The 20th century didn’t introduce the notion of gender as a malleable value, but it certainly brought the examination of shifting gender identity fully into public view. What freaked out the squares in Shakespeare’s time continues to freak them out in ours, which must come as a relief to the 18 artists whose narrative photographs and portraiture comprise “Role Models,” a collection of 70 provocative pictures on view at the National Museum for Women in the Arts. The show, the brainchild of NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling, is a veritable catalogue of the ways imagery defines identity, even — or perhaps especially — when the authors of said imagery are skilled artists with a full understanding of the semiotic weight of their pictures.
Subtitled, “Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography,” the show is bracing and provocative even when it’s inscrutable. The show cleanly delineates two generations of female photographers. The first, emerging in the early 1980s (Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, Laurie Simmons) was born between 1940 and 1960, thus coming of age just as the “second wave” of the feminist movement was gathering steam.
First among these was Cindy Sherman, who satirized and repurposed traditional modes of femininity as presented by magazine advertisements, film, and television with her “Untitled Film Stills” series circa 1977-80. Casting herself in various roles, Sherman created photos that could double as performance art. “She’s good enough to be a real actress,” Andy Warhol once said of Sherman. She’s represented in this show by three early 80s pieces and one from 1989, charting an arc of increasing sophistication through the decade.
Nan Goldin, meanwhile, photographed herself and those close to her in their own never-glamorous apartments and haunts. Her shots were bold simply for their refusal to clean up her subjects and their environments.
Sally Mann’s photos of young girls, including her own daughters, putting on makeup and posing with candy cigarettes are almost certainly more unsettling now than when she made them, 20 to 25 years ago. In the wake of the case of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty pageant contestant whose still-unsolved 1996 murder brought the issue of the sexualization of children to the forefront of public debate, it’s difficult to look at Mann’s work and think of anything else. The five 1996-7 photos from Anna Gaskell — one of nine photographers who comprise the second generation in “Role Models —explore the wonder and mystery of childhood, too, inspired more by the Brothers Grimm and Lewis Carroll than by any real-world notions of beauty or sexuality.
Gaskell’s pictures, along with those of Justine Kurland and Barbara Prost, blur the line between the conceptual and the documentary even further than their predecessors dared. Kurland’s photos, using all-volunteer models, sometimes appear set on another world entirely, one as devoid of warmth as it is of, well, men. (Actually, a man does appear in one image. It’s called “The Pale Serpent.”) Sharon Lockhart, only a decade younger than Sherman, carries on the latter’s tradition of stylized, cinema-inspired still photography — her subject here is a Japanese girls’ basketball team.
The show also includes memorable pieces by Mary Ellen Mark and Tina Barney, who examine womanhood at opposite ends of the spectrum of wealth and entitlement, and Laurie Simmons, who uses dolls and masks to represent the confined societal roles women have traditionally been allowed.
If you go
“Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography”
Where: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW
When: Through Jan. 25
Info: $10 / $8 seniors (60+) & students, free for members and under age 18; 202-783-5000; www.nmwa.org
