ART REVIEW : Photographic Works Bring World of Mental Illness Into Stark Focus

“M y last breakdown was fun,” says the taped voice of Karen Moore. “I enjoy my psychotic states. It’s a total freedom. Barry Manilow was on TV and I was sure he was looking at me.”

Moore looks out of a black-and-white photograph with a calm, open expression on her pudgy face. “When I’m psychotic, I’m expressive, but it’s to an imaginary audience,” her flat voice continues. “That’s the sad thing.”

A photograph of Richard Hasher, a paranoid schizophrenic, shows him reclining on his bed wearing outsize glasses and a T-shirt that reads “I’m a survivor.” His broad face registers a worried look.

“My fondest memory is thinking I was a trout having sex with a waitress who was another trout,” he says on the tape.

Dark-haired Patty McMadden looks small and childlike in a photograph. She was sent to a state hospital many years ago, at age 4, because she bit other children. Nowadays, she says she finds “nourishment” at her church. Because of her speech impairment, she had someone else read her statement on the tape.

“I’m not able to put on that social mask you see where people look so perfect and whole,” the voice says.

These and other images of men and women formerly hospitalized with mental illness are the work of Lonny Shavelson, a Berkeley-based photographer who is also a part-time emergency room physician. He patiently searched out these people, kept in contact with them as they moved from address to address (sometimes to re-enter a mental institution) and persuaded them to talk about their experiences.

Their words are their own, edited by Shavelson to listener-manageable length in consultation with each former patient.

Visitors to BC Space in Laguna Beach are handed a cassette player with a tape of these statements to match up with each portrait. And so begins a powerfully unsettling journey into the world of the mentally ill.

Perhaps the most striking thing about them is that their remarks veer so casually between feelings the viewer can easily identify with and unstoppable impulses that lurch over the border of acceptable behavior.

Some of these people endured abuse as children and bounced in and out of mental institutions for years; others were adults when their minds began to blur the outlines of reality. One former patient dates the onset of his illness to an intense reading of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in college; another remembers the day she knew the other passengers on the subway could read her thoughts.

Living on their own again after “lost years” in institutions, these people are coming to terms with the freedom the rest of us take for granted. Some revel in the special world of their illness; others nervously compare themselves with “normal” people. (“I go to a psychiatrist, but so do other people,” reasons one woman. “I get depressed about money, but so do other people.”)

Some of Shavelson’s sitters are posed in bare, anonymous settings that focus attention on their postures and faces. (The strangely puffy look so common to those faces could be a reaction to mood-equalizing drugs.)

In one of these portraits, rangy Jim Crowley, an anorexic (“I discovered I was angry, extremely angry”) laces his hands across his slack white belly and peers out in a dazed way, his head lowered. The very absence of the bric-a-brac of middle-class lives points up the vividness of these people’s interior lives and struggles.

Other sitters are shown in bedrooms or living rooms, the walls frequently hung with political or ecological posters or dark-visioned works of art. A “Hinkley for President” poster decorates the apartment of Robert Fennell, who has spent the last 13 years trying to find someone to join his Feminist Church of Dialectical Sexism.

But Shavelson’s photographic work--which also includes a humorous series about people who place personal ads and a new, shocking series about families stricken with cancer as a result of chemically polluted water supplies--depends ultimately on the power of the word.

Absorbing information about the backgrounds and thoughts of the former mental patients, the listener wants to see what they look like. But only the stories allow viewers to begin to empathize with them and begin to see them not as “weirdos” but as people with pasts riddled with violence, delusions and mistrust who have come to varying accommodations with their illnesses.

The journey that begins with Shavelson’s “I’m Not Crazy: I Just Lost My Glasses” series continues with New York photographer Mary Ellen Mark’s disturbing views of female patients in a locked ward of an Oregon mental hospital and work by former Corona del Mar resident Susan Smith, a poet and photographer whose images register the raw obsession with death that caused her to kill herself at age 32.

Mark is a consummate photojournalist, willing to devote painful days to absorbing the essential gritty details of the environments she chooses to portray. She has documented a methadone program for addicts in London, Mother Theresa’s Home for the Dying in Calcutta and the lives of prostitutes in Bombay.

In “Ward 81,” she looks unflinchingly at the bombed-out psyches of the seriously mentally ill. In this bare and bleak environment where all windows are crisscrossed with metal bars, every action seems horribly magnified and all-consumingly intense.

Two women embrace, one grief-stricken, the other smiling broadly. An inmate takes a chin-high bubble bath, her streaming dark hair thrown over the edge of the tub like an eerie Medusa. A woman passionately kisses an autographed photograph. Another woman clumsily concentrates on fishing something out of a purse.

One photograph shows a woman in shorts who is smoking. Her head is lopped out of the picture but her exposed thigh, ashen and burned with countless stubbed-out butts, is a shocking portrait in itself.

Pinched, bitter and suspicious faces abound here, but the most achingly memorable belongs to a woman with the countenance of a weasel. She scrunches herself up in a chair, her knees supporting her chin, and regards the camera with one baleful eye. Next to her is a photograph of two girls with hairdos and dresses that probably date to the 1940s. The girls look wholesome and normal.

After the initial shock fades, the questions begin. What terrible road has this woman traveled from then to now? What happened to her sister? Is it possible that years and years ago, when this woman politely smiled on cue for another photographer, she was already feeling the weight of the terrible blackness that would invade her life?

Mark does not tell the viewer anything about these women’s specific illnesses or about their pasts. Instead, she finds isolated moments that convey a bitter taste of what it is to live in a double lockup--in the prison of one’s mental state and in the loveless shelter of a state institution.

Susan G. Smith’s collection of poems was published in 1986. The slim paperback book dedicated, in a phrase that now seems sadly ironic, to “my parents, who have somehow seen me through it all.” The brief poems are nearly all about painful love and loss, which Smith evoked in an easy-reading, colloquial way that often scores a direct hit with vivid imagery. What a wonderful songwriter she might have been!

Her photographs are obsessive in another way. They are Polaroids, of herself and other people, marked up with a colored pencil.

In “Subtle Moves Made Subtler,” a scene in a courtyard, perhaps at a mission, yellow lines encircle a squatting child, a nun, some of the pigeons--and, chillingly, the cracks in the pavement.

Smith photographed herself outdoors in “Still Looking for a Perfect Fit but Maybe It’s Not to Be Found.” Yellow markings outline her body and a nearby cactus and skate over the green fullness of bushes like static charges.

Death stalks Smith in altered photographs of gravestones and in an image of herself leaning against a wall of overpainted memorial plaques. On one of them, she added her own name and birth date. Her head hides the place where the death date would be.

Smith also photographed herself standing at Marilyn Monroe’s grave. She painted huge black glasses with gold lenses on her face and added touches of gold to her hair and her lips and her outfit and the gravestone.

Revelatory, in hindsight at least, of the fixations of a lost and troubled person, these are images that also remind the viewer of the narrow line between a serious artist’s deep and painful self-examination and the burden of obsession.

In a statement in the gallery, Claire Smith Weaver writes of her sister’s preoccupation with death, “How come I didn’t know? It was everywhere, but she was an artist, and the edge was indistinct. . . . “

“Inside Out,” photographs by Lonny Shavelson, Mary Ellen Mark and Susan Smith, remains at BC Space through June 25. The gallery, at 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach, is open from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 497-1880.