Ricardo Barros, Martha Posner
Fabricating Truths, Shaping Stories
April 30 – June 6, 2010
141 North 2nd Street
Philadelphia, PA
Opening Reception: Friday, May 7, 5 – 9 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Saturday May 15, 3:00 p.m.
Photographer Ricardo Barros and sculptor Martha Posner display the unusual pairing of their work together at Philadelphia’s Dalet Gallery. Barros is a veteran Philadelphia area commercial photographer who also has art world credentials: photographs in numerous museum collections and a monograph, Facing Sculpture: A Portfolio of Portraits, Sculpture, and Related Ideas.
On exhibit by Barros is series of contrived studio images of nudes he has “directed.” His statement below explains his intentions.
To read more about Martha Posner, please visit my site, Photocommentary. I admire Posner’s work because it is both of this world and of some other world I’m still trying to define.
Bill Lowenburg
Ricardo Barros on his Fabricated Truths photographs
“What if photographs do lie? Even photographs in which the content is conspicuously manipulated can have something meaningful to say. Every one of these photographs has been staged. Every one targets a different idea. The baldness with which each composition is arranged makes it possible to move beyond the limitations of fact and reconsider what we already know but from a different perspective.
Each of these photographs includes a naked woman. Traditional Art Nudes soften the viewer's gaze with a poetic environment or distancing, visual patina. I prefer to lace up voyeurism like a bow tie.
My photographs are made in a “scientific” setting. Objective observers are supposed to look closely. With these photographs, viewers willingly stare. Upon detecting a visual narrative, their minds set off on an interpretive errand. They engage in a series of measured calculations and draw social inferences to explain what they are seeing. There is something meaningful to be found.
Through this exercise I give viewers permission to be voyeurs. I hope they find it pleasurable.
Quietly, I am also pilfering something – call it lust - that many men bring to these pictures. When viewers are so intently engaged in an abstract idea, few seem to notice the absence of a prurient reward for their expectations.
Even photographs that do lie can still comment truthfully.”
