"La Vendedora," Valles City, Mexico. 35mm slide projection
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Traveling from the U.S. border south to Oaxaca on a mission to shoot portraits of the Mexican people, Chicago photographer Joe Compean was guided by his uncle’s dictum: “Shove a camera in a Mexican’s face and they’ll wipe their smile off and look dead into the lens; that’s the Mexican look.” Although Compean sought to find and capture that look, his clear and lustrous color slide projections, one of them stereoscopic, prove that his uncle was dead wrong. Try as they might to be stoical, each of Compean’s subjects betrays intense emotion through the cracks in the facade. In his banner image, a woman tending an open-air dress shop sits cramped and huddled in a chair surrounded by mannequins in open stances with insouciant expressions, whereas she, in stark contrast, radiates worry, distress, discomfort and self-closure. Compean makes it plain that people are emotional beings who can never avoid disclosing their sentiments. (Michael Weinstein)
Through September 12 at 33 Collective Gallery, 1029 West 35th
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