Going Beyond Illustration

(2 of 3)

The work by Peress is typical of the pictures in this show, the best of which go well beyond the confines of illustration. Indeed, four of the photographers -- Harry Gruyaert, Alex Webb, Rio Branco and Jeff Jacobson -- are represented largely by shots that have never even accompanied a story. For one thing, many of these pictures strike a note sounded earlier by photographers like Lee Friedlander and the late Garry Winogrand, men who used the documentary approach for more personal ends. In the 1960s they discovered from snapshots (and from the groundbreaking work of Robert Frank) how the eccentricities of naive picture taking -- the awkward gestures, the uncomposed views -- can be a style in themselves when adopted deliberately. Eventually, their work legitimized photographs in which the scene could be tilted, limbs could be sliced by the edges of the frame and the mood of the main figures could be contradictory, ambiguous or just plain impenetrable.

Working in a profession that puts a premium on action shots, photojournalists have long turned out scenes with the same laissez-faire approach to composition. But in general, the exemplary pictures of the . camera-reporting tradition have bowed to pictorial convention, treating the edges of the frame like a proscenium arch around a quickly readable image. Anyone who doubts that this time-honored method can still be affecting need only look to David Burnett's elegant and straightforward pictures of minor league baseball. But Burnett is the odd man out in this show, where the prevailing tone is more hectic or quizzical.

Two of the photographers in the Portland show, Yan Morvan and Alfred Yaghobzadeh, have worked in Lebanon, and from some of their pictures one can grasp the moral implications of that tone. Their best images are their least polished: Morvan's scene of the aftermath of a car bomb, Yaghobzadeh's shot of two men bearing the victim of heavy shelling. For photographers working in the rubble of failed diplomacy, the most decent impulse is to use the camera as a branding iron -- the right pictures are blunt, scorching and indelible. That they can also look raw and haphazard is merely proof that style can echo the facts. The coherent images of classic photojournalism carry an implied message, namely that life is cogent even in the midst of catastrophe; that while events may be terrible, the human dilemma holds a familiar shape. The atrocities of Lebanon can shake that faith. In a place like Beirut, throwing aside design is no less a moral gesture than the tenderest lighting of "concerned photography."

Color sends its messages too. Most photographers now take to it comfortably enough. At the very least, fierce tones give a second life to black-and-white cliches -- what better than a heated format for rewarming old chestnuts? But color also has special advantages for dealing in deadpan ironies. Even before the eye takes in the subjects of Mary Ellen Mark's photo essay on Miami, the sheer chromatic punch says that Florida is a great setting for the human comedy. The lemony sunlight, the all too scrumptious blue of the sky: even the elements are in on the joke. And surprise, they make a perfect foil for the elderly locals, who strut with a vehemence that she finds both funny and fetching.