NOT NICE GIRLS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY WOMEN 1930-1980
Most are casual but penetrating portraits of weathered, solitary individuals. At first our attention is caught by their strangeness–the overdone makeup of an old woman in Woman With Veil, San Francisco, the exceptional girth of a woman at the beach in Woman at Coney Island, New York, the clashing, garish patterns of the hat and tentlike dress worn by another rotund woman in Woman in Flowered Dress, Riviera. But Model crops the photographs to downplay surroundings, filling the frame with her subjects, prodding us to study intimately their expressions, gestures, and style. An affectionate sensibility permeates many of these photographs, as though each person Model photographed were her own relative. When they are aware of being photographed, Model’s subjects rarely betray discomfort; in this respect her photographs are quite different from those of her well-known student Diane Arbus.
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Tension of another kind characterizes the collaborative photographs made in the mid-80s by Diane Schmidt and Michele Fitzsimmons, in which Fitzsimmons, a poet and artist, posed nude in unexpected places–on an el platform, in an Art Institute gallery, on a ledge across from the Wrigley Building. But her role isn’t to allure. Sitting on a bench at the Sedgwick el stop in Five Minutes to the Loop she gazes matter-of-factly at the camera, looking tired and bored. In Reclining Figure, Art Institute she clings apprehensively to a Henry Moore sculpture, while behind her two men peer at a Picasso painting, seemingly unaware of the presence of model or photographer. Schmidt and Fitzsimmons cleverly blend conceptual and documentary approaches; while making straightforward images that celebrate Chicago’s light and architecture, they prompt us to reevaluate attitudes about the body and about women that underlie more conventional nude photography.
