Boys being boys. (Arts).

Ellenzweig, Allen

Gymnasium

Photographs by Luke Smalley

Wessel + O'Connor Gallery, NYC

October 12-November 25, 2001

Gymnasium

by Luke Smalley

Twin Palms Publishers, 96 pages, $60.

WE'VE been awash in waves of photographic nostalgia for a decade or more. In landscape photography, we have Michael Kenna and Lynn Geesaman, whose pristine vistas, often of the French countryside, evoke the muted, lyrical pictorialism of the 19th century. Fashion photography's Sheila Metzner uses Fresson color, recalling the dappled Pointillism of the early autochrome process discovered by the brothers Lumiere. Today's homoerotic photography is not immune from this retrospective current. John Dugdale's blue cyanotypes and allegorically posed models seem but a short step from the pre-Raphaelite painter, Julia Margaret Cameron. And that camp duo, McDermott & McGough, catalogue sartorial elements of the Victorian era--high collars and top hats--with the encyclopedic rigor of pioneering English photographer William Henry Fox Talbot.

Now we have the photographs of Luke Smalley, culled from work he produced over the last decade of our own fin de siecle. With Smalley, we find nostalgia used appealingly, yet a post-modem element intrudes, creating a tension that is not always resolved. Taking the theme of the "gymnasium"--not that of today but of the small-town high school circa 1910--Smalley posits a nostalgia for lost youth, for ideal youth, for athletic camaraderie, and for male beauty just coming into manhood. He has fashioned images that seem to suggest an American boy-Eden in the years roughly between the Gilded Age and World War I, as if Thornton Wilder's Our Town were populated exclusively by Eagle Scouts. This he has done by getting teenage youths from northwestern Pennsylvania towns, athletes all, to don athletic gear of the period, or in imitation of the period, and used their uninflected gazes to recreate the amateur-style photographs of the period. For a moment, but only a moment, we come upon Smalley's small format pictures an d believe we are seeing authentic finds from a second-hand shop.

On closer inspection we realize that Smalley's is a re-creation, a skillful but slightly skewed one at that. A picture like "First Place" depicts a young man seated in shorts and athletic shoes, a dark victory sash emblazoned with the word "FIRST" running across his naked chest. The room's interior speaks of an authentic American past--everything from the leaf-patterned padded armchair with its spindled legs to the elaborately carved lamp with fringed shade. The boy's gaze is almost too painfully direct for the lyrical simplicity of his surroundings. We sense that a great deal of concentrated effect has gone into this simple composition, betraying the photographer's presence. The boy may appear to be a small-town local commemorated after his victory lap, but the photographer who posed him is no amateur.

It is in Smalley's carefully organized images--sometimes interiors, sometimes en plein air--and in his choice of props and models, that we are treated to an obsession. "Indian Club I" is a most startling picture: two bare-chested and muscular youths seem engaged in an odd game. One is seated on a stump in front of a wide rectangular white panel. He balances a slender Indian club on his head, but then we see that it's his companion standing off to the side who's balancing the club on the line from a fishing pole! There is coolness and irony to this visual conceit, an absurdist quality that has nothing to do with anything, except to focus our attention on the splendor of these lithe young men. In this and other pictures by Smalley--two boys sitting side-by-side under a tree; a seated daisy-chain of boys ascending the leaf-strewn steps of some old outdoor entranceway; a young man hanging from a tire-swing in his lettered jacket--we confront brilliant counterfeits of lost youth. Still other groups of pictures--b oys wrestling in old-fashioned leggings, or practicing swimming strokes on a sawhorse support, or holding still in the midst of calisthenics--are redolent of old-fashioned athletic manuals as well as the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins.

Smalley's obsession is both an invocation of the past and an inquiry into its unresolvable mysteries. Smalley's boys leave us to ponder the unknowable track of their erotic lives. Their mute gaze may provoke a nostalgia for our own lost youth, often fraught with desire for the very boy-next-door types that stare out from Smalley's pictures. These ambiguities are portrayed with a delicacy of feeling absent from Bruce Weber's earlier foray into similar territory. Where Smalley re-imagines the past and finds a sexual ambivalence in his youthful athletes, Weber cynically posed and fashion-styled his athletes as projections of our fevered gay desires.

Still, there is a puzzling inconsistency in the range of Smalley's work. Perhaps to achieve a certain visual variety, he has also produced larger-scale prints in which an isolated boy figure, often stripped to the waist to display the hairless trunk of an American kouros, becomes a decorative foil with a prop in hand--a medicine ball, a megaphone, a rowing machine. These images work within the context of the published book titled Gymnasium, serving as its cover graphics and providing punctuation points in an illustrated volume without a textual critical apparatus. Yet on the walls of a gallery, these spare images of boys in white space appear unanchored, out of context, and truly lightweight.

The published retrospective of Gymnasium does not finally resolve this problem. The intimate scale of the best pictures is often ruined by enlargement, and the two-page spreads leave the book's spine rudely dividing the delicacy of Smalley's effects. The book version often fails to acknowledge that their small scale is essential to Smalley's amateurphoto counterfeit, so we get photographs that bleed to the edges--a graphic style hardly in keeping with the period being invoked--and others set against a black background. From Twin Palms Publishers, masters of deluxe presentation, this is a rare disappointment. For all this, what rescues even Smalley's less sure-footed images is his subjects, who yield themselves to the camera with poise and grace.