CRITICAL REFLECTIONS
Miguel Gandert: Saints In my photographs I’ve always attempted to show the strength and dignity of the social classes I work with, to show them at their best. Often when dealing with a lower income population, one only shows the sadder and painful sides of life. I’ve chosen to show direct portraits of a proud people. —Miguel Gandert
No valid
negative critique of Miguel Gandert’s project of ethnographic documentary photography can be made from the perspective of his intentions. He accomplishes everything he sets out to do, with immense style and grace. On a formal level his silver gelatin prints are rich and sumptuous, well composed and technically outstanding. The images are fantastic, intriguing, even haunting, and the gift he gives viewers is one of insight into a world with which they may or may not be familiar. A common problem with ethnographic photo-documentation is that it can typically be characterized as rich people taking pictures of poor people for other rich people to look at. An excellent example would be Cyril Christo’s photographs of African natives. No matter how technically accomplished the work is, it never escapes the valid criticism that it functions as a kind of aesthetic colonialism. The old idea that a camera is a kind of soul-stealing device is absolutely true in this sense. This is related to why indigenous people worldwide tend, in general, to despise anthropologists. But what does it mean when the anthropologist descends from the same culture he or she sets out to study, or, as in Gandert’s case, the observer is also a participant? For his stunning photograph Christ in the Sarcophagus, taken during a ritual in Nombre de Dios, Mexico, Gandert broke away from assisting in laying the effigy of Christ into place only seconds before he snapped the shutter. No valid criticism can be made that Gandert is an outsider looking in. Quite the contrary, as a native of Española, NM, with deep roots in the region, he is documenting his own Hispanic cultural background and current traditional practices with the passion and insights of an insider. In this way, Gandert’s work is muy auténtico and thereby more potent than the usual ethnographer’s fare. So what’s my problem with it? You can’t criticize a submarine for not being able to fly, or critique an airplane for not operating underwater, but you can decide whether either vehicle is appropriate to its context. When Gandert has his one-man show at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian in 1990 it makes all kinds of sense. He presents a slice
and
Sinners
Andrew Smith Gallery 122 Grant Avenue, Santa Fe
of American life that a great many people are unfamiliar with, and doing so enriches everyone’s understanding of our contemporary multicultural reality. This is a very good thing. When his work shows up in the Whitney Biennial, as it did a few years ago, it starts to smack of rich people looking at poor people, though there’s nothing Gandert can really do to solve that problem. You don’t turn down the Whitney just because it might be the wrong context for your work, right? Or because some high-society person isn’t going to get it. But this dilemma raises real questions about museum mechanisms, the marketing of art, and the inevitable complexities of content versus context. At the elegant Andrew Smith Gallery on Grant Street, where Saints and Sinners (the name of the show, as well as a bar in Española) is given a room of its own, the context seems just fine given the gallery’s emphasis on photography and Gandert’s remarkable achievements. But when some wealthy Anglo who has just transplanted himself from the East Coast or California to the La Tierra subdivision buys one of these penitente prints because they go well with the exposed adobe and vigas of his new New Mexican summer home I start to get a little sick to my stomach. Yet again, what can Gandert, a (surely underpaid) University of New Mexico professor, do about that moral problema, short of single-handedly overthrowing capitalism? If only he could. That’s a great submarine you’ve got, but put it up in the sky and it’ll drop like a rock. Beautiful airplane you got going there, but set it in the water and it sinks like a stone. This all amounts to saying that there is a fine line between expanding awareness of culture, and aesthetic quasi-colonialism. The critique here is not of Gandert’s project, but is directed instead at how mainstream culture tends to echo a history of colonialism in its ongoing commoditization of ethnicity. And finally, as someone who sees Catholicism particularly, and Christianity in general, as one of the greatest evil delusions to ever beset humanity, many of these images make me ill. I can’t look at these pictures without thinking about the atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition, or the medieval tunnels connecting the monasteries and convents lined with the bones of dead newborns. The Vatican continues to be the wealthiest institution in the world, while many if not most of her adherents suffer in poverty; nothing Christ-like about that. Rituals that celebrate “St. James the Moor Killer” are reprehensibly ignorant. We might as well venerate George Bush Jr. as the new Great Crusader, cheer for the Ku Klux Klan, and piously promote priestly pedophilia.
—Jon Carver Miguel Gandert, Christ in the Sarcophagus, Nombre de Dios, Mexico, silver gelatin print, 2008
| j ul y 2012
THE magazine | 53