Invisible Hand: 'Portraits' at G Fine Art

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT an amateur photograph — unexpected or overexposed but nevertheless capturing a moment just so, fixing a figure or a setting in its moment forever — that suggests lethargy. Listlessness hovers over those photographs whose trends never update, whose hairstyles never rotate and whose dollars never inflate.

In capturing portraits from various corners of the world — in particular the developing world — each of the photographers in "Portraits," a show of seven photographers curated by Phyllis Rosenzweig at G Fine Art, turns instinctively to the vernacular, as if guided by an invisible hand. The work says as much about photographic tropes as it does about its subjects.

Malick Sidibe's snapshots from Mali, dating from 1970 to the present day, seem like they could very well be found photographs. Aged and presented in handmade, craft-oriented frames, these "vintaged" portraits embrace everyday photography as a portraiture strategy. Zwelethu Mthethwa's photographs belong to a more traditional, though still casual, approach to the portrait; in these, economic straits are captured viscerally, in the form of makeshift wall coverings made from box lids and commercial advertisements.

Chan Chao, whose new work is highlighted in the exhibit, submits the most formal shots of the bunch. The work is straightforward — his portraits are very nearly mugshots — of women who are inmates at an all-female prison in Peru. Chao humanizes his subjects with the flattery inherent to large C-prints; in addition, his titles ("Young Mother," "Ada: Laundress") soften the notion that these women could possibly be rightly incarcerated. His technique reveals a less-than-objective approach: Soft lines and colors suggest a high degree of sympathy.

More subtle are two contributions by Rineke Dijkstra, in particular "Sefton Park, Liverpool," a piece depicting two young girls in school uniforms lounging on a grassy mall (shown at top). The photo defies the viewer to see these teenage girls exactly as they are: poised on the mischievous edge between adolescence and adulthood. The temptation to fetishize — either as innocents or sexual beings — is the driving tension in the photo. Dijkstra's shots are the exceptions that prove the rule: Whimsical, interactive, these works are more than anthropological or historical in nature.

Collier Schorr's pieces, on the other hand, simply seem out of place. These black-and-white photographs don't fit in a show that emphasizes the way that color values can reflect a photographer's assessment of his subject. The hint of magic in these pieces defies the documentary air that pervades the other photographers' portraits.

Informal though it may be, the work does not lack for technical finish. Indeed, Alec Soth's prints are far better than the prints that typically grace D.C. gallery walls. (Local artists are too dependent on the services of David Adamson, whose prints can be noisy.) Soth's gorgeous print "Tricia and Curtis" captures closely the fine-detailed coloring in a patch of clover, on which the eponymous sitters lay. The soft, golden bands of withering clover rhymes the mysterious cuts along both the subjects' upper forearms. Scars? Branding? Burns? Perhaps drug use? It seems to be evidence of some kind of social decay, typical of the artist's sympathetic and gorgeous survey of Niagara Falls, the series from which this print and two others on display are drawn.

The best and most challenging pieces in the show are Beat Streuli's. Large transparencies by the artist cover the gallery's windows, making these portraits visible from street level. The photos in the show directly confront the notion of what it means to take a portrait: the subjects in the three color prints on display inside the gallery did not realize they were being photographed. The most casual portraits conceivable, these photographs from Bruxelles are directly documentary and yet, in a sense, the most personally revealing: Caught unawares, these are subjects at their most vulnerable.

» G Fine Art, 1515 14th St NW, Suite 200; Tue.-Sat. 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; 202-462-1601. (U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Kriston Capps

Photos by Rineke Dijkstra (top) and Chan Chao