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Written by Debra Brehmer, Contributing writer
Feb 24, 2011

“Le dejeuner sur l’herbe, Les trois femmes noires” (2010) by Mickaline Thomas. – Photo: Courtesy of the artist/Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

“The Truth is Not in the Mirror: Photography and a Constructed Identity” is a survey of contemporary portrait photography, running through May 22 at the Haggerty Museum of Art on Marquette’s campus.

Filling every cranny of the museum’s main exhibition space, this ambitious project capitalizes on museum director Wally Mason’s expertise in photography.

Plan to spend some time. You will need to journey at a snail’s pace – looking, reading and looking again. The underlying theme of the show is that the portrait has lost its workaday goal of mere representation. The contemporary portrait carries the self-knowledge of artificiality and the limits of its means.

While she is not represented in the exhibition, the artist Cindy Sherman surely opened the door to these 23 photographers. Sherman was the first photographer to cross the great divide between picture taking and art making in the 1970s. She did it on the back of the portrait by creating cinematic tableaux of herself in fictive settings. Sherman’s work spoke of gender, media, identity and perception.

Rather than using Sherman, however, the Haggerty anchors notions of a constructed self with a different forefather – David Hockney. More of a formalist, Hockney’s photographic collages of the 1980s use many individual pictures like playing cards to assemble a whole composition. Hockney suggests that the truth of perception is more accurately rendered as fractured parts, full of gaps, seams, stops and starts and random focal points.

When viewing the exhibition, it helps to think of the various works occupying a continuum. Reality, mimesis, veracity, documentation (whatever you want to call it), sits at one end. Total fabrication lies at the other. The tension between the two becomes the subject of much of the work.

Alec Soth, the young Minneapolis photographer who is now represented by Gagosian, anchors the far end of the scale. Soth remains a documentarian, crossing the country snaring elegant portraits of American life. He has a room of his own in this show, and it feels like a safe house. We land in Soth-land grounded in a straight-shooter’s love of looking. Old-school stuff.

Outside of Soth’s realm, things get topsy-turvy. The Netherlandish photographer Rineke Dijkstra seems to be making very direct portraits of adolescent girls, but she removes them from a context and poses them stark and frontal in a park. Their towering, flat engagement with the camera heightens self-consciousness. Bled of narrative, these images generate momentum as encounters between viewed and viewer, making us aware of our passive-aggressive gaze.

Australian photographer Graham Miller seems to be taking documentary road-trip photographs, stolen glimpses of isolated humanity. But no, we learn that the scenes are staged. He is interpreting the American landscape through the filter of Raymond Carver stories, suggesting the layered way that knowledge and personal experience color our perceptions.

Much of the work in the show explores this paradox of how the staged image can offer “more truth” than the supposed straight image. Tina Barney has long used her privileged upbringing as source material. She photographs wealthy people in domestic settings and art directs the shoots.  The large-scale of her work frames status the way neo-classical history paintings did. But her subject matter stays rooted to the family snapshot. Formally, Barney romps in all the trappings that define wealth, questioning how it shapes or deforms us, physically and psychologically.

Kelli Connell, by twinning herself as characters in mise-en-scene, makes visible our multiple and fluctuating sense of identity. Philip-Lorca diCorcia photographs random street scenes, but we learn that focused moments of his seemingly mundane images are staged.

Claire Beckett reverses all this role playing by taking very straightforward portraits of real soldiers who are actually wearing costumes to play roles in elaborate military training exercises. For example, a female Marine poses with her arm blown off. Rest assured, it’s all pretend, part of a facsimile battle exercise in preparation for deportment to Iraq. Here the pretend holds more veracity than the actual, because the images carry the full weight of the necessary departure from sanity or known reality required by war.

Because ideas about perception and truth are so complex and deeply embedded in the photographic experience, whether in 1839 or 2011, this exhibition floats almost too many ideas to adequately sort. The images are compelling, but the concepts need unpacking.

Oddly, amid so many large-format, juicy, colorful, seamless prints (Thomas Ruff and Mickalene Thomas!), for me it was the black-and-white pictures that posited the most thoughtful mediations on truth, art, perception and the portrait. Perhaps we are so accustomed to glossy images being commercial inventions that the cheeky irony of these exercises, while interesting, often feels erroneous.

I’m not engaged by Jesse Burke’s portfolio of re-tooled fashion or beer ads that addresses marketed notions of gender. I already detect the conceit in the actual ads. And likewise, I don’t know if Nikki S. Lee’s trope of dressing up and embedding herself in various subcultures changes the terms of documentation and identity enough to make us care.

On the other hand, LaToya Ruby Frazier, who also uses the documentarian’s vantage, finds something in the black-and-white medium that feels both emotionally real and physically staged at the same time. Frazier, as well as Jason Floria, is able to elevate the artificiality of the act of photography while hanging on to the emotional pull of the lingering desire to use the camera to seek out or acknowledge something about humanity. The artists who hit that mid-point on the compendium between truth and fiction take us the furthest.