Getty's "Close to Home" is a pictorial walk through history

Guy Stricherz, American, born 1948. Irene Malli, American, born 1964. Jerry Cox, Kansas City, Kansas. 1995. Dye transfer print after a color transparency by Don Cox, about 1962. Promised gift of Nancy and Bruce Berman. © Guy Stricherz

 

By Brooke Karli
Online Forty-Niner
Staff Writer

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. "Close to Home: An American Album," a current exhibition at the Getty Center, speaks loudly of the decades dating from 1930 to the mid-1960s, depicting America's history and lifestyle through the art of photography.

Nearly 200 priceless black-and-white and color photographs hang in the gallery, 120 of which are family snapshots by untrained photographers. Guy Stricherz, along with wife Irene Malli, turned popular post-World War II 35-millimeter Kodachrome slides into 25 fine-art prints.

After receiving a slide of his family taken in 1952, Stricherz was astonished at the quality of the cardboard-mounted transparency, displaying well-preserved color and a vivid depiction. He placed an open call in hundreds of small-town newspapers throughout the United States requesting old family transparencies taken between 1945 and 1965. Fourteen years later, the project attracted 100,000 responses and Stricherz and his wife chose 92 to transform into dye transfer prints.

"We focused on people and scenes with strong character," Stricherz said." Our intent was to portray the lives of ordinary Americans during the post-World War II era. Each picture has a private meaning, yet each holds a truth common to us all."

The gallery continues into two more rooms, one of which consists of black-and-white photos of couples, pets, children, friends and so on. The pictures are just as depictive and memorable as those shown by Stricherz, but have a better story as to how they were gathered.

Gail Pine, artist, collector and dealer of the recently uncovered photographs, found nearly all the photos on display at outdoor markets or second-hand shops.

According to Pine, "When disasters strike, many people rush to save family snapshots, which they consider among their most valuable possessions. However, what one generation treasures, another sometimes abandons. My interest in found photography grew out of serious reflection upon personal history, genealogy, and memory."

The final room contains some of the first and oldest portraits, taken in the late 1800s. All of the portraits are very simple and plain, most suffering damage from weathering, time and natural disasters. Portraits were done in rural areas by self-trained portraitists who traveled from farm to farm in wagons mounted with crude photographic darkrooms. They would pose their subjects facing forward, brightly painting them from the waist up, and focusing on the head and shoulders.

Although many of the photographs were taken by unknown, inexperienced creators, some of the photos on show were developed by well-known photographers such as Thomas Eakins, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange.

Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, summarizes photography as "The chief visual instrument of social memory." Such a statement is validated through the family snapshots that commemorate an occasion, capture a moment, or secure a memory.

The important milestones marked in the timeline of the American experience are prominent throughout the exhibition, including everything from the single life filled with friends and relationships to marriage and family. Photographs of couples and groups of friends, parents holding their babies, children at play, women in pretty dresses, men in their favorite hats, families on vacation or at home, and people with their prized possessions, including cars, television sets, and pets, are all strangely familiar images, even to those who never knew the people featured in the photographs.

It is said that a good family snapshot relies strictly on its degree to which the private and personal experiences portrayed are elevated to the lyrical and universal. More importantly, family snapshots can succeed because they are the product of pure instinct and represent endless fascinating combinations and variations on everyday life.

As stressed by Naef, "While time may not, in fact, stand still, a photograph can be a compelling object that suspends a vivid moment by trapping it in light-sensitive materials and fixing it indefinitely for another person to view and experience."

The "Close to Home: An American Album" exhibition will be at the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles until Jan. 16, 2005.