The Shifting Axis of Symmetry (review)

When Babette Mangolte moved to New York from Paris in 1970 she quickly involved herself with the city's most progressive circle of artists, choreographers, filmmakers, and directors. The group of images and films included in the gallery exhibition at Broadway 1602 contextualizes this particularly fecund period of artistic innovation. In much of her collaborative work, Mangolte is the one hidden behind the camera. She has been the photographer and cinematographer for seminal artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Lucinda Childs, Robert Whitman, and Richard Foreman. Several photographs from her joint work, as well as stills from the 1975 What Masie Knew, Mangolte's first feature, are part of the Broadway 1602 exhibition. The show also includes a short looped film portrait of Richard Serra, and a screening of The Camera: Je / La Camera: I, both from 1977 . Throughout this body of work, content materializes in several sets of dichotomies. By extracting differences between oppositional pairs—such as the photographer and her subject—Mangolte paradoxically reveals their similarities, illuminating more complex relationships than at first glance.

The crux of Mangolte's work in the exhibition surfaces in three subtle photographs of Tribeca facades. This group of three pictures, all from the Composite Buildings series, is composed of paired photographs, one printed above the other. In the first set, the photos are simply duplicated next to each other right side up. In the second pair, one is upside-down so that the photographs join at the building's midpoint. In the third, the top picture is upside-down and the bottom is right side up, a blank white sky frames and separates the buildings. Our eye is drawn not so much to the details in the individual photographs, but to the line of separation between photos. This shifting axis of symmetry emphasizes the point of connection between one image and its twin. The meeting of two similar images has the appearance of equal reflection. However, the mirroring is slightly off. There is balance, but balance is not identical to symmetry. The simple pivoting of

Yvonne Rainer, Cape Cod.Copyright ©1972 Babette Mangolte. All rights of reproduction reserved

a photograph's orientation, from right side up to upside down, for example, and its relationship to another photo, presents the image as a slightly different, opposing view. The possible sets of sideby side combinations suggest ongoing reconfiguration. The Composite Buildings series exemplifies what is evident in the rest of the show's work: the fluctuating relationships between oppositional poles and how they redirect the viewer's perception.

The Composite Buildings series was taken in preparation for Mangolte's second feature film of two names The Camera: Je or La Camera: I. The film is divided into three segments. The first two are about the action of taking photographs. These two sections contrast sharply with one another establishing the film's structural dichotomy. The last segment, in which the photographs are observed and commented upon by a friend, distinguishes itself from the earlier two parts like a detached artist assessing her newly created work.

The first part of the film is set inside a photographer's studio. Gazing through the lens of a camera, we watch isolated models pose one after the other against a plain, static backdrop. The unmistakable click of the shutter rhythmically punctuates the scene. A faceless voice directs: "Look at me. Look at the camera." The austerity of this early sequence strips away the artifice of film, suspending the viewer in continual contemplation of differences between the photographer and the photographed. By choosing to focus the camera solely on the models, the spectator sees what the photographer sees. The audience, aligned with the invisible artist, is made aware of the conditions of photography's art, the most important one being the relationship between the photographer and her subject. The distinction Mangolte draws between these two roles marks the central division in The Camera...