In an era when everyone is a photographer, one artist is trying to make sense of the medium.
Polish artist Piotr Uklański photographs comment on pop culture, history and photography itself. They are gathered in a new retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum called, “Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs.”
One of the pieces in the show is a photo of naked people — including Uklański himself at the center — forming a skull, in an homage to “In Voluptas Mors,” a 1951 picture from Spanish artist Salvador Dali made in collaboration with photographer Philippe Halsman. “The Nazis,” from 1998, is a large panel with headshots of actors who have portrayed Hitler in movies. An untitled piece, from 2004, is an aerial photo of 3,500 Brazilian soldiers arranged as the first Polish pope.
The show also includes his infamous 2003 piece for Artforum magazine, “Untitled (GingerAss).” The photo shows the naked buttocks of his then girlfriend and now wife Alison Gingeras. And at the museum’s hall, two banners reproduce his 2007 photographs portraying 3,000 soldiers from the Polish Army forming a dissolving image of the name of a trade union.
“There is an emotional center to the work, a kind of cheerful pessimism,” said Doug Eklund, curator in the department of photographs, who organized the show with the artist. “There is a combination of entertainment and deep thought. 'The Nazis' should send a shrill through your spine when you think about the history of post-war popular culture and the way that we turned all these handsome actors into symbols of what was supposed to be an unpresentable evil.”
Uklański, who moved to the U.S. just after the fall of Communism, said he agrees with Eklund’s take on his work.
“We produce these 'great' images, or images of great icons, and to what effect really, what are we left with after we consume them? And I think that is sort of where my pessimism comes.”
Uklański said even though he hasn't worked with photography for several years, he was compelled to do so because of the proliferation of cameras in smart-phones. “Maybe because it's so exhausted and seemingly so you can't find any new way to make something, but I hope I can have a try,” he said, laughing.
Accompanying the exhibition there is an installation of works from the Met’s collection selected by Uklański. It includes 60 photographs, plus 11 other paintings and sculptures. And he wrote a phrase in one of the walls, lifted from the streets of Warsaw in 1989: "Life is a terminal disease transmitted via sexual intercourse."
