Backbone > Lucid Dreaming
Here and There (are closer than you think)
by Beth Elaine Wilson

Everywhere is walking distance
if you have the time. —Steven Wright

“I’m almost 60 years old, and I’m still a war baby, after all these years!” exclaims photographer Marlis Momber, whose work is
featured in an exhibition organized by the Floating Foundation of Photography at Gabriel’s Cafe in Kingston. Born in Berlin in the midst of World War II, her earliest memories are images of destruction—burned-out buildings and empty lots of ragged rubble left in the wake of the Allied bombings during the war. And somehow life went on, as the hungry and traumatized survivors of the war picked up the bits of their lives and began to clean up the mess, bit by bit, and create a new “normal” life. But the trauma of the war experience, of the depravation and the fear, left a mark on the members of Momber’s whole generation. “Normal” life for them always has at its core the possibility of losing everything once again, at least subconsciously.

But the “war babies” worked hard to become successful, and Momber was one of them. She moved to New York in her early twenties, and created a successful career as a fashion photographer, starting as a photographic assistant and climbing her way up the ranks until she found herself sent on assignment to the Caribbean and South America on exotic shoots for a range of clients. Despite her success, however, there was something missing in the succession of glamorous images before her lens. While on assignment in Tortola, she was struck by the harsh contrast between the luxury hotel she was staying in, and the awful poverty of the shanty town just outside the resort, where the maids and porters lived. She ventured out to photograph these decidedly unglamorous subjects, and then brought the images back to the people. She made a slide show of what she saw, projected onto an improvised screen made by stringing a sheet between two trees. The response surprised her—this was the first time these people had had an image of themselves. They were used to thinking of themselves in the terms of the British colonists, or later the rich hotel owners. The empowerment provided by Momber’s sympathetic images was palpable enough to get her thrown off the island by the authorities.

Not long after, back in New York, Momber discovered the Lower East Side. Beginning in the mid-1970s, “Loisaida” (the Spanglish elision of the neighborhood’s name) became an obsession for her. The burned out buildings and the vacant lots recalled the bombed-out Berlin of her childhood, a resemblance that haunted her until she finally left her Sutton Place apartment to move into a homestead building there. She learned to speak some Spanish, and befriended the women in the neighborhood. In contrast with the overwhelming powerlessness of her childhood experience, here she was able to do things to make the place better—helping to organize a daycare center, build a community garden, fight the drug dealers, and raise her own child—and all the while, she obsessively documented the people, the problems, and the possibilities of Loisaida with her camera.

Momber sees the beauty of the people as individuals, and as a community. Her image of 15-year-old Sandra Rivas, standing on the street cradling her infant son, shows Rivas proudly smiling, while giving the camera a knowing, sidelong glance. This body of work, made over three decades, stands in marked solidarity and compassion with the people of Loisaida, and continues in a more personal vein the tradition of social documentary begun by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine at the turn of the 20th century.

Considering herself a “citizen of the world,” Momber recognizes that the problems and struggles of other people are, in the end, our own. One of the major challenges to the Loisaida over the past twenty years has been gentrification—real estate speculators buying properties on the cheap, converting them to yuppie apartments, and making a killing. In the process, the original residents of the area are displaced—and where are they to go? The exigencies of real estate only rarely take such issues into account, and given the immense pressures for “development” right here in the Hudson Valley, the issues raised in this exhibition are much more topical than you might expect.

A very different sort of meeting of worlds is taking place at Collaborative Concepts in Beacon. Estonian photographer Jaanika Peerna and Cayman Islander Bendel Hydes have created a joint exhibition entitled “Climate of Sight.” Peerna’s photographs begin with a contrasty black-and-white image, often of natural subjects such as a thicket of winter trees, which is then distorted digitally to create various abstract patterns. She then scratches into the emulsion of the finished print with tools ranging from exacto knives to steel wool, giving a tactile quality to the surface of the piece, investing the photograph with the qualities of both drawing and painting.

Bendel Hydes creates large-scale paintings using broad, bright washes of color, creating beautiful abstractions that continually threaten to morph into landscapes or other recognizable forms, like a Rorschach test, except that the images never entirely settle into legibility. His objective in this work is “finding a personal geography,” a process which, however, is grounded in a world of intersubjectivity—we devise meanings for ourselves based on common ideas that circulate among us. As a result, his personal vision is rendered (at least potentially) comprehensible to the rest of us, as it is made visible through the work.
The contrasts between the two bodies of work—Peerna’s smaller scale explorations in black-and-white versus Hydes’ expansive veils of color—are reconciled in a collaborative piece, also titled “Climate of Sight.” On a series of large squares of clear vinyl suspended in a parallel row from the ceiling, the two artists have executed various abstractions, Hydes’ in washes of blue and green, Peerna’s in more linear splashes of black. The viewer then looks through the overlaid series, which creates an almost aquarium-like effect, casting into confusion relationships of near and far, of what is accessible and what is out of reach. It seems a fitting summary of our strange and marvelous world, where the Baltic can meet the Caribbean, allowing each to maintain its individual character.

“Loisaida 1976-2003: Herstories” (photographs by Marlis Momber), presented by the Floating Foundation of Photography, March 1-26 at Gabriel’s Café, 50 John Street, Kingston. 338-7161. Opening March 1, 5-7pm.

“Climate of Sight” (photographs by Jaanika Peerna and paintings by Bendel Hydes), through April 6 at Collaborative Concepts, 348 Main Street, Beacon. 838-1516.