/the strange intimacies/
Young American photographer Beth Block graduated only recently (in 2001) in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has presented herself to American audiences at several group exhibits: in New York, California and Texas. Beth Block cannot boast a dazzling CV full of ”important“ connections, but her way of seeing the urban environment and its inanimate details is very intriguing. Her From There to Here is a series of life situations shown in convincing snapshots: the back of a Harlem vendor; purple high-heeled sandals hooked in the legs of a barstool; a typical fat American girl with blue lips, waiting with an ice cream in her hand for her mother's super retro afro to be styled; a coat, a carousel, a cigarette, heels, an umbrella, four white limos squeezed together outside a middle-class suburban house. (Why so many and why so tightly parked? Is there a wedding in the house? Or does a posh taxi driver live there? Hard to tell.) We can only speculate about the causes and consequences of the recorded details. A subtle humour underlies these perhaps at first sight simple-looking photographs which reveal small bits of the lives of things and people in the city and encourage us to develop them further in our minds; other photographs by Block have the feel of quiet contemplative corners which invite us to rest on a plastic chair, for instance with Mrs. Robinson.Indeed, things and environments play the main role in this series; rather than figures or faces of people, we are more likely to see just part of someone's leg, back or hand, a piece of their coat... The three portraits included in this series, however, prove Beth Block's ability to capture the person as part of an unrepeatable fragment of a story full of suspense and her ability to see subtle connections that carry a concise message cleverly reinforced by the photograph's title. Beneath their seemingly unspectacular and banal surface lies the artist's intent at communicating an event, including its intensity, to which she was witness. The city and the people living inside this huge city are the source of small, intimate events. This approach to photography is evident in the artist's series Portraits - Strange Intimacies. Without being too literal, Block precisely captures the peculiar intimacies and idiosyncrasies of various urban characters born out of the atomisation of the urban agglomeration. The photographs are named after prominent props in the portraits (e.g. red chair, stairs rooster, kebab stand, Roosevelt Ave.). They are messages told in the body language of people, animals, objects and the environment.
Beth Block shows her sense for working with the visual atmosphere of the city most strongly in her third series of photographs, which she presents on her personal website (www.bethblock.com). Into the Night (2002) pulls us into the unsettling urban night, whose lights construct a world of irrational emotions, fear, suspense and anticipation. A lone house, purple trees, the blue sky of a late sunset, narrow vistas and backlit shadows with silhouetted figures, an empty dining room, a golf course. Spectacular, empty spaces in which daylight plays the main role. The light of the sky and the lights of the city and their transformations. Found scenes of nocturnal urban performances without people, complete as they are, surrounded by an aura of restless fascination.
Beth Block's photographic images are rich in colour and able to communicate a pure and strongly visual message. Something which needs no words... another thing to like about them.