| |
William Ropp | | |
William Ropp "fascination of the imaginary"
There have been and there are many great photographers of children, but William Ropp is perhaps the greatest photographer of the child. In
the first decades of the twentieth century while Heinrich Kühn was immortalizing
the idyllic innocence of childhood, Louis Hine was capturing its antithesis in grim studies of children in sweat shops and slums. In our time Sally Mann powerfully
and eloquently evoked the young girl entering adolescence and also caught her
own children’s early childhood in a blended portrait of innocence, experience, and
place. In so doing she captured something essential about life in the American South.
Luis González Palma did a similar thing in his ritualizing of the native children of
Guatamala, his turning them into saints, angels, and Christ himself. Like Mann, he,
too, blended innocence and experience, yet not so much with place, but rather, like
Hine, with a social message.
~
One can think of many other photographers and the diverse portrait of children that
collectively emerge from their work. In addition to those four I mentioned, consider
Southworth and Hawes, Julia Margaret Cameron, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Roman
Vishniac, Diane Arbus, Arthur Tress, Bernard Faucon, and Loretta Lux, to name
but a few of the best. Each of these artists’ individual bodies of work about children
can be characterized and typed with adjectives such as allegorized, eroticized,
and fantasized or nouns such as photojournalism,
documentary photography, and
society portraiture. However, none of those words or terms describe William Ropp’s
art and what it is that he achieves in his portraits. None of those fictive childhoods is what he represents. His work goes beyond any imagined narrative of a childhood to address, and to address exclusively, the child himself and herself.
~
Viewers of Ropp’s portraits of children nearly always find them “haunting”. And
they are haunting in the way that great art haunts us, draws us back to it, and will
not let us forget it. But Ropp’s children also haunt us in a emotional way. That emotional
response to his work is nearly universal among those who see it; however, the nature of the emotion varies because it reflects, I would argue, not what the viewer
sees in the photographs but something within the viewer, something he may not see
within himself.
opening: Saturday, August 23, 2008, 7 pm.
opening hours:
August, 24. till September 6, daily 3 - 7 pm,
from September 7 till October 18 only by oppointment. |
Send E-mail
