Beyond sharing a room at the Yale University Art Gallery, there’s no suggestion of a formal association between print exhibition Printing Darkness and photo exhibition The Shared New Vision of ringl + pit.
I sense that’s in part because no suggestion is necessary. Photography is the wielding of light, and printmaking is, as the one show clarifies, the wielding of darkness (ink). The gallery’s wall colors reinforce the point: ivory for photos, charcoal for prints. Of course, neither exists in a vacuum; as photography uses light to render darkness, printmaking uses darkness to render light. And with both sets of work here rendered almost exclusively in monochromatic grayscale, they arrive, at least viscerally, to a pretty similar aesthetic universe. Drifting back and forth between the shows suggests many of their works could have passed as objects in the same show, had curators wanted to unify them.
In this case, they didn’t, with good reason. The Shared New Vision of ringl + pit, whose title itself feels rather visionary, is on a very different mission than Printing Darkness. While Darkness is vast in scope, spanning 500 years of works meant to capture its title phenomenon’s aesthetic, emotional and conceptual power, Vision pursues something much more intimate: a snapshot of two photographers about to be forced apart by history. Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach, German Jews who fled upon the rise of the Nazis, were dispersed, respectively, to Argentina and New York in 1933. But for a few palpably simpler and freer years before then, they partnered on ringl + pit, an “avant-garde” photo studio titled after their childhood nicknames.
You don’t need to know that last tidbit to sense an almost childlike playfulness in much of the work on display from that time. Yet its makers were also, according to curators, driving at something serious: “the feminist ideal of the New Woman, which promoted freedom and independence from gender roles.” Amid personal and commercial still lifes and subtly surreal portraits of “friends, lovers and other experimental artists,” you can sense moments where Stern and Auerbach might have been invoking that ideal, including in an image of a woman tugging at the lacing of her corset, perhaps about to shed a historically restrictive garment. One particularly striking portrait, snapped in 1931, shows a woman lying back on a dark rippling fabric that reads almost like water. Her restful eyes are curiously out of sync with a tensed jaw, and her hair blends with the fabric as if partially submerged.
Printing Darkness feels, well, darker. Co-produced with the Yale Center for British Art, curators say they’ve chosen “moments of shadow, twilight, and gloom to explore atmospheres ranging from the menacing and mysterious to the tranquil and spiritual”: grim histories and fine landscapes, evil acts and divine revelations, sinister figures and lamplit solitude. Maybe it’s because Halloween’s around the corner, but the darker images tended to be the ones that stayed with me. In Francisco Goya’s Modo de volar (A Way of Flying)—part of a “profoundly unnerving” series the gallery describes as Goya’s “most enigmatic”—my eyes first saw a band of winged demons terrorizing the night, only to realize the famously macabre Goya had depicted mere men using quasi-da vincian contraptions to gain the power of flight, only to realize the other way that, demonically indeed, the men are more likely wearing the corpses of great birds they’ve murdered in order to appropriate this power.
Lighter on the first impression but darker on the second were four photogravures by Kiki Smith, featuring a witch posing in somewhat hammy ways while spooky language narrates. “Her eyes shine out night,” the third frame says, conjuring a legitimately terrifying image of darkness—if not quite on the paper, then in the dark space of our minds, where we can hope such notions will at least tread lightly.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
