Willem Diepraam
My least favorite of Willem Diepraam’s 26 photographs at Stephen Daiter is a portrait of a sad-eyed woman with a deeply lined dark face and white hair. True, the elegant textures in Suriname, Paramaribo, 1975 ennoble the subject, and the photograph conveys her humanity. But this is the only close-up in which someone gazes into his camera–the other images conceal as much as they reveal, creating a provocative tension between the seen and the unseen. Five boys crowded together look in through a small window in Health Clinic Close to Missira, Mali, ca. 1980, taken inside a mostly bare room with some rudimentary medical supplies on a rickety table. While there’s a clear social theme–health care is limited and exclusive–the photo also suggests an untold story. Could the clinic have been abandoned?
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Diepraam, who was born in Amsterdam in 1944 and lives there today, began his career documenting demonstrations in the late 60s as a photojournalist. In Willem Diepraam (a book available in the gallery), he’s quoted as saying of these photographs that he intended “to ruthlessly force the gaze of the viewer in one single direction: where I wanted it to go.” Yet even his early photos are often complex. The human and animal figures in Paramaribo, Suriname, 1975, a street scene, look away from the viewer: a boy touches a birdcage, a girl appears to be reaching through a window, and a dog lies in the foreground, seemingly oblivious to the photographer. With their backs turned, they seem to wall off the space in front of them to outsiders. On the other hand, the photographer might be protecting their privacy.
Even in his landscape photos Diepraam uses barriers and darkness to introduce mystery. The most prominent feature of Groningen, 1976 is a line of diagonal shadows cast by trees across a field. They lead toward a vanishing point, but the camera’s relatively low angle and the flat land mean that not every detail is revealed–this isn’t a maplike layout in Renaissance perspective. In one of three images titled Landschap aan Zee, 1994, smoke rises far behind an isolated slab of junk metal. Though the place and date inform us that the photo was taken in peacetime, what looks like the mouth of a cannon–actually part of the rubble from an abandoned steel plant (distant steel plants are the source of the smoke)–might cause a viewer to imagine war in a peaceful Dutch present.
Denlinger chose to pair his work with five paintings by David Driscoll, which Denlinger describes as apparent “aerial views of some sort of lunar landscape or artificial surface that he’s creating with the paint.” Driscoll’s relatively flat surfaces–punctuated by bubbles or dense streaks, they appear to be extreme close-ups–do enhance the feeling that Denlinger’s spaces are hermetic, claustrophobic, cut off from the wholeness of nature. And while the photographer’s shallow focus spotlights what remains of the flowers in a traditional way, the fuzzy, confusing surroundings make them seem even more fragile, momentary, as if undermined by an unseen void.
