They offer no logos, no phone numbers or website addresses, no text whatsoever; if you didn't know the billboards were displaying the photography of Zoe Strauss, or that they were a piece of her exhibit opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Jan. 14, you might be a bit perplexed.
At 10th and Reed, the closely cropped face of a stern, middle-aged woman keeps a watchful eye over the intersection; it's Strauss' 2001 photograph Antoinette Conti, a loving portrait of one of her neighbors in South Philadelphia.
Another billboard sits directly behind a BP station in Oxford Circle, with one image stretching across two side-by-side billboards; it shows the sunset over a body of water casting an iridescent auburn glow. That color comes from the oil slick coating the water; it's an image Strauss shot of the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Chatting at the museum last week, Strauss is still in ecstatic disbelief that she's been able to showcase her art at this massive level. She says the immediate enthusiasm for the project from billboard landlords at Clear Channel was both a surprise and a thrill. At first, they offered 40 unused sites that would each host one of her photographs for a month — not a small number by any stretch. As the project moved forward, she says they kept offering more. By the time they are all unveiled, 54 billboards will pepper the city skyline.
"It was crazy!" Strauss exclaims. "I mean, those guys think all the time about signage and the way things are presented, and both selling billboards and what the billboards are selling. So the fact that they're so actively engaged in this anti-marketing campaign is pretty beautiful."
That these billboards don't point back to the exhibit directly (or at all) makes sense for a photographer like Strauss. Her modus operandi has long been taking art out of the museums, out of the galleries, and bringing it to the public on their home turf. That was the guiding philosophy behind her lauded Under I-95 project, which concluded in 2010 after a decade of showcasing her photography from the support beams of the interstate where it cuts along Front and Mifflin — and selling prints for an affordable $5 a pop.
This philosophy carries forward into "Zoe Strauss: Ten Years" (which runs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through April 22). The exhibit inside is joined by projections of its images on the building's façade, and the billboards around the city.
"I love the museum," Strauss explains. "It's important to me personally; it's an important civic space. But often there's a fairly distinct divide ... based on a lot of things. A lot of it is admission, and that's a real barrier. And then also general access. For me, it was very important to have the exhibition have a kind of barrier reduction, a kind of translucence or transcendence."
While Strauss is clearly most comfortable when her work is free of the sanctity (or is it stringency?) of the art world, she's no stranger to showing her photographs in formal settings. The PMA is just the latest institution to embrace her work, which has been shown locally at the Woodmere Art Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art; nationally at New York's Bruce Silverstein Gallery, and Columbus, Ohio's Wexner Center for the Arts; and internationally at Prague's Etc. Galerie.
The publication of her 2008 book America — a nod to Robert Frank's seminal The Americans, taking a similar but updated mission — bolstered Strauss' profile, but Under I-95 remains her signature effort to date. She saw a challenge in addressing it while preparing for "Ten Years." She wasn't interested in attempting to directly replicate the highway pillars in the museum's Prints and Portraits Gallery, she says, but she does hope to talk about the way that installation existed in that space and then "create a different narrative in this space." One where "moving in any direction, you still get the same experience."
This experience comes from the juxtapositions Strauss creates in presenting her work. Her photos can be grouped, with a minimum of short-selling, into three categories. First, there are observational images of text that's both playful (the bright-yellow road marker along the Atlantic City Expressway that reads, simply, "Stay Alive") and poignant ("Mom Were OK" scrawled in paint on the side of a hurricane-ravaged apartment building in Biloxi, Miss.). Then there are the mercurial abstracts, like her 2009 image Nick's Pizza, Philadelphia, a green cousin to William Eggleston's The Red Ceiling.
Finally, there are the portraits that garner Strauss the greatest amount of attention. Candid and striking, they can often be discomforting, depending on the subject. In America, some images portrayed residents of South Philadelphia and Camden smoking crack, photographed at intensely close range. The book's publication in 2008 was nearly delayed because a China-based printing company contracted by her publisher refused to print two full-frontal nude photographs of male subjects.
"There's approximately 150 million men in the United States and I'm going to venture a guess that the great majority of them have penises," Strauss blogged at the time. "But the three penises that were visible in the book were three too many for the printer. ... The ordering was laid out in a way so that each photo weighed a lot, and the two nude photos are very, very important in the creation of a narrative about America."
There is an undeniable element of shock to Strauss' work. But if that was all there was, her art would not be so widely revered. Other portraits strike a tone of wonderment and magic: Titanic, a whimsical shot of a child on a ship-shaped inflatable slide, or South Philly (Mattress Flip Front), of two children bounding acrobatically on discarded cushions and box springs stacked on a sidewalk. Most significant are her intimate, compassionate portraits of everyday people — some are her neighbors, others complete strangers, young and old alike — rendered glamorous by her lens.
At the museum, Strauss has created a densely arranged display. Rather than a typical museum photo exhibit — showing off a few dozen photographs spaced evenly apart, presented as what she disdainfully calls "precious objects" — "Ten Years" groups about 150 of her images tightly together, ranging in size from 6 inches by 9 inches to 30 by 40. This forces visitors to put a little work into viewing her show, rather than passively taking it in.
"Sometimes people may have to get up close to an image that isn't necessarily one they want to get close to in order to see the smaller image," Strauss says. "Occasionally, you're going to have to back up to see the full image. Behind you, there will be images you don't notice."
Strauss allows her audience little breathing room — that comes at the end, she laughs. For her, art lies in editing as much as photographing.
"It was never figuring out a way to force making an image," she says. "It was the way the images presented themselves."
(john.vettese@citypaper.net) (@johnvettese)
"Zoe Strauss: Ten Years" runs Jan. 14-April 22, $16, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-569-8080, philamuseum.org.
