Electoral montage

photographs by Brooks Kraft and Paul D’Amato

By Jenna Russell

“2 Photographers,” is at the Institute of Contemporary Art through Oct. 18. Tour the exhibition with curator Mark Bessire Sept. 12 at 12:15 p.m. Artist’s talk by Brooks Kraft Sept. 27 at 5:30 p.m

“bush make-up, l.A.,”: by Brooks Kraft, 20”x30”, digital print, 2000.

Caution: If you’re trying to forget who’s running the country, “2 Photographers,” the fall show at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA, may cause panic. The President’s face is plastered all over the first half of the exhibition, but take deep breaths. It’s not as if you have to listen to him talk.

Brooks Kraft’s oversized color photographs contrast two successful presidential candidates on the campaign trail – George W. Bush, captured in action last year, and Nelson Mandela, photographed in 1994 as he sought victory in South Africa’s first free election. The pictures are strange, sometimes beautiful, and always revealing, with the revelations likely to be colored by the viewer’s own political leanings. Photographer number two, Paul D’Amato, offers quieter revelation, minus the horror of recent political history.

The show begins with Bush in a barber’s chair in Iowa, a crush of photographers jammed into the room. The media crouches, poised to hang on every snip, and their breathless anticipation is at once hilarious and sad. It’s an unflattering close-up of journalism’s pack mentality, and coming from one of its own, a contributor to Time and other magazines, it’s as commanding as a leaked internal memo. The image makes a fitting prologue, introducing the easy political spectacle that, with the media’s cooperation, distracts the public from a chronic lack of substance.

In a haunting picture from last year’s Republican convention, George and Laura Bush and Dick Cheney stand onstage together, backs to the camera, behind a curtain of confetti. They might as well be alone in the hall, as paper hail blurs the crowd and seems to muffle their cheers like falling snow. The same isolation pervades a quartet of shots from Utah, Florida, and Michigan, where Bush is shot from below and behind as a towering, black-suited statue, alone against a blank, unchanging sky. When an arm enters one frame, offering something – gum? a tape recorder? – the candidate blocks it with a raised, flat palm.

Kraft’s unexpected angles are subtly eloquent, as he casts telling details front and center. When he catches Bush on the phone at the back of his bus, the photo is composed from somewhere near the floor, so the candidate and his staff are dwarfed by one big black cowboy boot, disproportionately large and menacing in the foreground. The photograph speaks volumes about the way complex individuals and platforms are boiled down into oversimplified symbols.

What are we to make of the contrast with Mandela? The South African has an openness and spontaneity, a joy that makes Bush look strained. Seen with his hands clasped in prayer between two laughing teenagers, Mandela is at ease, aglow in orange twilight. The formal arrangement of the three figures suggests a Renaissance painting of Christ with angels. Then we see Bush onstage before a large pastel mural of Jesus, whose arms reach out to embrace the serious, dark-suited candidate.

Elsewhere, Mandela presses a cloth to his head, eyes shut against heat or emotion, while Bush’s makeup artist blots his impassive face for him. The two moments — one from the optimistic, dewy infancy of democracy, the other in disillusioned middle age, seem impossibly far apart. They’re linked by the voters lining up for handshakes, who need to be reminded it’s their job to demand more than makeup and haircuts.

Campaign stops are rigged to give the impression of grave importance despite minimal content. D’Amato is drawn to the opposite, hours that look empty but contain all of life’s substance. Anyone who knows older men knows the poignant, hollowing moods in the MECA professor’s photographs of men’s social clubs. These large C-prints are held together by things that all men, lucky and unlucky, eventually have in common: death and loss, and the marshalling of dignity at the slow or sudden waning of their powers.

Released from the duties of work, the men drift in limbo, smoking, swapping stories, playing cards. In “Waiting,” taken at the Woodford Club in Portland in 1998, the obvious question – waiting for what? – has an obvious answer. (Death, of course.) Behind the seated older men, a younger man is visible in a doorway, distant but dreamily visible, like memories of youth. In “Smoker, L Street Bath House, South Boston,” the old man’s face is bleached almost blank by sunlight, and the shadows of his companions rising behind him are like the ghosts of lost brothers. Still, there is daily affirmation and renewal, as when, in the deserted dawn, the “L- Street’s” Terry pulls a shower handle to send water streaming down his twisted body.

In his photographs of the Mexican border, D’Amato’s younger subjects also wait, daydreaming while their hair is braided, or literally floating, as in “Bather, Mexico,” from 1998, where a heavy woman suspended in cloudy water is as amazing as a magic trick. “Juarez, Mexico (Blind)” is a devastating double portrait of a world-worn man with a ruined eye leaning on a stick, next to a boy who looks as new and fresh as a flower. The blind man can’t see the boy’s bright, hopeful eyes; for him, that time, that hope, no longer exists.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.