Finding truth through manipulated images
PHOTOGRAPHER Nicole Belle says she met her latest muse, Rev Sanchez, in a shoe box on South Pasadena’s boutique-y Mission Street.
That’s where she lucked upon a stash of vintage Hasselblad negatives in an antique store -- images of adolescents, young women and men affecting mannered poses beneath trees, amid leafy parks and poolside. Not much more information than that survived, Belle says, just that all were shot in the 1960s and ‘70s by a commercial photographer named Rev Sanchez, whose archives the shop purchased after his death.
At first, Belle thought these staged tableaux might come in handy for her then-current project -- sewing together the characters peopling her personal snapshots, literally with a needle and thread. After churning out a few contact sheets, however, it became painfully apparent they would not. “They were ridiculous, just totally over the top,” Belle, 30, says. “I thought, there’s nothing I can do with these, they’re too outrageous.”
Instead of filing them away, however, she scanned them, then began to digitally noodle and reconfigure, largely to help shake the unease Sanchez’s images provoked in her.
“It was so blatant, the relationship between [these models] and the photographer,” she says. “It was way too intense. I didn’t want to be an accomplice.” She hit upon her resolution by falling back on an old habit -- Belle often constructs photographic self-portraits, and “for a while, I’ve had the guilty pleasure of [digitally] doubling myself,” she explains. In multiplying her subjects, “I felt I was giving them another option.”
Take the teen girl in the checked dress and patent leathers, the one self-consciously modeling against a sapling, bandage childishly affixed to one ankle.
“That girl, she seems very unsure,” Belle says. “I can read in her a tentativeness that she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be doing. When she gets more of herself, it’s not so much.”
Belle’s subjects, she says, gain safety in numbers: “You can no longer stand in front of them and stare at them. They’re not looking at you anymore, they’re looking at themselves.”
Currently finishing her master’s of fine arts at UC Riverside (where her thesis project opens in a group show Saturday), Belle also works part-time as an assistant to Catherine Opie, an experience, she says, that’s helped Belle understand her own developing style. “I heard Catherine say recently that maybe it’s a generational thing, the importance of truth in photography,” Belle says. “I don’t get hung up on that. I know how images are produced, how they’re put together for magazines, movies and all that. I’m not interested in capturing ‘the truth.’
“These images have their own truth that speaks just as loudly and as true as any other image,” Belle adds. “These narratives are fuller and more rich.”
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-- Mindy.Farabee@latimes.com
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THE REV SANCHEZ SERIES
WHERE: Found Gallery, 1903 Hyperion Ave., L.A.
WHEN: Ends May 5
PRICE: Free
INFO: (323) 669-1247, www.foundla.com
ON THE WEB: For more photos, go to latimes.com/belle
