This exhibition presents recent work by four photographers based in the U.S. all of whom deal, to some degree, with conventions of portraiture. One, Phyllis Galembo, is a New York-based artist who has numerous museum exhibitions and publications to her credit. The other three -- Kevin Kline, Herman Mhire, and Sonja Rieger -- are based in New Orleans, Lafayette, and Birmingham, respectively, and their works are known primarily to a regional audience. Beyond this immediate geographic distinction, other connections beckon: Mhire and Galembo were both born in the places they currently live, while Rieger is originally from Germany, and Kline from Colorado. All except Kline have supported themselves in part through academic pursuits, and while Mhire and Rieger use digital processes to create their work, Galembo and Kline both work with celluloid film. Nearly all of Galembo's and Rieger's subjects are African, Haitian or African-American, a distinction that is not as meaningful in either Kline's or Mhire's work.

Beginning with the invention of photography in the early 19th century, the interaction between sitter and photographer has differed from that of the portrait painter, thanks in large part to the fundamental role of time. The choice of subjects, where to document them, how to control or direct their activity, and what to do with their likenesses once the shutter has clicked -- these are all fundamental decisions faced by any contemporary artist who uses a camera to document other people in the world. And in the digital age, with phone cameras, Photoshop and flickr introducing billions of new images into public circulation, it is easy to forget that the photograph is itself a mediated device, and that the 'truth' it tells is, at best, circumstantial.

PHYLLIS GALEMBO has been documenting masquerade and carnival-based practices around the world, and she is most celebrated for images taken in West African countries and also Haiti, where she has traveled annually for the past decade to work in Jacmel. By returning to certain places over a period of several years, Galembo has developed an understanding with some of the more secretive societies in Sierra Leone, Mali, and Burkina Faso, and this has enabled her to document carnival costume and masking practices from a broad spectrum of groups covering an immense geographical area.

Galembo's approach to her subjects is to bring her camera and lights to sites of public display, and to capture her subjects in motion, against a backdrop that is recognizably local. Frequently she clicks her shutter at dramatic moments of high ritual, but at other times she waits for a more spontaneous chemistry to occur between individual participants. What links Galembo's images is their capacity to convey the expressive power of masquerade, a point she has brought full circle with her parallel activity as collector and documentarian of vintage Halloween costumes from the U.S.

KEVIN KLINE is an artist whose embrace of photography has been gradual and entirely self-guided. Since starting to exhibit regularly a few years ago, his practice has become defined by his efforts to record the lives of the ordinary people who populate his New Orleans neighborhood. Kline's interest is in the individual as he or she presents herself to a world that is familiar and safe. In making prints, he has also delved into the use of traditional, even archaic, techniques, which tends to imbue the images with a sense of slipping into the past.

Most recently, Kline embarked on an expansion of his dialogue with the general public, by making large prints on inexpensive paper and posting them on the exterior walls of his Bywater home. Transforming the street-front into an improvised gallery, Kline also invited a social dimension of the work to manifest itself, in which passersby commented among themselves on the images they were seeing, which in some cases conveyed their own likenesses. By literally returning his images to the street, Kline is attempting to push our experience of the photographic portrait beyond the gallery's physical limits, and in the process stimulate a conversation about the adaptability of the public sector.

HERMAN MHIRE uses the image of his sitter as the jumping-off point for an extended interaction with a rich variety of Photoshop tools, during which recognizable identity assumes second place to the visual effects that can be obtained by distorting the facial features, or blurring them into a nearly abstract field of texture and patterns. One of the more noticeable parts of Mhire's process is the sheer conventionality of his subjects' poses, as if to reinforce the frequently phantasmagorical quality of the final image by drawing our attention to the plainness of its origins.

Many of Mhire's finished images verge close to abstraction, and for that reason his is the work that seems to clash most evidently with the basic principles of portraiture. Rather than attempt to capture the essence of his subject, however, Mhire is clearly more interested in the concept of decipherability. Obviously, his subject and those close to them are able to recognize their own likenesses, and this exhibition includes four variations on the face of the artist Ralph Bourque. In this sense, Mhire seems to be recalling the precedent set by Claude Monet's painted haystacks, wherein the physical reality of the subject matters far less than the artist's effort to demonstrate that looking at an image is itself a dynamic activity, and that decoding a field of optical effects is what all of us undergo when we try to 'read' an image for its content.

SONJA RIEGER is an artist whose photographic investigations have taken her into a number of collective situations in which her response to a situation is comparable to that of an anthropologist searching for characteristic expressions of cultural specificity. Rieger's most recent group of photographs, under the title Dazzling, came into being almost by accident, as the result of conversations with one of her mother's nursing home providers, Daryl, now Daroneshia, who is the guiding force behind the Platinum International Newcomer's Pageant. Transgendered beauty pageants, while not quite a commonplace, have been a mainstay of African-American gay culture for many years, and Daroneshia's guidance enabled Rieger admittance to a world that she never knew existed.

Rieger's perspective as a photographer comes from a far corner of the dressing room, where the contestants for the pageant prepare for their big moment. By avoiding the artificial distance that might be imposed if the photographs were done from stage, Rieger is allowing for the context around her subjects to remain steadfastly neutral, with the focus on the individuals and their transformation. Because the pageants are done with some degree of secrecy, Rieger's visual intimacy with the pageant contestants encourages her viewers to try and discern all aspects of the subjects' reality, from the everyday people they are underneath the clothes and makeup, to the exotic creations that become the most potent expressions of their innermost selves.

Dan Cameron, Senior Curator at Large

Gallery hours: Thursday through Sunday, 11am-4pm.

Gallery admission: $5/general, $3/students & seniors, FREE To CAC members.

For information, call (504) 528-3805