Submitted by Jean Dykstra on Sun, 01/29/2012 - 12:00am
Zoe Strauss, Mattress Flip, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art
Let’s start with Mattress Flip, maybe Zoe Strauss’s best-known photograph. It was first exhibited as a small color photocopy afixed to a cement column underneath I-95 in Philadelphia. Between 2001 and 2010, Strauss organized annual day-long exhibitions of photographs under the I-95 overpass, at the end of which she sold her pictures for $5 each. Those exhibitions grew to include some 200 photographs and plenty of critical attention. Today, Mattress Flip is a billboard-sized image, hanging at the west entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the exhibition Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is on view through April 22. In a dozen short years, Strauss has gone from her increasingly well-attended shows under the highway overpass to the Whitney Biennial (she was included in the 2006 show) to the Silverstein Gallery to this mid-career retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum.
Back to Mattress Flip, which exemplifies, in many ways, Strauss’s work. It shows a boy who seems to hang, mid-air, upside down, having just launched himself from a pile of ripped and dirty mattresses on a city street. Behind the mattresses stands another boy, fist in front of his mouth, hiding a grin, enjoying the show. The photograph is pure exuberance. It’s a moment of joy plucked from what we might imagine is a tough neighborhood and difficult life. In fact, the tragic back story to the photograph is that the boy in the background, Lawrence “Boo” Rose, was shot and killed not far from where the photograph was taken. That sad fact takes nothing away from the beauty of the picture.
Strauss’s photographs – portraits, architectural images, and signage – began in the South Philadelphia neighborhood where she lives and have expanded outward over the years to include other struggling cities and people trying to get by, from post-hurricane Biloxi to the Las Vegas streets well off the glittery strip to Camden, NJ, among other places. She trains her attention – and ours -- on people who have fallen through the gaping holes in our increasingly porous social safety net.
Zoe Strauss, Vanessa, Philadelphia, PA, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art
In addition to the exhibition in the museum, which includes photographs and two slide shows, Strauss’s images are embedded throughout the city, on some 54 billboards in and around Philadelphia. The billboards contain no words, no explanatory captions. Viewers will make of them what they will: the tough and sweet Women Kissing, Beatty, NV, at Cottman Avenue and Revere Street, for example, or the eerily beautiful Submerged Car in Swamp, Venice, LA, at Grays Ferry and 47th Street. With these billboards, Strauss has brought her work full circle, in some ways: from the streets onto the white walls of galleries and museums and then back out to the streets again.
By Jean Dykstra
