Splendid Simplicity Stark, Unadorned Photographs In Jundt Art Museum Exhibit Show The Power Of Simple Images

Photography is visual poetry, images hinting and suggesting their way to our emotions. And, like poetry, it comes in all varieties.

Right now, the walls of the Jundt Art Museum hold a collection of photographs that show the remarkable range of emotions and ideas that photography can express. Seventy-nine of the 81 pictures come from the more than 9,000 photographs in The Minneapolis Institute of Art’s collection. Two pictures, and the drive to bring the exhibit here, come from Jim and Joann Jundt.

Thankfully, the curator of the Minnesota museum, Ted Hartwell, decided to let the pictures speak for themselves, hanging unburdened by verbal baggage. The show is pictures, grouped by theme, with titles, photographers’ names and dates. That’s it.

That simplicity shows Hartwell’s confidence in the medium. Like good poetry, photographs are marinated in ambiguity. The only way through that ambiguity is interpretation, and each viewer will interpret a photograph differently. That’s a source of photography’s richness, the reason it draws us.

If the chance to see excellent pictures that are shown only in Spokane and Minneapolis isn’t enough motivation, there are two other good reasons to go see the photos at Jundt.

First, you should see the pictures you will recognize, the pictures most of us have fixed in our heads, like collective memories. You can see Arthur Rothstein’s “Dust Bowl” (1936), which depicts a father and kids escaping the wild winds that define the Depression; and Dorthea Lange’s “White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco” (1933), another picture from the Depression of a man waiting in a crowd with his empty cup in hand.

Robert Frank’s “Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey” (about 1955), from his book, “The Americans,” shows two people in separate windows of a building, identities hidden by an American flag flying across the frame. The picture challenged not only how Americans looked at themselves, but also challenged documentary photographers to interpret more deeply than they had before. Harold Edgerton “Milk Drop Coronet” is an example of photography’s ability to show the extraordinary in the everyday.

There are more.

It’s worth the trip from wherever you are just to see Henri Cartier-Bressan’s “Behind the Gare SaintLazarre, Paris, 1932,” a man about to get his foot wet. This picture taught subsequent photographers that the most interesting things may be quietly happening, literally, behind the scenes. The picture also helped Cartier-Bresson introduce the idea of a “Decisive Moment,” that exact moment when the action and the aesthetic come together in the viewfinder. The trick for the photographer is to expose the film at that moment. Most of us who consider ourselves documentary photographers still use both ideas as guiding principles.

Another magic picture is W. Eugene Smith’s “Tomoko and Mother, Minamata, 1972,” a heartbreaking but beautiful picture of a mother bathing her crippled child. Smith may be the finest example of a photographer who believed that exposing truth would change the world. In his book about Minamata, Smith wrote: “To cause awareness is our only strength,” which is another principle guiding many documentary photographers.

There are enough more great, classic images in the gallery to make you want to read, or re-read, a history of photography just to help you organize the wave of images.

The second reason to go to the exhibit is to see pictures you may never have seen. It’s another testament to the eye of curator Hartwell that he didn’t just chase after the pictures the whole world has already acknowledged as great. He also sought out great but less-known photographs and confidently put them next to the knowns, organized by themes we understand.

My favorite example is the picture the Jundt chose to put on its poster, a photograph by Jock Sturges called “Christina, Misty Dawn, and Alyse, Northern California, 1989.” Three girls are simply framed in an old, weathered window; the middle has the attention of the other two, and of us.

There’s also “Treasury Building from J.P Morgan’s Office, Manhattan,” by Berenice Abbott, which is just that: a view of the building that means money shot from the window of a man who represented money, with an American flag flopping in the wind between the two. How you read the picture has more to do with who you are and what you think than it does with what the photographer wanted you to think.

The exhibit also tugs at our sense of unknowing. Next to a David Seymour picture of Picasso under his “Guernica” painting, we find another picture of Seymour’s called “Terezka, a Disturbed Child in an Orphanage, with her Drawing of Home, Poland, 1948.” Individually, each picture has an intriguing enough image story to tell. Together, they have us wondering about the connection between genius and insanity.

The variety of the exhibit will, if nothing else, give you an appreciation for the many forms good photography can take (although it is interesting to consider why all but five of the photographers represented chose black-and-white film, even those shooting after the dawn of good color film).

The collection traveled here, and only here, because the Jundt family bridged the Jundt Art Museum and The Minneapolis Institute of Art. Jundt director and curator Scott Patnode calls the exhibit “the most important photographic exhibit to come to Spokane, because of the historic range of the photographs.

“Certainly there have been excellent individual photographers’ exhibits,” he says. “But this is so broad. We’ve got the history of the world in this media, right here.”

The Jundts live in Minnesota and work with The Minneapolis Institute of Art. Jim Jundt also sits on the board of trustees for Gonzaga University.

As a photographer at this newspaper, struggling to find the stories and images beneath and on the surface of our community, I found that a collection of pictures like this provides a touchstone for my efforts. It’s a collection of some of the most explosive collisions between a photographer’s vision and the world he or she looked at.

Like me, you will probably like some of the pictures, dislike others, and not understand yet another few. But you will have seen.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 Photos (2 Color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Art review “Photography: Making a Collection Grow 1983-1996” will be on display through Dec. 13 at the Jundt Museum on the Gonzaga University campus. Admission to the museum is free and the exhibit is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, and noon to 4 p.m. on Saturdays.