NOMADS

For his photographs of homeless people in New York subways, Andres Serrano used Edward Curtis's famous portraits of a "vanishing race" as a reference and a departure point. Serrano's empathy with the homeless was somewhat like Curtis's belief that his subjects were a noble people, who through no fault of their own were being eradicated. However, the identification with Curtis was artistic, not ethnographic; Serrano understands that the art of portraiture is rhetorical and not expository. That is, he understands that he is constructing an image, not "taking" one as the myth of photography claims. In doing so, Serrano also assumes a moral and ethical position for the artist in general. By admitting to a construction, he deconstructs the idea of portraiture in which representations of faces are "windows to the soul"; instead, he projects the idea of portraiture as ideological force. He thus performs a kind of "image psychoanalysis" on the notion of identity itself. The Curtis photographs are "false" in a sense: he used the wrong costumes for certain tribal affiliations, and the poses imbued a sense of nobility, whereas poverty and disaffiliation-the real forces at work on his subjects are invisible to the camera. Yet the images have endured in the public imagination, and even in indigenous people's own sense of themselves, speaking to the power of art (or artfulness) to construct a history and an identity through representation. Serrano has improved on Curtis's efforts by the use of a scale that is more appropriate to heroic portraits, and the use of color which enriches the subjects' representations as expressive force. In another important improvement, he publicly gives them back their names, rescuing them from the anonymity of most of Curtis's subjects. But where the cross-historical indexing in the juxtaposition is most effective and emotionally sharp is in Serrano's reminder that homelessness and a lack of public identity can be and have been for over a hundred years in this nation-a matter of public policy; a policy of deliberate displacement by a politics that favors economic arguments and racial homogeneity over the lives of real people.
Text written by Curator Bruce W. Ferguson and Vincent J. Varga for the exhibition catalog.