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A photograph is instantly nostalgic, capturing a time that starts deliquescing even before the shutter completes its snap. You can look at a picture from 30 seconds ago and immediately start remembering. Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, the Metropolitan Museum’s latest love letter to the mnemonic power of photography, amps up that effect — or tries to.
This sporadically successful show gets it exactly right with Larry Sultan’s enigmatic wall of prints, which vibrates with refined ambivalence. Sultan plucked each image from his family’s home movies, an anthology of mid-20th-century leisure preserved on 8mm film. In the grainy textures and light-washed colours of the 1960s, a slim young mom cradles her baby by a fetching waterfall. Dad proudly pushes a brand-new lawnmower over emerald grass. Here, a long-limbed boy in an orange life vest scuttles on to an inflatable raft. There, he hurls himself through a hoop held by an adult’s hand. We witness picnics and trips to Disneyland — all the recorded rituals of the suburban middle class, or those who ache to belong. Similar films lurk in the attics of millions of families, uniting Americans across ethnic, political and regional divides.
To the adult Sultan, revisiting that footage allowed him to understand his family’s move from a five-storey walk-up in pre-gentrified Brooklyn to California as an almost mythic journey. “The home movies seem to me the visions that a family in Flatbush, New York dreamt up,” he has said. “If you took all our hopes and projected them on to emulsion, it would look like those movies.” The Sultans were the dramaturges of their own lives, and the lawn was their stage.
Snapshots are often posed, composed and intentionally artificial; home movies, on the other hand, follow the flow of movement and mood, the transitions from self-conscious clowning to flickering distraction. Those unguarded moments are the ones that interested Sultan, and it’s there that he went hunting for single frames to extract. In one, the boy — Larry himself, presumably — clutches his lower back like an old man who’s just levered himself out of an armchair. In another, his mother claps her palms to her cheeks in exasperation, pantomiming “The Scream”.
A viewer might miss one of these 16ths of a second when they slip by on a projector, but in Sultan’s selection each one becomes the main event. The stills pick up disquiet, tension and the slight taint of unhappiness. They are acts of retrospective investigation.
“I am still caught in that longing for that same utopia my parents were longing for by coming out west,” Sultan has said. “And I’m caught between knowing better and still desiring that security and some past that doesn’t exist except in home movies.” That mixture of feelings, preserved on now-archaic film and printed on paper, yields a perfect fusion of subject matter, medium and technique.
Unfortunately, the rest of the exhibition doesn’t live up to Sultan’s standard. Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother focuses on artists who recycle found pictures, treating them as relics and looking for ways to wring new meaning from them. It tries to capture the plaintive wistfulness encased in obsolete media. In practice, though, most of the works here do the job meagrely or not at all.
A two-pronged piece by Sophie Calle consists of a picture she took of a white terry cloth bathrobe and a printed first-person narration of her memories — or, possibly, inventions. Calle doesn’t evoke the past so much as confuse it, mixing what was with what might have been. Annette Messager did use found images early on, but for “My Vows”, she shot and arranged countless tiny photos of mouths, ears, hands and breasts into a vague thesis about the compound nature of identity. A photograph by Maurizio Cattelan of a red neon bar sign spelling out the show’s title seems neither salvaged nor old, or even especially wistful.
At least we get a strong pair of pictures by Sheng Qi, who fled China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Before leaving, he chopped off the pinky of his left hand and buried it in a flowerpot, an act of public despair and disgust. Here, we see two views of his mutilated hand against a communist-red ground. In one, the upturned palm cradles a miniature black-and-white headshot of himself as a child in a worker’s cap, a young soldier of the Cultural Revolution. In the other, the same hand proffers a picture of Chairman Mao. The diptych collapses recent events with more remote history, mixing the intimate with the epic and violence with nostalgia.
The show eloquently contrasts the way memory and aspiration interacted differently during the last century in China from the way they did in the west. Instead of copious images of intergenerational bougie fun, we get sober mementoes of national horror. In his series They, Hai Bo pairs decades-old formal portraits with recent photos of the same people, and the juxtaposition does something more poignant than just draw attention to the sitter’s wrinkles.
A pigtailed teenager in the cap and tunic of the Red Guards stands facing the camera head-on in 1968, a proud half-smile on her face and Mao’s Little Red Book in her grip. Three decades later, there she is again — still black-haired and mildly amused, if a little more hunched — in a sleeveless flowered dress. She is no longer off to make history or build a nation; rather, we see that she has survived an era of murderous idealism with her good humour intact.
Other pictures in the series are less upbeat. In “They No 7, Three Sisters”, a trio of girls in the 1970s adopt severe expressions that let a girlish glow shine through. In the companion piece, that sense of suppressed energy is utterly gone, and so is one of the siblings. Of the two who remain, the one on the right with the high cheekbones and luscious coiffure has aged into a gaunt sage with a haunted look. Time, that sinister sculptor, pocks and gouges the body, turning each of Hai Bo’s subjects into a breathing memento mori. At its best, Call Your Mother is a hymn to the momentous events we miss or misunderstand, the changes we fail to track, the clarity that comes from seeing the ordinary tinged with melancholy.
To September 15, metmuseum.org
