October 5–12, 2000

art

Her Way

Girls, girls, girls: Plachy’s Barbie Convention, Niagara, New York, 1992

Sylvia Plachy photographs what she wants, how she wants.

by John Grant

Repros: Photographs by Sylvia Plachy

Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Furness Bldg., 220 S. 34th St., through Oct. 29, 215-898-2083

Sylvia Plachy is a photojournalist, but that term is misleading, since it suggests someone who photographs events with a claim of objectivity. In Plachy’s case, there is no such claim; she is unabashed in her subjectivity, imposing an irreverent, often magical, perspective on whatever she photographs.

A refugee from Hungary in 1956, the year the Russians invaded, Plachy eventually ended up as a staff photographer for the Village Voice. Her regular photo column, "Unguided Tour," was for many readers something highly anticipated. Essentially, what it amounted to was Plachy’s latest, favorite picture.

Plachy was free to do whatever moved her. The result was work that broke the rules. Images were often out-of-focus or contained motion blurring of some kind, aesthetic items now very much in fashion. There was little or no captioning. It resulted in an eclectic body of work that extends all over the geographic and thematic map.

That broad range of work is currently on display at the Arthur Ross Gallery in a show of 47 Plachy prints — the bulk in black and white — from 1976 to 1999. A cooperation between the Penn Humanities Forum and the Arthur Ross Gallery, the exhibit is the first of five exhibitions or lectures about the notion of "style."

As a Hungarian, Plachy has an interesting pedigree. Some of the world’s most famous photographers — Brassai, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert and Cornell Capa and Andre Kertesz — were also Hungarian. When they emigrated, they tended to stick together. Robert Capa, who died during the French Indochina War, was helped in his career by Kertesz, as was Plachy, who describes the famous Kertesz as a friend and mentor.

In her collection of "Unguided Tour" photos, Sylvia Plachy’s Unguided Tour (Aperture, 1990), there is a closing shot taken by Kertesz in 1984 of Plachy and five peasant women in aprons, carrying hoes in Hungary "on the road to Visegrad." Kertesz would have been 90 years old, Plachy, 41. The unmistakable joy of the scene — Plachy weighed down with camera bags and bent over laughing, the peasant women also laughing — says something very real about the relationship between the two and the tug of their homeland. Plachy reportedly returns to Hungary often, and several of the images in the show were taken there.

Kertesz, a famous photojournalist in Europe before he arrived in the United States in 1936, had a frustrating time here. He found himself surviving on advertising work. According to the critic Weston Naef in an essay on Kertesz, American photographers at the time concentrated on "delineating clearly the surface of the thing photographed." The old objectivity bugaboo. While for the Hungarian Kertesz, the "first goal was to express his feeling about the subject."

Plachy seems to have a similar aesthetic drive.

In an account in Plachy’s book, Village Voice writer Guy Trebay tells of being on assignment with her in the West. He recalls how she climbed and hung precariously from an oil derrick to get a shot, then later came upon a wounded but still moving rattlesnake, which she coolly photographed up close.

	Mirror mirror: Plachy’s Richie Rude, 1998

"You could look at her gameness as a kind of hubris. Or as I prefer to, you could think of her as blessed. More than once it occurred to me that, when you are smuggled out of a Stalinist country in the bottom of a farm cart, covered with corn, at age 13, you have the sense that the worst has already happened. If fate is laying for you on the top of an oil well or with fangs on a black highway, so be it. The important thing is to get the shot."

The photos at the Ross Gallery exhibit all this.

The exhibit features a 1990 shot of Ralph Nader in Moscow with the political activist in the lower third of the frame in a great hall, waving at the camera — the top two-thirds of the frame are taken up by an immense painting of Lenin holding forth to Bolshevik troops. There’s a 1998 portrait of her son, the actor Adrien Brody, made up with punk spiked hair for a movie. There’s a wonderful shot of tourists at Stonehenge with a backpack and bedroll that perfectly echoes the stacked rock pillars of the ancient site, and a magnificent portrait of I.F. Stone standing between pillars in some Senate office building, grinning uncontrollably.

Then there are the joys of the flesh.

A 1992 shot entitled Yo! is of a delighted young woman in an elevator baring her very pregnant belly. There are images of transvestites donning fake breasts and eyelashes. Finally, there is Peacock in Las Vegas (1993), an angular composition in which a hapless 30ish man sits in the lower right at a table next to a small stage. He is transfixed by an elaborate peacock fan incongruously atop a pair of female legs in high heels. Dead center in this magnificent fan is a perfect bare butt.