mounting of About Face, and that the show fails to embody its own name.

About Face is on view at Pier 24 Photography, in San Francisco, through February 28, 2013. 

Michael Rothfeld is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living in San Francisco by way of New York.  He is currently pursuing his MFA in Fine Art and MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts.