PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE GALLERY COLLECTION

January 6 to January 27, 2013

Our mid-winter exhibition of photographs from the gallery collection continues our effort to find narrative & interrelated meaning among seemingly disparate images found in the course of a given year. The show is comprised of aerial records of bombing raids over German & French soil; somatotype photographs of young Naval recruits & c-print enlargements from Ansco color transparencies featuring cheesecake pinups. Shot from the underside of American bombers, the aerials show the silent progression of bombs caught between sky & their explosive impact upon the earth below. There is beauty amid the cloud fragments, the interlaced parcels of agrarian land, the web of city streets & buildings, but ultimately these images record the shock of destruction & map the intricacies of vulnerability. The somatotypes, too, aim to map & record the physical condition of young men at flight training facilities set up by the government shortly after Pearl Harbor. Set against a backdrop of grids & numbers, the men stand expressionless & nearly nude, looking less like future bomber pilots & more like dazed boys suddenly caught in a war they did not foresee. As ubiquitous as bomb patterns scaring the earth below, the WWII-era pinup model was a wholesome reminder of girls back home, an icon painted on the sides of bomber planes as much for morale as an expression of manhood. The photographs represent one era’s veiled interpretation of eroticism, female beauty & sexuality. Over 60 years old, the transparencies as objects are scratched & pitted, perhaps suggesting that even our symbols of beauty are vulnerable to the inherent flaws of passing time & the destructive potential of evolving cultures.