Places out of place
Photographers Max Becher and Andrea Pobbins explore what happens when the familiar is relocated in new surroundings.
When Max Becher and Andrea Robbins traveled to Cuba on a photo expedition in 1992, the husband-and-wife team of photographers didn’t train their cameras on the traditional subject matter.
“When we said we were going to Cuba, people thought, ‘cars, cigars and girls in plaid school uniforms,’” says 42-year-old Robbins, an assistant professor in the School of Art and Art History at UF’s College of Fine Arts. Instead, they came back with photographs of Capitolio, an imposing, dome-shaped structure reminiscent of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the Bolsadela Habana, or Stock Exchange of Havana, and several banks that give this part of old Havana the look and feel of Wall Street and the Financial District in New York — the vestiges of capitalism in the heart of communist Cuba.
From a distance, the resulting photos in their project, “Wall Street in Cuba,” have the air of a traditional photographic study of neoclassical architecture in New York, says Becher, 41, an assistant professor of digital media in the School of Art and Art History at UF’s College of Fine Arts.
“But when you get up close,” says Robbins, “It’s like ‘Escape from New York’ because there are trees growing out of the signs and there are shoes hanging up to dry on the windowsills, and there are people living in the Stock Exchange.”
Becher and Robbins have made a career of capturing in photographs places that have been transported to another part of the world and — more often than not — transformed in the process. To photograph New York, they traveled to Cuba and Las Vegas. To photograph Germany, they visited Africa. To photograph Native American Indians, they traveled to East Germany. And to photograph the London Bridge, they went to Arizona.
The central question posed in virtually all of their works: “What if you took a place and you moved it somewhere far away?” says Becher. “What would happen to it?
“The New York you see in Las Vegas is different from the New York you see in Cuba, or the Brooklyn you see in Australia,” he adds. “It’s a paradigm shift, like a laboratory experiment.”
That experiment — ongoing for some 20 years now — explores the influences of “overlapping eras of slavery, colonialism, holocausts, immigration, tourism and masscommunications” on our traditional notions of place. And the couple’s documentary-style color photography, hailed by critics for its unique approach, subject matter and social commentary, can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum of New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. They’ve had exhibits in museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Barcelona, Paris and the Harn Museum here in Gainesville, where photographs from one of their newest projects, “770,” are on display at the new Cofrin Pavilion through May.
“Max and Andrea have been part of an extraordinary number of international exhibitions,” says Kerry Oliver-Smith, curator of contemporary art at the Harn, who helped bring another of their exhibitions to the Harn in 2002. “They’ve also been unbelievably prolific,” producing a tremendous volume of work that “just keeps getting better and better,” says Oliver-Smith.
In the fall of 2005, the photographers had exhibit openings in Düsseldorf and Cologne, Germany, the Jewish Museum in New York and in Barcelona. They also just published a new book providing an overview of their w o r k , e n t i t l e d “ T h e Transportation of Place: The Work of Andrea Robbins and Max Becher” (Aperture Publications, 2006).
COMMON BONDS
Becher and Robbins are no strangers to the experience of relocation and re-assimilation.
Becher, who was born and raised in Düsseldorf, Germany, was transported into the strange new surroundings of New York City as a teenager, when his parents, Bernd and Hilla Becher — themselves renowned contemporary photographers — moved to the United States in 1977.
Robbins grew up feeling like a bit of an outsider as a member of one of the few Jewish families in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a 350-year-old town just outside of Boston with Protestant religious and cultural roots dating back to the Puritan settlers.
Robbins and Becher met in 1984 as students at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Friends who felt the two had a lot in common introduced them to each other. Soon the couple began working on film projects together at school. They continued their collaboration even after completing their bachelor’s degree programs at Cooper Union in 1986, supporting themselves by teaching at Cooper Union and Rutgers University and by selling their photography in galleries. Eventually, photography won out over film as their primary medium, partly because photography was better suited to their subject matter, partly because it had more immediacy, and partly because it was more marketable than film. Before long, they had developed a distinctive approach to their subject matter and began assimilating an impressive body of work. They cemented their partnership when they married in 1988.
BROOKLYN ABROAD
Photographing the “770” project took Becher and Robbins to Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, California, Israel, New Jersey, Cleveland and Milan to photograph replicas of the Hasidic Lubavitch Jewish headquarters, located at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.
“It’s like a village that’s been disbursed around the globe,” says Becher of the Hasidic Lubavitch community. It’s not just the building that’s been relocated. It’s the 19th-century dress, which has been transported through time, and even the mannerisms of the people. “If you come across a Lubavitch person who speaks Hebrew or Portuguese, the mannerisms you can recognize from the same people you met in Brooklyn,” says Becher.
Becher and Robbins, who immerse themselves in research about the people and places they plan to photograph and return to the photographic sites a number of times during the course of a project, were pleasantly surprised at how quickly the people in the Hasidic communities assimilated the photographers into their lives, and how welcomed the couple felt wherever they went. When Becher and Robbins traveled from Iowa to a Hasidic boys’ camp in Montreal, Robbins recalls, “Three people yelled out, ‘Hey! How’re you doing?’ And we knew them. ”
Photographing the Hasidic Jewish community in Postville, Iowa is another project the couple has been working on for the past 10 years. Although the community is in a state where the Jewish populace comprises 1 percent of the total population, the town boasts the largest number of rabbis per capita of any place in the world.
“It’s nice to run into New Yorkers when you’re in Iowa,” says Becher, who observes that most of the people in the transplanted Hasidic community have the mannerisms of typical New Yorkers: “They’re fast and direct.”
FAMILIAR FACES IN UNEXPECTED PLACES
Becher and Robbins resist the temptation to visit exotic places and bring back the experience to an audience that has never been there. Instead, says Becher, “We always photograph something that’s familiar and we bring it back to the people who are partly responsible for it.”
In one project, for instance, the couple photographed America in France and France in America. The America in France component consists of a series of photos featuring super strip malls outside of Toulouse. And for France in America, “We combined that with St. Pierre,” an island off of Newfoundland that’s still part of the French republic, explains Robbins.
“France is very picturesque. There’s an urge to photograph it,” says Becher. “But we wouldn’t just photograph France being France in France. It has to have that second level for us to find it interesting. France off of Newfoundland, now that’s interesting.”
But Becher and Robbins’ photography moves beyond the juxtaposition of familiar structures in surprising new places. And while humor and irony both are important components of their work, “These are very serious subjects” having to do with globalization and its impact on cultures, says Robbins.
One project, “The Americans of Samana,” for example, consists of a series of portraits of some of the 8,000 descendents of freed American slaves living on the Samana peninsula in the northeastern region of the Dominican Republic. The people living there, with surnames such as Green, King and Jones, speak a dialect of American English from 1824, when their ancestors were relocated to Samana from the United States. But the community has suffered political, economic and social isolation from the rest of the Spanish-speaking residents of this Caribbean island, along with its numerous dictatorial govern “
VIEW MORE Max Becher’s and Andrea Robbins’ photographs at www.robbinsbecher.com. Their new book, “The Transportation of Place: The Work of Andrea Robbins and Max Becher,” (Aperture Publications, 2006) is available through Amazon.com.
PROFESSION: Contemporary photographers whose works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Their photographs are part of the permanent collections of such museums as the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum in New York. EDUCATION: Becher and Robbins both received bachelors of fine arts degrees from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York; Max received a master’s degree from Rutgers University; Andrea studied for her master’s degree at Hunter College in New York. YEARS IN GAINESVILLE: 3 FAMILY: Max and Andrea are married. They have two children: Oscar, 11, and Bruno, 7. Both boys attend Country Day School.