The Magic Of Mexican Realism Is In Good Hands

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday October 24, 2008

Robert McFarlane

? PHOTOGRAPHY

PEDRO MEYER- HERESIES

Australian Centre for Photography

Until November 15

Reviewed by Robert McFarlane

MEXICO'S Pedro Meyer bridges the gap between photographic artifice and what at first seems fierce, passionate photojournalism. This exhibition shows why Meyer's mix of documentary and magical realism, aided by computer, is so confounding - and memorable.

He belongs to his country's vibrant visual tradition, evolved from Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo through Manuel Alvarez Bravo to today. Meyer is about making dreams visible, whether through pungent, naturally observed images in rich black and white and vibrant colour or meticulously manipulated photographs, such as his seductive image of a child dressed as an angel turning away from a tiny, ancient woman carrying fire. Why is the child turning away and what is Meyer's reasoning in having the woman bear fire, while standing, perhaps symbolically, on a chess board? There is no simple answer but once a Meyer picture is seen, it cannot be forgotten.

His pictures can range from visceral and deeply symbolic to crudely propagandist, even eccentric observations. Not for him the fashionable, safe ennui of most photo-artists; Meyer is unconcerned with what supposedly makes a "good" photograph. Look at enough of his work and it seems the moment of exposure must have been urgent, instinctive and irresistible for the 73-year-old Spanish-born citizen of Mexico, even if orthodoxies of sharpness and composition are sometimes secondary.

Paul Wombell, the director of London's Photographers' Gallery, says Meyer's vision "inverts the notion of cinema as a series of frames in movement by redefining photography as static cinema". Meyer's photographs distil ordinary ways in which people may feel alive, such as an anonymous man standing at night on a railway station platform, wearing an absurd fluorescent tie, or two women embracing in a bar, wreathed in emotion.

Everything is fair game for his lens. In the more complete essay of Heresies, on display in book form at the gallery, two pictures define his surprising range: an enormous flock of birds rising as one above a tree, and the tenderness with which a Sandinista woman soldier cradles her automatic weapon.

Meyer is about discovering the phenomenal within the ordinary, but also fabricating images, with computer artifice, when necessary. In this he appears to commit, as the title of the book and exhibition suggests, photographic heresy. But what we see in this exhibition is unmistakable evidence of a great, unconventional photographic artist who is unconcerned with taste or genre but always engaged with the tiny, never trivial, kernels of daily life.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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