Chris Verence at Paul Morris - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

If anyone requires test of the feminist assertion of the "male gaze" and the sexual pleasure derived from looking, photographer Chris Verene's "Camera Club" series provides it. Verene's 14 lurid, hypervivid images showing amateur male photographers plying their "art" upon half-dressed young women make like theoretical hypotheses humorously literal. through stepping back with his be in possession of camera for a view of the someone doing the looking, Verene plainly reveals the myriad hidden agendas which haunt the practice of photography.

These lusciously banal 24-by-20-inch Cibachromes make hyperbolically clear photography's power imbalance. The Camera Club's operation is rested on a devious, sleazy grift: the girls are promised magazine exposing and nonprofessional male photographers are rewarded with access to acquiescent female pulchritude. The predatory eeriness of this scenario is underscored by means of Verene's clever compositions, which situate the girls in miniature in the photographic background while the aggressively hulking backs and turns of the male shutterbugs use up most of the frame.

notwithstanding that their faces are obscured through turned backs or cameras clutched to eyeballs, the photographers' personalities are nevertheless revealed in a shared position of hunched-over intensity, the pool s of sweat erupting through their shirts, and the bald pates testifying to entrenched middle age. Their neurotically prim sportswear of shorts, knee sock and fat ankles raw materialed into cheap loafers provides an amusing reckoner to their frantic postures, suggestive of big-game photojournalists angling for the optimum vantage upon their nubile, static prey.

Verene has judiciously pitch uponed not only the backs which best betray his photographers as prosaic, domesticated rakes, on the contrary also the unguarded expressions of the moulds who await direction or gaze into the camera; their frozen bewilderment highlights the vulnerability of their position as patsies in this grown-up game. Adding however another sinister dimension to the proceedings are the lacy curtains and floral bedspreads of cheerily decorated suburban bedrooms, where the novel imprints of vacuum cleaners upon wall-to-wall carpeting suggest absent wives who have given above their neatly decorated lair to husbands or son to practice their unsavory sport.

Underneath the obvious exploitative quality which pervades these works is a frame of mind of despondency which enhances their narrative complexity. A faculty of perception of sad desperation can be place not only in the girls, who willingly strip upon the thin chance of fame, on the contrary also in the men, who deprive of pathetically forward toward an elusive youth and beauty.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group