Just-So Stories
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In Ellen Kooi’s photograph “Penningsveer-riet,” a young girl stands, eyes closed, in a field of tall grass. The wind bends the dramatically-lit grass and lifts the girl’s hair, snaking it out in picturesque tendrils. A real person in such a rapturous pose must really be experiencing something. But what, exactly? The artist-photographer isn’t obligated to tell you. Therein lies the problem with staged photography. The artist has treated something — a girl, a field — as if it were nothing, a blank canvas, and then turned around and — with a wind machine, perhaps — turned this nothing into something. To put it another way, the artist has forced the most documentary of all media to do fictional work.
These paradoxes, pursued in the right direction, lead to the philosophical heart of aesthetics: Why does art lie, and what is the point of that? These questions, and the intelligence of star practitioners like Jeff Wall, are what have made staged photography so compelling in recent years.
But two shows currently up in Chelsea lead us in another direction, toward the conclusion that staged photography has reached a coy cul-de-sac.
Ms. Kooi, a Dutch artist showing at PPOW gallery, uses elegant lighting and pre-Raphaelite women to create striking, commercial-quality images. On the wall, her huge Plexiglas prints involve the viewer in barely erotic fantasies that could conceivably be used to sell jewelry. “Almere (Ophelia)” alludes to John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia” painting. But whereas Millais’s painted figure, bent at the torso, manages to look dead, holding her bent arms palms up, in sacrificial supplication, Ms. Kooi’s model keeps her back straight and her arms out, palm down, like someone who wants to stay afloat. The kelpy mess below her, beautifully caught by the camera, like a food stylist’s dream of miso soup, almost steals the show, but the eye keeps returning to the model’s dress, which must be getting ruined: a fact that would not matter in real life, but seems to matter here, because the artist has chosen the dress. Part of the visual message of “Almere (Ophelia)” is that Ms. Kooi has chosen to ruin this dress.
For once in the history of photography, it can be taken for granted that the artist intended every part of her image to be just so. The viewer has to wonder what, in “Monte Sibilini — Rim,” a little girl leaping joyously through a field says about Ms. Kooi’s intentions? Were this the advertisement it so easily could be, we could read the image as corny but merry.
Several of the photographs present less romantic images. These can be more easily assimilated as art because they tackle the familiar problem of suburban entropy — the overturned earth of front lawns in need of sod, or the odd grove of trees facing a dingy marina. Such landscapes puzzle many artists, productively so. Ms. Kooi’s interpretations — children climb the trees and observe the dingy marina as if they were elves, about to invade — have a forced whimsy. In “Coenplain,” a jogger stands, like a lean Cortez, surveying the mown lawn of a cloverleaf junction. These useless fields, daily visible to every daydreaming child, must inspire many fantasies of important treks. It’s fitting that Ms. Kooi stages her photographs in these outdoor spaces where you do feel that you ought to do something. But we don’t really know what the lean jogger means to do, and we have no reason to suppose that either the jogger or Ms. Kooi do either.
***
At Yossi Milo gallery, untitled photographs from Tierney Gearon’s “The Mother Project” depict the artist’s mother, who, in her senescence, has been photographed in a number of upsetting situations — “some of which,” according to the gallery’s materials, “occur naturally and some of which are facilitated or encouraged by the artist.”
In one photo, the artist straddles her mother’s lap and kisses her like a lover. In another, the naked mother pretends to nurse the artist’s baby. In another, the naked mother stands on a hotel room bed, lifting up her skirt, while a very worried looking child stands in the corner. In another, the mother kneels in a green field, wearing a truly scary red-skull mask, while a toddler sits beside her and screams.
These scenes gesture toward the troubling facts of senility. Grandmothers can become scary, and that possibility deserves artistic attention. Ms. Gearon leans into the possibility, exaggerating the trouble. These situations would not have existed had the artist not staged them. The freedom the artist takes with her own mother and children may be her own business, but it makes it hard to look at these pictures. If these were drawn pictures or scenes form a novel, a baby need not be frightened, and a grandmother’s body need not be used. But because these are staged photographs, real materials — and persons — have to be used. The documentary nature of the camera may not be permanently incompatible with fiction. But it creates problems that these two photographers have not solved.
Kooi until November 25 (555 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-647-1044);
Gearon until November 25 (525 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-414-0370).