Strangelove’s Weegee and Zhang Yaxin: Model Operas complement each other in curious, provocative ways

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      Strangelove’s Weegee
      Zhang Yaxin: Model Operas
      At Presentation House Gallery until July 26

      In a fake American war room: a custard-pie fight among five-star generals and men in suits. In an ersatz pine forest: a leaping dance by rifle-wielding Chinese soldiers. What? On first glance, Presentation House Gallery’s two photographic exhibitions, Strangelove’s Weegee and Zhang Yaxin: Model Operas, appear oddly alien to each another. Both represent highly stylized, popular-culture productions, undertaken during politically charged times, yes, but from vastly different cultural, aesthetic, and ideological conditions.

      The first show is composed largely of black-and-white images, shot in 1963 on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s cult film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. They’re dark, candid, and at times almost grotesque, revealing the seepage of tabloid voyeurism into a more vaunted form of mass media. The second show consists of colour images documenting propagandistic operas and ballets produced in China during the Cultural Revolution. Their hues are highly keyed and their subjects are stiffly posed and idealized. Turns out, though, that PHG curator Helga Pakasaar knew exactly what she was doing, programming these two bodies of work concurrently. They complement each other in curious and provocative ways.

      Weegee, aka Arthur Fellig, is acclaimed for what the show’s introductory panel describes as “his stark depictions of the dark underbelly of New York”. Working as a press photographer in the 1930s and ’40s, he had a reputation for arriving at violent accidents, destructive fires, and bloody crime scenes before police and emergency workers. (He wasn’t clairvoyant; he merely tapped into police radio transmissions.) Using a Speed Graphic camera with flash (many of his news shots were taken in the middle of the night), he created a distinctive aesthetic that suited his subject matter. As many of his images focus on shocked witnesses, distraught survivors, and gawking bystanders as on the victims themselves, thus upping the voyeuristic ante.

      Why a notoriously exacting film director would hire Weegee to record the making of Dr. Strangelove is explored by guest curator John O’Brian in the show’s catalogue. Kubrick, who started his career as a photographer for Look magazine, apparently wanted to achieve a noir-ish look in his movie, made in anxious response to the nuclear-arms race and the Cuban missile crisis. Weegee was instructed to shoot the Strangelove proceedings with a flash, which isolated the actors in stark and unflattering relief against a backdrop of midnight darkness. Peter Bull is caught with an ugly, distorted expression on his face; Peter Sellers is snagged with an inhaler in one nostril and a pox-size pore on the end of his nose. Not exactly the enticing publicity stills most film studios were looking for.

      A large number of the Weegee photos on view are focused on Kubrick himself, especially as he sets up shots, peering through a viewfinder or movie-camera lens. As both O’Brian and Pakasaar observed at a recent public talk, the element of voyeurism here is again doubled: just as he did in his news photos, Weegee shoots “the looker looking”. There’s something both straightforward and devious about this work.

      Zhang Yaxin’s brilliantly coloured photos also reveal a kind of straightforward deviousness. During China’s Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing, directed the production of revolutionary operas and ballets. These re-educational, proletarian works were staged and then filmed for mass distribution, and stills from them were also widely distributed in various forms. As a photojournalist working for a state-controlled news agency, Zhang was seconded to document these “model works”, which paradoxically absorbed influences from banned “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionary” art forms such as Peking opera and Hollywood musicals.

      As an indication of his privileged undertaking, Zhang was given the use of one of only three Hasselblad cameras in all of China, as well as a supply of what must have been contraband Kodak colour film. His images are meticulously composed, revealing both his own perfectionism and the control-freak tendencies of Madame Mao. Revolutionary soldiers and courageous peasants, in overdetermined poses and with operatically exaggerated expressions on their highly made-up faces, extend their arms in salute of a blood-stained heroine or brandish weapons in defiance of the enemy. In a still from Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, two uniformed men, each enhanced with black eyeliner and raspberry-red lipstick, stand chest to chest and hand to hand as if ballroom dancing—an inadvertent drag show.

      Curiously, the self-awareness of these photos, their obvious posturing and stagecraft, plays into the postmodern western aesthetic. Where once Zhang’s photos would have been read as kitsch, they are now admired and collected as culturally and aesthetically significant. Both Weegee and Zhang produced curiously self-conscious hybrids—under the close instruction of their inspired or benighted bosses.

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