Andrea Robbins and Max Becher

GERMAN INDIANS AND BAVARIAN BY LAW

August 31 - October 25, 1998
Contact Sheet 98


Photographs by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher present us with deceptively straight forward depictions of seemingly familiar places and events. However, in each case our assumptions are thrown askew when the context underlying each image is revealed to be something quite different. Robbins and Becher are a married couple who work collaboratively using photography as a means to document what they refer to as the transportation of place. In elaborating this idea the artists wrote, "Notions of place have become intensely confused due to overlapping eras of slavery, colonialism, holocausts, immigration, tourism, and mass-communications. We focus on particular examples of such confusions, always a place, event, or artifact on display for the public."

This exhibition presents two recent series titled Bavarian by Law and German Indians. Historically the notion of culture and place was associated with geography. Today the intersecting and mixing of cultures through tourism, immigration, colonialism, and wars have blurred the clearly defined boundaries of cultural identity and history. Andrea Robbins and Max Becher delineate this cultural confusion in their photographs, which conceal, rather than reveal, a conclusive interpretation, leaving the viewer with many questions regarding the preservation of one culture weighed against the assimilation and subordination of another.