Girl #39
Menachem Wecker
Girl #39 showcases a model with shoulder length blonde hair, rich lips, low-cut blouse and pout, in a 12×15 photograph. But she hardly represents the typical model: a gray circle obstructs her neck and upper chest, and her portrait sits quarantined in a black rectangle, flanked all around by Mondrian-ish grids spanning the entire color range.
She is an attractive girl next door, but if you ask her name, she simply won’t tell you. She, and her sisters in the seventy photographs in "Girls on Film" at Harvard’s Sert Gallery, are "China girls," or "color-timing strips": models who posed in film processing labs to help test color balance and tonal density in a film. They are all anonymous, save the artists’ own occasional images slipped into the repertoire in a postmodern tease.
The exhibit is the brainchild of Julie Buck and Karin Segal, who both work in the Harvard Film Archive. Over email, Segal told me that the show initially involved short film portraits, but compatibility problems with the Anthology Film Archive in New York, where the show began, necessitated the film stills format.
The show lives somewhere between art and research, though Segal called it "an artistic work." She cited several curatorial and aesthetic decisions: arranging the room like a film strip, and photoshopping the images. This was initially done to "clean up" the images and eventually to make them uniform, by adding text, adding or removing color bars, and "sometimes intentionally making the women appear to be even more constrained and claustrophobic."
But the ultimate curatorial move is anti-historical. Segal conceded to knowing quite a bit about the girls’ history, though the information was excluded "because we want the viewer to react emotionally and visually to the images, without framing the images in a historical context." Upon first seeing the show, thought the exhibition would have gained a lot from properly documenting the people behind the portraits. A fruitful opportunity to reveal the human aspect of what lives these models lived before and after these portraits were done, was sadly missed. But looking at the figure in "Girl #62," I can’t help but think that the mysterious smirk and bewitching eyes might just mean a whole lot more left as it is, anonymous.
