David Allee at the KMA’s “New Photography” Exhibit

The relationship between photography and painting has always been treated as a complicated one, and perhaps never more so than today. In fact, with the advent of Photorealism and digital imaging programs like “Paint Shop Pro”, we have long since passed the point where we can clearly tell who (The painter? The photographer?) is imitating whom. But what is perhaps more troubling is that it has become increasingly difficult to figure out why an artist working in one medium is imitating or borrowing a certain style from another.

In an apparent attempt to show viewers that it is nevertheless possible (and even enjoyable) to establish a sense of order in the midst of such confusion, the KMA offers visitors to its new photography exhibit a special guide that attempts to map out for them how the works on display have “transformed photography into a vital contemporary art medium marked by innovation and experimentation.”

Under the heading, “Gallery Challenge: Can You Identify?”, the interactive guide asks visitors a series of questions that reveal much about the world of photography today: “can you identify photographs that have been altered using digital software or darkroom techniques? Can you identify photographs that represent straightforward views of the subjects [of the photographs] as they appeared [before being photographed]? Can you identify photographs that depict places or settings that were invented or staged by the artist?”

Before you get too far along in this game, you may begin to sense that something fundamental is missing, that some question or set of questions hasn’t been asked but perhaps should have been. And why might this be so? It appears that the featured photographers were so preoccupied with, say, merely tweaking a famous painting (“distorting” a Caravaggio by taking a picture of it that uses only the existing light of the museum where it is displayed), or pulling a sleight of hand (photographing a chair set against shelves of wine corks that only become identifiable as you move closer to the image), or imitating a still from a film ( an overly studied image of a woman who sits “lost in thought” in a corner of a lighted foreground that is set against the receding hallway of a mansion), or recreating a 19th century landscape watercolor painting, that they devoted too little attention to the subject, mood and composition of the image itself.

The end result of these formal experimentations is that, with one very notable exception, the works on display lack the sense of detail, arrested motion, and imminent disclosure which give a photographic image the power to invoke the invisible by means of the visible. But all these shortcomings become fully apparent in the exhibit precisely because there is one photograph which shares none of them: David Allee’s stunning “Stadium Light.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, his method is a simple one: using a large-format Linhof Technikardan camera to take pictures at night with long exposures (for up to 20 minutes), Allee produces images that combine the artificiality of an Ed Ruscha pop art painting with the documentary realism of an eerie urban setting illumined solely by its own artificial lighting.

In the work on display at the KMA, “Stadium Light”, a partial rear view of Yankee stadium taken from an anonymous, off-centered, and seemingly “midair” vantage point that no person could actually occupy turns a readily identifiable architectural monument into a snapshot “stolen” from a distant and alien world; for the side of the stadium assumes the form of a ship’s bow, and the apparently empty seats have the appearance of an amorphous, miniaturized hologram. More striking still is how the absence of any material texture, conventional perspective, or natural color gives the cropped image of the stadium, subway tracks, bridge and street a flat, uniform quality that seems to place it in a dimension where the realms of photography and painting become distinct and yet inseparable.

Allee’s photograph thus achieves what the KMA too generously credits to all the works on display: it explores the “expressive possibilities” of both painting and photography in a way that revitalizes both mediums. Moreover, he does so in a manner that is animated by a critical spirit which is conspicuously absent from the other works. That is, the depiction of the “artificial”, lifeless, and empty if not uninhabitable stadium seems to expose us to a type of collective experience that individuals may at times get an intimation of, but then quickly dismiss. But it is because this sense of unease isn’t normally “seen” or acknowledged that it is capable of haunting our experience of modern life.