November 2002


Known for the unconventional pictures she published each week in the Village Voice column, “Sylvia Plachy’s Unguided Tour”, Hungarian-born Sylvia Plachy in recent years has established her reputation with the publication of several books: Unguided Tour (1990), Red Light (1996) and Signs and Relics (1999). For this small retrospective, entitled “Verso,” she has combed through forty years of her archives and discovered forty pictures showing that one of her obsessions- not a conscious choice since she was unaware of it- was looking at people, places, animals and things from the back: hence the title “Verso.”

Her choice is hardly innocent. Looking from the back is anathema for the street photographer and the photojournalist alike; pictorial convention dictates that faces are the most important part of us. If we look at magazine covers in any newsstand, faces are sure to be dominant.

Over the years Plachy brought her camera to nightclubs and ghettos, dog shows and weddings, beaches and sumo-wrestling contests. She avoids the exotic and prefers to find small magical moments close to home. Her ability to fit in and to drift along, her sense of wonderment at the day’s offerings, her pretense that she is only taking family pictures, recall her master Andre Kertesz and another lover of people’s backs, French photographer Edouard Boubat, who published a book called Seen From the Back.

Plachy is excellent when she makes “portraits” of people such as writer Norman Mailer or promoter Don King, his hair forming an aura of light around his head. But her best shots are probably of the un-self-conscious – children and animals. The boy hugging himself after a swim, the bear diving into the waves, both demonstrate how eloquent and strong body language can be. It seems that Plachy’s unusual perspective lets her communicate emotions and sensations other than the visual. We feel the bear’s delight and the boy’s shiver almost directly. It is Plachy’s gift to seamlessly blend poetry and empathy, and pull us in on the other side.


-- Carole Naggar

June Bateman Gallery
560 Broadway/Suite 309 New York, NY 10012
www.junebateman.com
(Until November 30)