Tanja tackles friendship…

My personal Facebook page lasted two hours. I signed up with little enthusiasm but felt a general social pressure to “get with it”. The first posting that arrived was the writer’s thoughts on the sunrise that day. The next was a response to that. The third was about waiting for his kids to come out to the car, and I was so shocked by the mind-deadening triviality of this new information highway that I got off at the next stop. The only reason I keep my personal page is that it’s a requirement in order to have a business page. I never look at it. Ever.

Tanja Alexia Hollander is a Maine-based fine art photographer who has been around. But she’s not of my generation and therefore would have been easier with the Facebook way of finding new friends, and staying in touch with old friends and family members. But she obviously wondered to herself at some point how it would all hold up if these “post-ers” were brought from cyberspace into the light of the real world.

Tanja Alexia Hollander: Are You Really My Friend? has recently opened at the Portland Museum of Art and runs through June 17, 2012. Tanja must be grinning from ear to ear because the media – from The Boston Globe to MPBN – have been happy to embrace this quirky exhibit, and it’s getting terrific mileage.

I immediately loved the l-o-n-g (70′) print that starts off the exhibit at the top of the stairway entry. It’s a brilliant ploy that says loudly and immediately that here is something you’ve never seen before so open your mind. It underscores the endless parade of Facebook friends one can acquire. But by arranging to meet 646 of these friends face to face in their very real, tangible environments, Tanja is willfully dismantling the very premise of Facebook itself.

Weirdly enough, Tanja and I had never met – until the evening of the day I visited her PMA exhibit and she walked by me wearing a name tag while we were both at a Creative Portland event. I had questions I was going to e-mail to her, so in keeping with the premise of the exhibit (cyberspace vs. face time), she was able to answer them on the spot.

This is a work in progress, but I was shocked when she told me only a few of the 200+ portraits created so far were made in 2010 and all the rest in 2011. If this were me, I’d be spending 2012 in bed with the covers over my head to gear up for the next 200. But check out more details about it all at: http://www.facebookportraitproject.com.

There are no names under specific images, and only exceptionally do the subjects’ personalities come through – another nod to the two dimensionality of connecting via today’s social media. Two of several images I remember because the subjects did seem like real and interesting people, are the one of Emma Hollander lying on her bed smirking at her sister behind the camera, and my favorite – “Andy Bothwell (Aka Astronautalis), Allston, MA”. Andy is…in the back seat of a van (does he live in his vehicle?), and you see the top portion of his head only. Ironically, with only a portion of his face showing, personality and mystery a-plenty emanate as his eyes bore into you.

And the comment wall for public “postings” is another cool idea. But the question on the wall when I visited “How important is face time to friendship?” is designed to provoke in a very predictable and un-thoughtful way. The resulting generationally-obvious postings from the exhibit’s viewers dilute the value of that wall greatly for me. Notes saying things like ” Face time is the ONLY way to be friends” sparred with obviously younger responders’ “I love Facebook” notes. Hopefully, ongoing questions will ask viewers to think rather than emote.

The biggest questions people seem to have about this exhibit are tied together: Why is no one smiling? Why does everyone have the same expression? Two reasons – one: it was the artist’s choice to keep her subjects’ expressions neutral in part because she knew that everyone grinning into the camera would look downright silly and snapshot-like – and two: with the camera and film she used to take these portraits, it would be hard for people to maintain anything but a neutral expression for that exposure length. Those grins would become deadly.

However, two notes on the public’s posting wall did catch my eye: “Every ceiling was very unique.” (not quite true but an astute observation nonetheless) and “It’s the space people embody that seems to stand out more than the people.” So I wasn’t the only one, then: these are not portraits of people. They are portraits of lives. While I started with the faces in each picture, I quickly became much more interested in the environments in which these “friends” lived and this is the point of the entire exercise. (In fact, I was fervently wishing I could tour many of these spaces, they looked so appealing.) If you scan your way through the many pictures, you may come away feeling glassy-eyed and somewhat bored as evidenced by some of the notes on the wall. But if you take the time to study and read the images, you will see the hand of a master composer of pictures – because it’s all there in the details.

And don’t think every square inch of these pictures wasn’t very carefully considered. That’s the gold in this exhibit. The idea of chasing down Facebook “friends” and immortalizing them in the flesh is an irresistibly catchy handle for the media, but the portraits themselves, regardless of why they were created and who they depict, are why they are featured in an art museum exhibit. If you are a photographer, go and study them and work a little harder at it than the average art museum-goer. You will learn a lot about what actually makes a picture of value, as well as how a mature artist has a vision and painstakingly sticks with it until it is realized through a complete and noteworthy body of work.

By the way, can anyone tell me who on earth would sign up for the Facebook page of Cheer laundry detergent (facebook.com/cheer)… or am I from another planet? Regardless, I know you’ll be fascinated to know I use Arm and Hammer (Fragrance-free) laundry detergent. But sorry – as gripping a detail about my life as it is, that’s the only personal info. you’ll get from me any time soon, because the only place you’ll find me on Facebook is here: http://www.facebook.com/VoxPhotographs.

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This entry was posted on February 19, 2012 at 3:20 pm and is filed under EXHIBITS/SHOWS, Maine . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Tanja tackles friendship…”

Brendan Says:
February 25, 2012 at 9:23 pm

I like the Astronautilus image, but by and large I find this series of work uninteresting. The concept of the body of work, to me, is more interesting than the images themselves.

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