By Michael Eilers
Arizona Daily Wildcat
"Sometimes students are ignorant," poet and guest speaker Andrei Codrescu growled in his thick Transylvanian accent. "They need to be dragged to something like this and sat down." I had asked him why students should be drawn to see "Points of Entry: Reframing America," the exhibit at the Center for Creative Photography, but he replied along a different vein, expressing his frustration with the close-the-borders mentality pervading this country.
We live in an amnesiac country that is forgetting its immigrant roots. "Reframing America," a stunning collection of World War II-era photographs by seven immigrant artists, makes this fact eminently clear. Seen through the various lenses of these photographers, America becomes a vital, rich place, full of irony and hidden detail often passed over by a jaded native eye. These photographers' visions of America enrich our understanding of this great country in much the same way their transplanted languages, cultures, and heritage enriched our population.
The exhibit itself is the first of a three-part series called "Points of Entry," a collaborative project created by the Center for Creative Photography, the Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. The results of four years of intensive effort, this show will travel to museums all over the country, showcasing the unique and powerful vision that can be revealed by an outsider's eye.
"We wanted to do something that was bigger than all of us," said Terry Pitts, Director of the CCP. The idea was to create an exhibit, using the pooled resources of the three museums, that gave a complete, complex, and even contradictory record of the immigrant experience.
"We wanted to bring together photographs taken by immigrants, who were looking at America with an adult, alien eye," Pitts said. Joanne Chan, representing the Friends of Photography museum, pointed out that "these photographers 'broke the rules' of American photography, bringing a fresh, experimental vision." This infusion of new ways of seeing influenced American artists for years to come, and in that way reshaped the way we view our own country.
The photographs themselves are a series of miniature revelations. Taken from the years 1927-1948 in an almost exclusively urban environment, these photographs document and record an America rarely seen by the settled majority. Shot from both journalistic and artistic points of view, the photos range from visual essays published in LIFE magazine to deeply personal self-portraits. Pictures of gypsies, the homeless, racial discrimination, and urban poverty reflect the shock and anger these immigrants felt after arriving in the land of plenty and finding only empty pockets.
"We draw (the immigrants) here," Arthur Ollman said of America, "and we must understand who we are that draws them here. This show illustrates the gap between the image of America and the reality of America." Director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, Ollman will co-curate the second installment in the series, entitled "A Nation of Strangers."
Russian-born Alexander Alland photographed an anonymous skyscraper in New York in such a way that it looms menacingly over the viewer, a symbol of the mechanized, incorporated mentality that seemed so strange to immigrants who often came from the "village" cultures of Europe. Another photograph of big-band jazz leader Count Basie captures an utterly American phenomenon from a newcomer's point of view, revealing a quiet awe at the elegance and charm Basie exuded.
Photographers Lisette Model from Austria and Marion Palfi from Germany both saw themselves as "social research photographers," documenting the class differences and social inequities of 1930s America. Rather than setting out to critique America's flaws, these photographers intended to help heal the country they came to love by documenting weaknesses as well as strengths. They felt that recognizing the class disparities and racial tensions underlying America was essential if we intend to make the real America match the ideal.
Andrei Codrescu, always ready to provide an interesting quote, had this to say about immigration: "That is one of those pineapple words, fully loaded with juice, and when you say it, the word bursts into opinions." Most viewers will have many opinions about the exhibit. The photographs present many viewpoints, from frank admiration of American culture to the harshest possible criticism of our occasional slips into racism and discrimination. In this way these alien eyes deepen and enrich our understanding of our own America. By illuminating the dark corners we don't often see, these seven photographers refresh and renew our vision of this country. This is a remarkable exhibit, one that shows the potential of photography as a tool for political and social change, as well as the key to an artist's personal vision.