ART/Allan Jalon : Images Catch Breakdown, Healing of the Mind

Rejoining a sun-drenched sidewalk crowd after an hour in the BC Space gallery in Laguna Beach brings a sense of unwanted exposure and a few flinching moments of gratitude for being well.

The gallery’s current exhibit, called “Inside Out,” consists of photographs showing people in various phases of mental illness. At its core is the contrast between the intentions of Mary Ellen Mark, 48, a well-known New York photojournalist, and Lonny Shavelson, a 36-year-old emergency room physician in Berkeley who is building a reputation for his work with a camera.

Mark’s 16 photographs were shot in a maximum security mental ward in Oregon. They show patients whose manic trances, cackling dementia and grimaces of permanent shock reflect states of mind both extreme and inescapable. “My pictures are about isolation,” Mark said of the photos, which she took in 1976. Shavelson’s 23 subjects are people from the San Francisco Bay Area who, holding the shaky railings of medication and therapy, have gone out on their own. The fragile, gray-silver atmosphere of undependable recovery hangs about this part of the show; one can listen to a cassette recording of the people give brief, first-person, world-in-a-sentence accounts of themselves, in which the general tone is one of adjustment, sometimes hope.

Shavelson said that seeing Mark’s work spurred him to search out former patients, rather than long-term inmates. His subject is the uneasy compromise between the extremely lonely privacy of illness and the daily effort to lead a more public life. “I don’t know if what I’ve done is exactly a critique of Mary Ellen Mark’s work,” Shavelson said in a telephone interview from Berkeley. “It is more of a response.

“Her work was a fascinating insight into the institutional world of mental illness, but I didn’t think it was about what mental illness means to most people today,” he said, in a voice that sounds studiously calm. “Most people today are deinstitutionalized and have to live on the outside the best way they know how. In some ways, the institutional part of mental illness is the most important part of that life. It left an indelible scar on all their lives and you need Mary Ellen’s work to know what it was like inside. That is why the combined show is called ‘Inside Out.’ ”

Mark’s subjects offer no accompanying narrative. To tell from the page-long autobiographies Shavelson provides--he has published a book with both the statements and the pictures--many of them have achieved an unyieldingly personal point of view. Still, what they say often slips with unconscious ease from near-comedy to misery.

“What happened to me was a breakout, not a breakdown,” says Sally Zinman. “I had reached my early 30s and had not been able to break from my parents. One day I woke up and I had no idea who I was. I told my father that he was a very nice man, but he wasn’t my father. Two aides from the hospital showed up and said I had to go.”

Robert Fennell, a former state inmate, says in a written statement: “After several years of radical theorizing, i (sic) was able to intertwine communist theory with feminist theory, marxism with solanisism (sic), in a very unique and radical fashion.” “However, after 13 years now, i’ve never been able to get anybody to join up with me.”

Often, one senses a defiantly tightening grasp on a better life. “Now I do things in between the depressions so that when they come on I already have my basic things together,” says Diane, a severe depressive. “Things come in cycles.”

Shavelson said he started by spreading word of the project through community mental health centers and on the streets.

“I would get the strangest messages on my telephone machine from people saying they wanted to talk to me and reminding me that they were not dangerous,” he recalled. “It was a collaborative process . . . there would be several visits (to their homes) and I would get to know them. I let them come to me, rather than going to them.

“Being a doctor helps me in the sense that I’ve learned over the years how to get people to trust me. That’s done by caring.”

He did not try checking out what his subjects told him. “It was important to me that I was making no judgment on their stories. The thing is that they lived their lives according to what they told me.”

Shavelson said it was intentional, at BC Space, that Mark’s pictures hang in the innermost room of the gallery. One works one’s way in toward her images of no return, then out past Zinman, Fennell and Diane. These days, Brooklyn-born Shavelson said, Zinman helps run a counseling service for others with mental illness; Fennell is still out but is dying of cancer. Diane is a volunteer for an animal rights group.

“It’s great if you can live on the outside, but many people can’t,” Mark said. “Think how hard it is on the outside. Life is tragic for many deinstitutionalized people.”

Mark’s title for her pictures is reportorial--”Ward 81”--while Shavelson draws his from what one of his subjects told a police officer who heard her screaming and knocked on her door. Fearfully explaining that the panic stemmed from absent-mindedness, not a relapse, she said: “I’m not crazy, I just lost my glasses.”

The woman, Joyce Kasinsky, looks out from a picture hanging on a wall above the stairway leading from BC Space. She’s doesn’t wear glasses in her picture. She seems to have decided to pose without them. In her wide, dark eyes is a not-quite-dark clarity, a steadiness and a sense of awareness that stay with one into the sunlit crowd outside.