Some of the people seen in this show of photographs, subtitled “Travel and Tourism at Home and Away,” must be on vacation—the girls on the beach on Cape Cod, say, in pictures from the early ’80s by Joel Meyerowitz. In others the journey is both less explicit and more alarming: Posing with wives or girlfriends, the soldiers photographed by the heartland portraitist Disfarmer don’t seem particularly destined for travel, until you look at the images’ dates and realize they come from around World War II. Elsewhere it is the photographer, not the subject, who is on the move, as in the pictures of people and places across the United States by Farm Security Administration photographers such as Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, and John Vachon. Or perhaps the photographer is at home, but home is not here—as in scenes of Mexico by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, or of India by Raghubir Singh.
Looking at images from abroad, Americans often reflexively hove for something exotic, but of the aim of the show’s curator, the artist and writer Collier Schorr, seems to have been to frustrate touristic expectations. Ortiz Monasterio’s Toreros, y es Plata, Cemento y Risa, Mexico City, 1987, for example, captures bullfighters practicing their moves, a conventionally iconic subject. But the site is a scruffy patch of grass beside a rain-slicked freeway, and the toreros wear K-Mart clothes and look like teenagers. Perhaps any more glamorous treatment of the corrida might be as banal in Mexico as a postcard of Mount Rushmore would be here. Think of the landscape of Switzerland and the biker camps photographed by Karlheinz Weinberger probably won’t be the first images that come to mind. Think of Vietnam, though, and you might well remember the war photographs of Larry Burrows—but those would hardly feed a desire to pack a suitcase.
Other picks of Schorr’s seem to address expectations less about place than about photography. Meyerowitz’s Eliza, Cape Cod, 1982, suggests Rineke Dijkstra avant la lettre, presaging the younger artist’s seaside portraits on a different scale. Lee’s Jack Whinery, homesteader, his wife and youngest child Pie Town, NM, September, 1940, might have been chosen to suggest that the kind of portraiture mastered by Walker Evans a few years earlier and a few states east entered the vocabulary of photography as a widely applicable tool. Evans’s own two works in the show, on the other hand, don’t shout out his name: A study of the type of Southern architecture that Evans photographed often and a studio shot of an African statue. both have manifest imperfections that imply they are intermediate stages rather than final forms. A terrific piece by William Christenberry, meanwhile, can be seen as a deconstruction of the older photographer: Building, Hale County, Alabama, 1967–2000, a grid of sixteen pictures of a single building as it is renovated, expanded, and transformed over thirty-odd years, starts out looking just like Evans and winds up closer to Bernd and Hilla Becher, not only describing a different structure (and a different America) but invoking a different conceptual genre.
“Overnight to Many Cities” was too varied and sprawling to advance a real thesis. Its juxtapositions seemed sometimes careful, sometimes casual; it leapt around in photographic format, not to speak of time and space. And yet, to Schorr’s credit, the show hung together across its continuous disruptions, and there was barely a picture in it that didn’t surprise and engage.
—David Frankel
