"Optical Delusions: Jokes, Puns, and Sleights-of-Hand in Photography "
2000-06-17 until 2000-10-15
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA

Photography is often thought of as a sober-minded and objective medium, one that clariNULLes the facts. The photographers in this exhibition, however, aim to confuse. Several of them mix up photography and painting in perverse ways. Teun Hocks, Calum Colvin, and Vera Lehndorff and Holger Trülzsch paint or construct scenes that they then photograph. The results emphasize the paradox created when a three-dimensional reality is represented by a two-dimensional medium. Similar tricks are played on the eye by the odd constructions of Zeke Berman and the manipulated reality of Robert Cumming.

The photographers featured in this exhibition share a desire to both amuse and confuse the viewer. The sense of humor involved can range from the whimsical and frivolous to the dry and poker-faced. Sometimes the photographs work like cartoons or comic strips. Photographs by Hocks and William Wegman, the baby pictures of Sue Packer and Deborah Hunter, the street photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, and Elliott Erwitt, and the parodies of other people's photographs done by Jay Boersma and Gary Brotmeyer all function in this way.

The fun that these photographers are having can be irrepressibly juvenile-as when Vik Muniz plays with his food in Medusa Marinara-or comically existential, like the strange manipulations of Michal Macku. The Romantic poet John Keats said of the Grecian urn that it doth tease us out of thought; so do the photographs seen here.

IMAGE:
Vik Muniz.
Medusa Marinara (detail), 1999

Related Links:

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Other Important Exhibitions in Chicago