Rediscovered Faces of Ayacucho

By Lindsey McCormack
View Gallery
BEVERLY, Mass.— From 1924 until his death in 1976, Baldomero Alejos was the premier photographer of Huamanga, a provincial capital in the remote Andean region of Ayacucho. His studio was a magnet for locals who wanted to record a life event — a romance, marriage, birth, or death — or to create a memento for posterity. The Alejos archives were inaccessible during the devastating conflict between the Shining Path and the Peruvian military until the mid-90’s, when Alejos’s son Walter and granddaughter Lucia began to catalogue and digitalize 60,000 jumbled negatives — another 40,000 were lost to rot.

The exhibit “Retouched: The Photographs of Baldomero Alejos” (through June 1, 2006 at the Casa de la Cultura/ The Center for Latino Arts, 85 W. Newton Street, Boston, Mass. Also at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Mass) was organized by Lucia’s childhood friend and Harvard graduate student José Falconi. The show features 150 enthralling images discovered in the archive.

A delightful portrait opens the exhibition; two people nestle close to each other but seem to inhabit different eras. The woman wears traditional clothing and a direct, unadorned expression, as if for a daguerreotype; the man, with his modish sunglasses and unbuttoned sports jacket, strikes a pose straight out of a movie poster. His arm around her shoulder looks less like a tender embrace than the way a gangster might hold onto his moll. Through a perfectly conventional pose, a wonderful play on the artifice of photography is created, a sort of deadpan Peruvian Gothic.

Alejos lived during an unusually peaceful period in long-suffering Ayacucho. His photographs carry a certain antebellum poignancy. (Ironically, one of his last portraits was of the philosophy professor and future guerilla leader Abamiel Guzmán.) Yet these pictures are compelling because Alejos did not approach his job with the apathy of a commercial photographer. He was a perfectionist, elaborating on the playfulness or gravity which his subjects brought to the studio.

Alejos worked only with natural sunlight, skillfully capturing the wide spaces of Andean valleys as well as the subtle expressions of the human face. Given Alejos’s heavy antique box camera and homemade developing equipment, impulse shots were a technical impossibility. Still, the painstaking realism of these photos turns out to be deceptive.

For Alejos, the art of photography lay in the ability to improve on reality just short of making the resulting image unbelievable. His son Walter, who was in Boston for the exhibit opening, explained that Alejos never returned a portrait without first taking a fine graphite pencil and smoothing away black circles and wrinkles, or adding a bit of hair as needed. “He could take fifteen or twenty years off a face,” Walter said, “but if you try to get rid of all the wrinkles it doesn’t look like a person anymore.”

Alejos was proud of his skill at retouching, and the people of Ayacucho were eager to pay for it. A portrait typically cost about twenty percent of a monthly salary; rural families might have to save for months, even years to afford a sitting. Thus to be photographed by Alejos was an honor. In one portrait of an indigent family, the father appears to be holding the photographer’s contract for services rendered: in this way he ensures that the prestige of an Alejos portrait is recorded within the portrait itself.

The contract in the father’s hand also highlights the theatrical quality in these portraits. According to Walter, Alejos was not afraid to send someone home from the studio to comb their hair or try on a different outfit. No wonder, then, that his subjects display considerable self-consciousness about being “onstage.” The musicians done up like gunslingers look ready to shoot their own Mexican cowboy movie; and the proud foursome of toreadors strike the same pose they might use to face down a bull (except, perhaps, the gentle- looking fellow on the right.)

The tendency for exotic self-presentation, especially in women, is also intriguing. Some, such as a society lady in a kimono, wrap themselves in Oriental mystique. Other women dress in the colorful costume of “La Huamanguina,” the folkloric Indian woman of the highlands. As the exhibit notes point out, many of the women dressing as “La Huamanguina” are physically indistinguishable from those who would actually wear the outfit every day, except that their broad smiles and confident bearing give them away as city-dwellers.

To take in the entirety of this wonderful exhibit, the viewer needs to visit two spaces: the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard University, and the Casa de la Cultura/ Latino Arts Center in the South End. The obvious drawback of this setup — many will not have time to travel between both spaces — is offset by the fact that each one functions as a free-standing exhibit. Furthermore, it is important that these photos be displayed in one of Boston’s longest-standing Latino communities. Alejos’s photographs tell a moving story of the creativity and endurance of a culture, and of the social injustices that years of civil war only managed to deepen.

Naked Truths at the 808

By Ken George
View Gallery
BOSTON, Mass.—John Ashcroft once had statuary at the Justice Department clad in thousands of dollars worth of drapery. An unruly aluminum breast had apparently unnerved the then attorney general, an assiduously religious man.

Chalk it up to residual Puritanism, the ascendancy of the religious right, political correctness run amok or all of the above. But a patch of bare skin still has the power to elicit red faces and in some cases send the culture cops running for the drapery.

The uninhibited art of Penelope Jencks is a salutary antidote to all the priggishness. And you can currently see highlights from the last three-decades of her sculpture at Boston University’s 808 Gallery. A 1958 graduate of the College of Fine Arts, Jencks’ is perhaps best-known for the towering Eleanor Roosevelt statue in New York’s Riverside Park.

In the latter half of her career, Jencks has scaled-up her work considerably. Roosevelt peaks at eight-feet and a granite Robert Frost commissioned by Amherst College will be of similar dimensions. The 808 exhibit displays nothing on either but does include plenty of miniature beachscapes, busts and human figure studies. And it is Jencks big, bold nudes — some must top nine feet — that cast the longest shadows in this retrospective.

While the eye-level views of genitalia are sure to make Grandma blush, Jencks plays it pretty safe — serving up less shock then awe. And although artistic riffs on skin and sea seem as old as the sea itself, her skill and the scale of her art rejuvenate these hoary motifs. This is especially the case in the full-frontal set-pieces “Beach Series I” and “Beach Series II.” The former is a collection of life-sized terra-cotta nudes; the later, a series of plaster giants.

Here self-exposure is more the restrained Yankee variety then the thronged boisterousness of say, Miami Beach. Figures are depicted standing, seated, reclining, kneeling or in the process of disrobing. There are as few smiles as there is apparel. And the nudity is unexceptional, not steroidally-enhanced. With their paunches, sags and ample hips, Jencks bodies come closer to what we glimpse in the mirror rather than the movie screen.

The sculptor’s earlier work, consisting mostly of terra-cotta busts and figures studies, testifies to her mastery of naturalistic form and detail. In her series of self-portraits, notice the details of the contracting or extending sinews of the neck, shoulders, arms — sterling evidence of formidable sculpting chops, but rather oddly out of place amongst all the fleshy entropy. And the terra-cotta beaches were a bit of a misfire. This endless parade of diminutive seascapes, some populated with miniaturized bathers, veered toward craft-store kitchiness — or perhaps they were unfairly diminished in comparison with the grandeur of the other works.

The wondrous behemoths of “Beach II” exerted the greatest hold on my imagination. Rutted and pockmarked, these white or earthen-toned forms suggest ancient statuary; or perhaps a group of naked, wizened giants from a Swiftian universe. My favorite: a woman clutching her waist and scanning the horizon — in this case traffic on Commonwealth Avenue.

Like any retrospective there are minor annoyances. It is at times infuriatingly inclusive, so much so that negotiating the hefty lineup of sculptures becomes wearisome. Ironically, for such a comprehensive exhibit, I found it odd I couldn’t locate anything on Jencks’ monumental Roosevelt statute. More contextual material would be helpful — be prepared to shell out $15 for a book surveying her major works, as I did.

A collection of this size requires space to breathe which the 808, with its open floor plan provides. And the gallery’s floor to ceiling windows imparts a whimsical dose of exhibitionism — pedestrians needn’t press their faces against the plate glass to get an eyeful.

Readers had until April 2nd to press their faces against the glass. The 808 is located at 808 Commonwealth Ave. in Boston, near the BU Bridge. Click here for gallery hours and contact information.

The Art of Absorption

The subjects of David Hockney’s portraits have been totally absorbed into his art and autobiography.

Highlife Lowdown

Two excellent books, one by Boston rocker Jen Trynin, plumb the insides of the worlds of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.

Bleak Beauty, the photos of Antonin Kratochvil

By Lindsey McCormack

The acclaimed photojournalist Antonin Kratochvil delivered an afternoon talk at Harvard University recently, as black and white images of war zones and industrial wastelands flashed across a screen behind him. Few photographers alive have created such stunning chronicles of the global scope of war and environmental destruction. Yet what makes these photos uniquely beautiful is their direct, unadorned empathy for ordinary people trapped in horrific situations.

Born in 1947, Kratochvil came of age during the height of Soviet repression in his native Czechoslovakia. After fleeing the country in 1967, he spent much of his early twenties in refugee camps. He eventually arrived in the US, becoming a citizen in 1976. The experience of being a refugee, of being forced to wait while the effects of war and occupation play out on one’s family, inflects the mood of Kratochvil’s photographs even today.

For one of his first undertakings as a photojournalist, Kratochvil returned to the home he says he missed and hated at the same time. His many trips to the former Soviet bloc culminated in the 1997 book “Broken Dream: 20 Years of War in Eastern Europe.” A more recent project captures the grotesque inequalities of today’s Russia, a society that strikes him as “a return to Rasputin times.”

After more than three decades, Kratochvil can match any seasoned reporter for continents explored and crises documented. Yet for all their geographic range, the photographs in his slide show evoked above all an intense sense of claustrophobia. Venezuelan prison inmates, Albanian refugees who have settled in boxcars, and African-American denizens of Louisiana’s “cancer alley” all struggle to survive in shrunken, polluted landscapes of man’s own making. Even an apartment block on the outskirts of Prague carries a menacing sense of enclosure.

Despite, or perhaps because of his immersion in humanity’s bleaker moments, Kratochvil seems to cherish the good things in life. In the middle of his slide show appeared the image of a nude pregnant woman, glimpsed in profile through wavy glass. The photographer laughed, explaining that his wife had threatened to divorce him if at least one picture of her weren’t included in his first collection. “And now I can enjoy the product!” he exclaimed, indicating the affable, floppy-haired teenager who was sitting off to one side, seeming only mildly embarrassed at being pointed out in this way by his dad.

Kratochvil’s warmth comes through even in his starkest photographs, which point not to nihilism but to the importance of personal concern for change. It is telling that many of his projects have developed in conjunction with NGO’s that work with populations in crisis: his series on Guatemalan street children with the Central American Casa Alianza, for instance, or the 2005 exhibition on the “Forgotten War” in the Congo for Doctors Without Borders.

In his 2005 book “Vanishing,” Kratochvil continues to lean into the themes of poverty and environmental ruin. His intent as a photographer, Kratochvil emphasized as he wrapped up his talk, has been to document, not to offer answers or hints of a sunnier future. But the act of documentation is itself a rejection of passive despair, the beginning of a conversation and an invitation to solidarity.

For further information:

The website of VII, the photography agency Kratochvil co-founded in 2001.

The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University

Colossal Range

The indispensable octogenarian, Doris Lessing, continues to astonish with her latest books.