Terry Kurgan: Photographs 1924 - 2005
by Tracy Murinik
One of photography's earliest and ongoing applications is its use as evidence - proof of people and things having existed and being present at a particular moment in time - or as "material for interpretation ... to be solved, like a riddle; read and decoded, like clues left behind at the scene of a crime", to quote Annette Kuhn who Terry Kurgan cites in wall text for her recent solo exhibition at the Goodman Gallery.
It is this that we are encouraged to do in 'Terry Kurgan: Photographs 1924 - 2005': look at the photographs on show, both as surfaces and as compilations of intricate detail; engage them as images identifiable by their titles, and also as psychic palimpsests.
An exhibition in three parts, this is a tightly conceived, carefully edited body of work, which efficiently pulls together key facets of what Kurgan has variedly been exploring over the years: her complex interest in the medium of photography and its meanings.
Kurgan's most recently produced images on the show - a series of bold, large-scale colour portraits, collectively titled Some Jo'burg Kids - are winged in by a re-edited version of an older body of photographs mostly of Kurgan's very young children, Family Affairs (1999/2005) on the one side of the gallery, and by a series of found family photographs dating back to early last century - before and shortly after World War II in Eastern Europe, and the time of her parents' childhoods - on the other.
Some Jo'burg Kids is a charming and empathetic insider eye on pre-teenhood and young adolescence in suburban Johannesburg. The portraits are of Kurgan's children's respective peer groups in two different environments: some reveal gawky, awkward-looking adolescent schoolboys, framed by the imposing architecture of the boys' school they attend, photographed in ill-fitting school uniform, seemingly unable to keep track of what their own bodies are up to; and the others, a poignantly vulnerable-looking array of primary school kids self-consciously dressed to party, photographed performing themselves for Kurgan's camera on a manicured surface of suburban lawn against an azure evening sky on the occasion of their school's Valentine's disco. These are extraordinarily perceptive images that foreground their subjects' personalities in progress, caught at the cusp of growing up.
But where do these images fit in relation to the other two sets of work on show? Keys lie in Annette Kuhn's commentary, and in the title of the exhibition: the time scale 1924-2005 being the temporal backdrop against which we need to read and reference these works. In Family Affairs, the scrutiny that Kurgan and her mother give, in a fascinating email exchange, to photographs featuring three generations of mothers and daughters in Kurgan's family (her grandmother, her mother and herself respectively, each holding their infant daughters; plus a photograph of her infant mother being held by her governess) take these commonplace images of mother and child into the domain of almost forensic analysis. They pose questions of how those relationships, perceived through photographs, exist as images in our memories, informing our sense of history, culture and family reference, devising a larger narrative about who we are, as well as their inherent contradictions in terms of what we later learn to know about what informed those relationships. Similarly, in the found photographs that Kurgan includes of her maternal and paternal families in Poland and Lithuania, we're pushed to recognise the detail that we inherit of our own perceptions - our own implication in a particular set of historical dynamics that feed themselves through photographs as a psychic trail of knowledge and inference from one generation to another.
Opened April 23, closed May 2005
Goodman Gallery
