How the Other Half Lives: Photos with a Mission

"The Social Scene," one of two current photography exhibits at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), features historically relevant-and artistically important-photographs from the Ralph M. Parson's Foundation Photography Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The exhibit combines the work of American photographers Hellen Levit, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Danny Lyon, Lee Friedlander, Roger Mertin, John Pfahl, and Garry Winogrand, as well as Hungarian photographer Brassai, that, taken together, visually chronicle a developing American sense of self from the 1930's to the late 1960's.

The photographs are all taken in the documentary tradition; that is to say, their main objective is to record rather than to interpret the history that they treat. But this is not to call into question the artistic merits of the photographs, or indeed the photographers. It was still the charge of the photographer to anticipate what would be historically important-what features of his or her current generation would come eventually to be defining, and to depict those features with poignancy and beauty. At the very least, this choice to include or exclude--this visual diction, as it were--defines the photographers as artists as well as documentarians.

Considered in their context, then, and viewed with the benefit of hindsight, these pictures do-even if unintentionally-make important statements about the self-representation of America throughout the 20th century: about its own sense of self, its aesthetic, and perhaps most importantly, it's shortcomings.

The exhibit is divided thematically into two sections-"Social Space" and "Character Studies," each of which occupy one room of the main floor of the ICA. With a few exceptions, both sections include photographs from each of the photographers mentioned above. "Social Space" deals visually with environment. It analyzes the American milieu at any given time, especially in terms of dimension, geometry, orientation and the arrangement of things as they occupy their space. More importantly, it deals with the responses to and negotiations of that atmosphere by the people who live in it.

Photographs by Brassai (which, although taken in Paris, have probably been included in this collection simply because, for the purposes of description, they might as well have been taken in America) depict the moral bankruptcy and decadence of the 1930's in terms of space and the objects that occupy it. An opium pipe, a negligent smoker of that pipe, and the chaise lounge upon which she sleeps are the focal point of "An Opium Smoker Asleep," which simultaneously chronicles and criticizes the social norms of the 1930's Paris demimonde. Lighting is dark and the focus is dim: the space is uninviting and, on top of that, there's no room among the clutter anyway.

To some extent, in their chronicling of the emptiness and shallowness of the early 20th century's beuorgeousie, Brassai's work can be seen as constituting a visual companion to such works as Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby".

One of Levit's untitled depictions of 1940s urban New York has a small child-probably a baby boomer-at the epicenter; her mother is tucked into the periphery and a car speeds towards the child, who runs to her mother. The salient objects of the photograph are machines, cars, buildings, concrete, asphalt, and, in increasing numbers, people. The space presents itself ominously and uninvitingly. The child seems afraid, uncomfortable, not at home. In such a way, Levit appears to be depicting a sort of psychological dysphoria in terms of the physical space her subjects occupy.

The other section of "The Social Scene," "Character Studies," seems to work in the opposite direction, analyzing the extent to which people affect and even craft their own environments; space responds to objects rather than defining them. Danny Lyon's "Bikeriders" has four particularly surly looking men straddling their man machines imposingly: they are the focal point and the environment is significant only to the extent that it complements and enhances the bikers' presence.

Taken as a whole, "The Social Scene" is thought provoking, beautiful, well worth the $4 admission fee. See it for its historical merits, its artistic merits, or both, but see it.