More Real: The Photographs of Barry Kornbluh
You get off a bus and there's a lot of activity in the corner pizza shop with its straight angles, someone wiping the glass countertops, the pizza oven's metallic mass shining in the brightness of the fluorescent lights and the guys' whites. It's not gentle to the eyes. You walk by. It's a harsh city. It's a scream out there. A frenzy of hurried paces and rough stances. Rudeness is accepted. If you look into the closed shop, there's always a lone someone mopping the floor.
Inside somewhere. The city's energy has heated the blood, given its dose of nerve. You're still dazzled and ready to be dazzled more or affect a dazzle of your own. It might be in the way you strut down the office hallway towards a Xerox machine and say hello and notice the day's paper lying on a chair.
These photos certainly don't need words to tell you what you're seeing or should be feeling. They allow immediate response. You might be in too much of a hurry, too distracted with the frivolities of your work week to give an image some contemplation, but these snaps can grab you into their recesses away from the harried embellishments going on around you. There's a focus here, a concentration and direction of force; a determination to pursue past the distractions we allow to pad our processes.
This photographer is more real because he reveals what's visible, not what we pretend to see. Maybe one would rather be shown prettiness, be cheered up, made to laugh or sentimentalize. Something more real is going on here. These are looks at not away from. You can go on hiding but you know there's something behind you as substantive as a shadow. These photos are pure because they speak to that voice inside us deep under protective layers of denial. Gloom is part of the make-up, more visible in these shots than most of us are used to taking in. In looking at the more somber facts, these images go beyond the proprieties we're comfortable with.
It's because he doesn't range far from the immediate look around that these photos might disturb. These aren't scenes of news events we can abstractly say we're supposed to have some feelings for, some compassion for. This is a domestic journalism that does more than report: it elicits response to those feelings imbued into the shots. The viewer's response is aided and encouraged because the photographer has mined to that gist to which the viewer can't help but feel.
Each shot is an investigation into the stillness of the image's moment. Our imaginations are touched by the waves of feeling emanating from these scenarios. Gripped emotionally, responded from the gut, we acclimate to the moods, slow down enough to hear the whispering tones, become involved because we recognize the necessity of paying attention to these feelings Barry Kornbluh reveals. The atmosphere echoes with the responsibility of action.
(unpublished)