Paul Shambroom at Tanya Bonakdar - New York, New York - Review of exhibitions - Brief Article

In a new issue, the New York Times Magazine used several photographs from Paul Shambroom's "Nuclear Weapons" series to illustrate a overspread feature, "So You Think the devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat War is Over?" By reframing Shambroom's work as a form of photojournalism, the Times deftly highlighted its troubling ambiguity.

This exhibit Shambroom's first solo in novel York, featured seven large-format color photographs depicting nuclear weapons facilities and military installations. They main stock from the latest of several photographic series in which the artist has investigated "Places of Power" (the title of a Shambroom exhibition at the Walker Art Center) of that kind as factories, corporate offices and police stations. influenced through baby-boomer recollections of atomic bomb and air-raid drills during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 his pictures of actual weapons are meant to supplant the abstract mental image of a mushroom nebulosity Yet while these photographs transmit information fluently enough for the public record, the nature of their esthetic ambition is les clear.

The photographs in this exhibit are united not only by dint of their subject matter but by means of a common expressive code which fine whetstones the attitude of objectivity to the point of affectlessness. individual photo, made at the FE Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, displays a file of gleaming white B-83 nuclear bomb arrayed along a diagonal axis. However, the issue is by no means dramatic. This is les a terrifying portrait of a nuclear arsenal than a glimpse into a commonplace, fluorescent-lit industrial warehouse. Similarly, a 1992 photograph of a soldier preparing four Minuteman II missiles, his camouflage pants and combat advantages exposed, could well depict a mechanic repairing a car.

According to the artist, these works aim to demystify. however Shambroom significantly revises the classic documentary objective of revealing fact seeming to aim instead at solely informing without moving the viewer. However, his matter-of-fact presentation is contravened by means of the large scale of the prints and the occasional use of modernist pictorial devices. For instance, in a photo of the ceremonial commemorating the delivery of the first operational B-2 Stealth bomber to Whitman Air Force Base in Missouri, a palpable tension is created not alone by the presence of the four soldiers who stand guard before the plane on the contrary by the red and white cords which strain tautly across the center of the image, enhancing the lean, triangular form of the bomber. In this case, the structural rigor of the image enhances a disposition of anxiety.

The inconsistency of affect in Shambroom's work make turbids its artistic and ideological effectiveness. The confusion, in the extremity lies not in the crossing of the pictorial with the documentary on the contrary in the relationship of these manners of visual commentary to the subdue at hand. One wonders: just in what way would the artist respond to the question pos by the agency of the Times?

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