"Spectacle' at the Art Museum

"Spectacle" is a show in which we see photographers looking at people looking at something. Sometimes a background is provided to "set the stage," as in the anonymous Exposition Universelle, Paris 1889 / Au Pied de la Tour, with its crowd of strollers taking in the soon-to-be-dubbed Eiffel Tower. Sometimes you're on your own. There are as many ways of looking as there are eyes to look.

There are innocent looks (a man regarding a fish in Burk Uzzle's Fish Viewing Room Under the Grand Coulee Dam, Washington, 1979). And there are guilty looks (the far-from-beatific-looking Cardinal Law in Lisa Kessler's Projection of 2002)

There are judgmental looks (Robert Frank's 1956 portrait of a gesticulating old pro in Political Rally, Chicago), and there are non-judgmental looks (William Klein's 1965 onlookers, who neither laugh nor cry in Heart Attack, Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, Paris).

There are engaged looks (Robert Capa's uncomfortably close close-up of mothers mourning their slain sons in Naples, October 7, 1943) and there are disengaged looks (Amy Arbus's cool 2003 study of devotees in Torches).

And there are some looks that are downright surreal (David Graham's Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, Hayward, Wisconsin, 1984, in which dinosaur-sized replicas of sports fish dwarf their human admirers.)

I suppose that one point of the show is that man is by nature a curious creature. Another would be that we are endlessly fascinated by ourselves and that by photographing grief, anger, surprise, envy, desire, remorse we are trying to understand what these states of being mean. And some of us will empathize with those we look at, while others will learn to mimic the appropriate responses.