Photo ‘Scene’: The Famous and the Unfamiliar

MOCA’s traveling photography show “The Social Scene” is a compelling experience despite somewhat convoluted organization.

Put together from the permanent collection by curator Connie Butler, it presents some 300 works by nine artists. As famous as Brassai, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, they’re also as unfamiliar as Helen Levitt, John Pfahl, Danny Lyon and Roger Mertin.

The idea seems to be that these artists represented a sea change in documentary photography. Whereas precursors like Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange believed photographers should function as advocates of social betterment, these photographers worked the underbelly streets to different, ever more personal ends.

Brassai, the eldest and only truly European artist, chose 1930s Paris bistros as his beat. His hookers, transvestites, gays and thrill-seekers recall the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. But Brassai’s photographs remind us his scenes paralleled Weimar Germany when chic decadence was cultivated as an anesthetic against the real angst of looming totalitarianism. The actors in “A happy group at the Quatre Saisons” have the kind of real fun that comes with borrowed time.

Robert Frank--a quarter-century younger than Brassai--was born in Zurich in 1924. Working as a freelance photojournalist in 1950s New York, he aligned himself with the Beat generation. Eventually producing his classic “The Americans,” he linked Kerouac & Co. back to their Existential European ancestors and vice versa. Frank’s “Backyard--Venice West, California, 1956” looks remarkably like a Kienholz.

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We see the documentary form drifting toward the cinematic art of film noir. Photographers assume the role of private-eye loners stalking dangerous nights for clues to the mystery of the self.

Other actors in “The Social Scene” are most often native New Yorkers. The senior member, Helen Levitt, was born in 1918. Still active, her wonderful eye for the unexpected often falls on small children--like the one laughing at the woman whose head has disappeared into his stroller. Levitt’s New York is populated with moxie survivors of the gloom.

It’s hard to believe Diane Arbus was just five years younger than Levitt. Her deadpan images of the Great American Freak Show changed everything. Seeming to represent the ‘60s anti-Establishment counterculture, she squeezed the fun out of Brassai’s universe. Her dwarfs, cross-dressers, pre-pubescent lovers and grotesque iron-pumpers seem like the doomed spawn of a corrupted gene pool.

The work was so jarring it melted the membrane between photography and art. People recalled Arbus in the same breath with Warhol and Janis Joplin. Funny. She worked the same carnival as Fellini, but where he tapped it for humanism, she got toxicity. Probably cultural differences.

Americans were getting squeamish. Critics grumbled that people like Arbus were just Cadillac bohemians exploiting the unfortunate. In 1971, she committed suicide.

Garry Winogrand took similar heat. Using his options as a working photojournalist, he pictured the emptiness of press conferences and the unreliability of deriving fixed meanings from photos, “Easter Sunday, Central Park, New York, 1971,” for instance, first looks like a naked guy assaulting innocent passers-by but then turns into a piece of street theater. In “Women Are Beautiful,” Winogrand produced an endearing paean to the male’s reflexive need to girl-watch. For this, he was bad-mouthed by feminists as a sexist voyeur. In 1984, he died of cancer at 56 in Tijuana.

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Probably it’s just a coincidence, but the other, younger artists seem more politically cautious. Lee Friedlander deals in the poetics of formal oddities like the way a road turns in “Akron, Ohio, 1980” or in his own shadow falling on the back of a woman in the street.

Danny Lyons’ status as a risk-taker isn’t lessened by the fact that he gets to know the convicts and bikers who are his subjects. If anything, personal acquaintance must only deepen empathy. All the prisoners look innocent, the bikers, heroic, and everybody matches up with the romantic actors who play them in the movies.

It doesn’t diminish the power of John Pfahl’s images to note he is almost a straight landscape photographer who shoehorns in social commentary by depicting power plants and offshore drilling rigs.

Roger Mertin inhabits the kind of red-necked suburbia that borders on farmland. Out there, plain houses, garages and basketball hoops look like they’re anonymous because the locals don’t want outsiders to figure out what a great life they have. All of Mertin’s models look like loved ones, and his fantasies are wholesome.

Aforementioned organizational muddling consists mainly of arbitrary thematic image-groupings and a catalog with four essays that meander. Meanings intended by contributors Butler, Max Kosloff, Emily Apter, A.D. Coleman and Liz Kotz play about equally as unnecessary distraction or provocative mental enrichment.

I guess that confirms the photographers’ intentions.

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“The Social Scene,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., through Aug. 20, closed Mondays. (213) 626-6222.