Are we there yet?

Liza Macrae Are we there yet?

When you hear a symphony or read a great poem, very few people are deluded enough to say to themselves: I could do that. Yet photography, unique perhaps of all the arts in its accessibility, tempts the viewer into confusing the good with the great. There are very few people who look at photographs who don’t own a camera of their own. Industry estimates put the percentage of US households owning photographic equipment at 80. Last year alone, over 20 million digital cameras were sold in the United States alone - and that’s not counting the number of cell phones, tablets, and laptops equipped with image-making capability. There remains a small number of photographers who bring us images that ordinary people would have no way of capturing - close-ups of celebrities, say, or glimpses of forbidden terrain too dangerous to allow most of us to point and shoot at them, such as war zones, eruptions, cyclones. But most of the photographs hung in galleries or collected in books present images that we who are viewing those images could conceivably have photographed ourselves.

Thus the implicit irony of photography’s

democratization is illuminated and reinforced: as the number of Anyones who can make a photograph has wildly increased, the percentage of those photographs deemed worthy of our attention has by mathematical necessity shrunk. As a kind of technological democracy has been manufactured, the old hierarchies survive. A case in point is this collection of images made by the rural renegade photographer Liza Macrae, who seems to belong to no school, follows no fashion, and has been creating a breathtaking body of work beneath - or perhaps beyond - the cultural radar for years. Here are 39 photographs of startling originality, all of which, singly and together, sharpen to a fine point the mysterious distinction between what an ordinary person sees and what a gifted artist sees. Here there are no combat zones, no erupting volcanoes,

no movie stars, no freaks, and, really, nothing that would be beyond the purview of any camera owning American with access to a child, a house, a room, a sink, a tub, a dog, sky, or water. Yet in image after image, Macrae de-mystifies the mysterious, and re-mystifies the mundane. The refusal of these images to announce their own specialness becomes part of the spell they cast. They say to us: You could see this too, if only you would. A few of these pictures have an eerie, haunted quality - they could almost be stills from a horror movie. Her photograph, for example, of the abandoned house with a tricycle nosed into a corner, standing there like a punished child whose vanished family has forgotten to forgive him. Yet infused in the desolation of this image is a visual nostalgia for the life these now bare rooms once enclosed, a life suggested by the candy colored exuberance of the walls themselves. On her mother’s side, Liza has Southern roots, and on her father’s side her background is New York literary. Macraes have been prominent publishers since the early days of the 20th Century - her great-grandfather was head of the fabled old house of E.P. Dutton, and was responsible for bringing Winnie the Pooh to American shores, and her father continues to have a distinguished career as an editor and publisher. Coming at things from the literary angle myself, I note with interest the complete absence of text from Macrae’s photographs - no signage, no headlines, no book spines. The closest thing we have to written communication is the unsettling picture of another seemingly abandoned house, again with candy colored walls, where the hearth has been hastily stuffed with newspapers, though no matter which way I turn the photo all I can make out is a letter or two here and there, the print within the print insistently indecipherable. But what is decipherable here are the good if naive intentions and dashed hopes of whoever hung this wallpaper, since its gaiety is almost completely

undermined by the slapdash manner with which it has been hung. Macrae is a poet of the unutterable. I was raised to believe that if you could not find words to express a thought it decreased or even erased the value and even the validity of that thought, yet here Macrae reminds (and reassures) us that often our most profound moments are ineffable, inexpressible, almost, in fact, un-photographable. Here the frank and the elusive share the same space, the all-seeing and the tactful. Here a child says This is Me and This is Not Me in the same breath. Many of these pictures explore Macrae’s daughter with a disorienting, strangely invigorating lack of possessiveness. Rarely has a child been photographed with such respect for her autonomy and mysteriousness, and, as the pictures themselves explore the boundaries of selfhood and privacy, a privacy that neither nakedness nor close-up can corrupt, the intransigence of the daughter’s gaze rings out again and again, like a hammer against steel. Macrae eschews melodrama with the zeal of a minimalist. Two trucks on a highway, ghostly white, spewing mist, a rooster prancing across a snowy field, a toy in an empty bath tub, a girl wearing her dog as if it were a fox stole, a young boy learning an early lesson in machismo, displaying his decorously bleeding nose while concealing his undoubtedly less decorous feelings about what has befallen him. As universal as these images are, through them we find our relationship to the physical world being finely recalibrated. Just like a great book becomes a lesson in how to read, these images offer us a chance to refine what John Berger called our ways of seeing. Even when the images seem haphazard, discovered by accident, taken on the run, they each are presented with the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. Yet there is something more here than a refinement of our ways of seeing. There is also a refinement of our way of being. Rarely has such frankness of gaze and muscularity of vision been combined with such

Some photographers become famous

that the artist either created these tears to be photographed, or quickly

for imposing a narrative on their subjects - the great pictures of Sebastian

capitalized on their appearance by setting her camera on a tripod and

Salgado, in which the suffering of workers visually echoes the story of Christ

tripping the shutter with a plunger release, the entire enterprise becomes

come to mind. Others, like Nan Goldin, manage to turn their work into

trickier, and more puzzling. I can’t help but wonder if Macrae including this

a continual act of self-examination, an arresting autobiography in which the

self portrait is her way of alerting us to the possibility that what seems to

artist is all the more present for never appearing. In Liza Macrae’s work

be occurring without the artist’s intrusion or pre-meditation is something

there is no imposed narrative, and no discoverable autobiography. In fact,

entirely more controlled and painstaking after all. Going back to that picture,

you are tempted to believe that the photographer doesn’t entirely exist, and

her mournful face seems suddenly to be laughing at me: how could I have

that the photographs are not images but windows, through which you can

ever thought for even a moment that such suchness could have been the

look and see the world.

result of anything but massive effort and consummate skill? Every image in

gentleness and unobtrusiveness.

A critic describing the quality of unsentimental pity that permeates the work of Anton Chekhov suggested that Chekhov saw the life of people and animals from a distance, but with the clear forgiving eyes of an angel. I said a few paragraphs above that, especially given her background, there is a noticeable lack of the literary in Macrae’s pictures, yet I nevertheless thought of Chekhov as I looked at them. These remarkable pictures hold within them the pure gravitas of nature, in which the plain reality of our existence overwhelms our need to judge it, or edit it, and understanding is expressed by our abandoning our attempts to understand. Liza Macrae has accumulated an idiosyncratic body of work that finds its power and vitality in the contested space between the billion photographs taken every year and the precious few that matter. Her pictures are so effortless they can seem accidental, but one image here may give a bit of the game away. It’s the one self-portrait in the collection, and it shows the artist weeping. The anguish and dignity of her face creates a kind of emotional alarm, as we watch what happens to a face when it is twisted by grief. But then you think - Wait. How did this picture come into being? And what is that in her hand in the bottom right corner of that image? And when it becomes clear

this book suggests that we are seeing something the artist has been waiting her whole life to show us. - Scott Spencer

Are we there yet? Photographs by Liza Macrae Edited and Designed by Malene Waldron Text by Scott Spencer The 39 black and white and color photographs were made between 1988 and 2011.

Are we there yet? has been produced as a limited edition large format hand printed spiral-bound book © Macrae/Waldron 2012 Hudson Valley New York.