The title of this exhibition, hosted at the generally excellent Te Manawa museum of Palmerston North, is more than a touch misleading: it might have you think there will be rather a lot of photographs by Frida Kahlo; instead, it is a collection of photographs owned by Kahlo, and a mere handful (literally; you don’t need more than the fingers on one hand to count them) which she herself took.
This disparity was only one of the things that left me feeling, in spite of some interesting points, rather disappointed in the exhibition overall.
I’ll start with the aspects that disappointed me, so I can finish on the high note of the things that interested me.
The first, simply, is that the exhibition doesn’t really deliver on the idea it puts forward, that there is s strong and obvious link between Kahlo’s photographic collection and her art. There are hints, perhaps, in the photographs by her father: his work is pretty orthodox late 19th century photography, where the limitations of the tools and the infancy of the medium tend to lend to holding still, staring-at-the-camera type of photography that could perhaps presage Kahlo’s (sometimes unnervingly) direct self-portraits.
But on the whole the exhibition doesn’t mount much of a case, not least because there’s such a diversity of styles on show, but also that the predominant themes are nothing you wouldn’t see on many people’s cellphones: family and friends, the odd building, and so on. Most of them are technically unexceptional and of subjects which are interesting primarily because of context, that is, their association with Kahlo herself, or one of her similarly well-known friends or lovers.
It’s a collection of art that is notable almost entirely because of the association with the painter, not because they’d be exhibited if anyone else had taken them; the exceptions tend to be those which were taken by friends known as photographers in their own right (such as Man Ray). And it’s not a case of juding by modern standards: much of the work on display was produced in the era when the like of Ray, Ansell Adams, Cartier-Bresson (and, closer to home Manuel Álvarez Bravo) were only some of the most prominent names redefining photography away from the over-posed aesthetics of an earlier era.
So on that level, disappointing; but what was good?
Well, for one, some of the photos were good by the criteria photos in an exhibition would normally be judged by: interesting in and of themselves. Photographers such as Man Ray, and subjects such as strikes and revolutions are present here and there; artistic and photojournalism is represented, albeit very sparsely.
I got a good deal of amusement out of the nominally romantic section of the exhibition: aside from a few nudes kept presumably for, presumably, their eye-candy value, there is a selection of (mostly) self-made shows of lovers and admirers in various stages of undress and pose (recumbant, a muscular, shirtless archer, legs splayed, what have you): something to remember when you next hear people bemoaning selfies, sexting, and the like. Once we could make raunchy pictures of ourselves and our beaus, we did, we collected them, and we wrote notes on them.
Somewhat in that line: something of note is how often, outside of posed images, Kahlo is conventionally pretty. In more posed shots she looks closer to, but not, the unconventional image she presents of herself in her paintings, and one of the things so often noted about her work.
Finally, the biographical element is interesting: Kahlo’s family, friends, and lovers are all represented to varying degrees; the context and representation of what interested Kahlo enough to keep (photos of indigenous people, buildings, her father and sisters - but not her mother! - and grandmother; one of her doctors; lovers, including some her biographers have never identified). One of the most powerful, for me, was part of a series of photographs of one of her many hospital trips: Kahlo is in traction, her head trussed up and attached to pullies, and three or four images into the series, she is prone, no doubt in considerable discomfort from the traction and pain from injuries and surgery, and an easel has been rigged above her bed where she paints.
A more perfect depiction of the drive to create is hard to imagine.