Washington, D.C., is where our national identity is housed, protected and put on display for the masses. D.C. has also become known as a city of museums. Large, significant museums, houses of our national history and culture, most of which are free to the public, can be found in D.C. This celebration of our national identity defines the District for millions of Americans.
But despite the cultural draw of the establishment here in Washington, there is a thriving counter-culture that exists beneath the surface that finds such a celebration disturbing, and even dangerous.
In a city that has politics at its very core, it is difficult not to find a moral message in the emerging avant-garde art being generated here. The work of Cynthia Connolly, a D.C. based photographer whose work is currently being exhibited at the funky P St. gallery Transformer, is charged with social significance, both for the city and the country. The work, complied from a year spent in West Alabama, elegantly and subtly documents the struggles of America's rural poor.
The exhibit is divided into two sections, with large black and white prints on hanging on the west wall of the gallery, and dozens of 5x7-sized images in both color and black and white lining the shelves of the east wall. The photographs are immediately striking, as Connolly has cleverly employed a series of techniques to connect viewers with her images.
Her shooting, printing and presentation style work hand in hand. Connolly will shoot two related images consecutively then print them next to each other on the same piece of paper, containing them in the same frame. Sometimes one of the images is a special continuation of the other, so that the two (or sometimes three or four) images make one whole picture. However, in some photos the images are only thematically related, depicting similar buildings, different parts of the
same structure or different billboards or signs with related content.
Her use of irony when selecting images to present together in the same frame strongly indicates that the artist has a point to make. The words "No Drinking," or "No Alcohol," "No Gambling" and "No Loitering," appear frequently on signs or on the outside of the buildings Connolly depicts in her work, insinuating a community that has been left behind.
"This is a place ignored by most, especially corporate America, because there is little reason to advertise and sell in these primarily poor regions," reads the artist's statement. "I realized these people were living with bare necessities - food, light, water, gas, car and shelter."
In the gallery, the eye wanders immediately to the larger prints, first examining the photos and allowing them to provide an introduction to the subject matter. But unexpectedly, it is with the 5x7-sized images that Connolly's point is driven home. Each 5x7 photograph is individually framed and set up in rows along shelves. To look at a photograph, the viewer must actually pick it up, must actually physically handle it. In doing this, Connolly forces those who view who work to build an intimate relationship with the images depicted. No one is allowed to view from a distance.
The nature of her work, and its ability to make us ponder the causes of poverty and other social ills, is contrary to a strong movement in contemporary photography that seeks to present its subject matter without any imposed judgment or opinion from the artist. Connolly has no doubt been influenced by the dynamics and politics of Washington, D.C., the city the 42-year-old artist has called home since 1981. For those who live here, the city's iconic image is forever altered after witnessing and experiences the tremendous segregation, poverty and violence that plagues the city, beginning just a few blocks from the capital, the monuments and all the other symbols that represent and define America's view of itself.
While Connolly's work depicts Alabama, it is the second in a series of exhibits spotlighting of D.C. artists at Transformer for a reason. These images tell a story that is all too familiar to those who call the nations capital home, but easily ignored by most everyone else.
Perhaps Transformer is aptly named. A tiny space squeezed into an old storefront, between a rowhouse and a barber shop, across the street from a massive new high rise being constructed and down the street from the District's largest Whole Foods Market, the gallery attempts
to change how we think of ourselves as a community, as a city and as a nation. Artists in the District, like Connolly, whose work can't be found in the Smithsonian or the National Gallery, often seek to expand, redefine and ultimately transform the images D.C. conjures up in the public mind, forcing the ideas exalted on the National Mall to defend themselves in the face of reality.
Cynthia Connolly will be speaking at Transformer on April 16 at 2 p.m.
