Wendy Watriss Curates Menil Photography 

Without understanding a lot in regards to the Menil Collection’s pictures holdings (how may we? It’s hardly ever offered), on this displaying, it’s onerous to inform the place Dominique de Menil ends and Wendy Watriss begins. We should not advised a lot right here (as is the museum’s customized of non-didactics) and I’m left questioning about Dominique (actually a tactic of a lady who adored wonderment): Did she have a pictures assortment advisor? Did she have photographer pals? Did she, as one dedicated to plastic arts, contemplate pictures to be an artwork kind or a type of documentation? 

Perhaps I inch nearer to some type of conclusion once I be aware that the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is given probably the most illustration right here — eight items to be actual. Considered one of many first photographers to mix the respectable label of documentarian with the much less plausible (on the time) label of artist, Watriss tells me Dominique collected Cartier-Bresson extensively. She mentions that as she was curating the pictures, she was intently studying the biography of the de Menil household, Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil (William Middleton, 2018), and that her intention was to channel Dominique’s imaginative and prescient (and maybe much less of her personal). Watriss was invited to curate the Menil’s pictures assortment, with the help of the museum’s Senior Curator, Michelle White. The exhibition, Photography from the Menil Collection: Curated by Wendy Watriss, will likely be on view all through subsequent yr’s FotoFest Biennial. 

The images are fantastically curated, with a pure stream — every picture talking to the one earlier than it and main into the one after it — that solely esteemed curators comparable to Watriss and White may make really feel flawless. There are few surprises right here, and a number of other grand slams. We get Walker Evans’ Allie Mae Burroughs (1936), Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Alicante (1933), and Bruce Davidson’s East a hundredth Street (1966), (are we nonetheless involved in viewing a well-known {photograph} in individual? I truthfully have no idea). I’m bored by Elliott Erwitt, however that’s splitting hairs. In a heavy present, the palette cleaners are the nineteenth century photograph playing cards and the fascinating Brazilian photographer Pierre Verger.     

Dominique’s intrigue within the misfits, the outcasts, and the strangers, is current right here. We see a sexually ambiguous girl, a eunuch, Black and white people who find themselves enslaved, kids, Black folks within the Sixties American South; there may be little curiosity within the institution, the middle. The presence of masks of every kind, mirrors — shadows, and odd chapeaus — is all proof of Dominique’s ardour for surrealist artwork. The curatorial conversations between the exhibition and the bigger assortment are wonderful, together with Brassaï’s cartoonish “faces,” which kind a pure dialogue with the African and Pacific Northwest Indigenous masks within the adjoining areas; small images with distinguished textual content level to the pop aesthetics of Jasper Johns and Joe Overstreet, at present on show; viewing apparatuses within the Wunderkammer closet look so fantastical they drive us to query the digicam itself; and it’s intriguing to view Charles Moore’s Police Dogs Attack Demonstrators (1963) after which later, in a neighboring room, see Andy Warhol’s Little Race Riot (1964) impressed by Moore’s images. 

While John and Dominique had been undoubtedly dedicated to social justice, I really feel the pictures from Vietnam are all Watriss. A floating wall, centered, shows the one coloration work within the exhibition — that of the extraordinary photojournalist of the Vietnam conflict, Larry Burrows.

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House 

So why this exhibit at present? Watriss is knee deep in getting ready for the fortieth anniversary of FotoFest in 2026. Next yr’s bash is very anticipated. So, certain it’s well timed, nevertheless it’s rather more than that. As a photojournalist herself, traversing via Africa and Europe within the Nineteen Seventies, Watriss is of an period when photojournalism — the taking and delivering of images used to impart a trusted firsthand account of worldwide information occasions — was an honorable place to carry. Not solely did the vocation present respect, however a photojournalist may, with out hubris, considerably assist alter the world they lived in.  

Burrows, a British battle photographer, labored for 9 years on the entrance strains in Vietnam, embedding himself within the battle with little regard for his personal security. His option to shoot in coloration was revolutionary to battle pictures, and his use of High Speed Ektachrome movie was controversial. The uncommon measurement and saturation of those photos, of meticulously crafted dye switch prints, shouldn’t work in any respect (the alternatives are all improper!), however one way or the other, they do — maybe as a result of overwhelming sense of technicolor fakery (are they from a Hollywood film set or a rancid nightmare or one in the identical?) Burrows’ photos performed a significant position in shaping public opinion in regards to the conflict and influencing coverage making selections associated to it. Remembering this, I instantly recall Watriss’ personal images from the post-Vietnam period, of veterans and their households affected by the toxin Agent Orange. The sequence gained a number of prizes and helped increase consciousness of the toxin publicity’s debilitating sicknesses, aiding victims and their households to shed the stigma surrounding it. Perhaps this cohort of picture makers was the final true bastion of photojournalism that could possibly be relied upon to assist reconcile a worldwide battle whereas igniting a complete viewing public (on the time, there have been solely three tv channels and only a handful of worldwide magazines). At the time Burrows was capturing, photojournalism was activism. 

Imagine… at present, we stay inside a governing administration that intentionally seeks strategies wherein to undermine American democracy, shutters free speech, deploys nationwide troops onto its personal streets, hunts immigrants, manipulates the justice system to rival any gangster syndicate — it unabashedly resembles authoritarian governments in each kind. We don’t really feel rage the way in which that we should always. Or, at the least, we don’t act upon it — if it presents itself in any respect. Those of us who protest craft a glittery poster, put on a performative scarf, and put up images and movies of the occasion on-line that we really feel proves our (momentary) dedication to activism. Yet, Texas is taken into account a non-voting state with one of many lowest voter participation charges within the nation, with these below 30 demonstrating the least curiosity. Instead of sit-ins and bus rides and the danger of arrest and bodily hurt (as seen in a number of of the pictures right here), we snap and we put up and we go about our enterprise. 

Where is the craze? Where are our revolutionary leaders? Here, we’re prompted to laterally ask, the place is the digicam? The exhibition is a stark reminder that the digicam started as a weapon of imperialism and has by no means divorced itself from its origins as a tool of the oppressor.

Images not change the course of conflict. We are witness to this as images from Palestinian lands have flooded our line of sight for the previous a number of years. Susan Sontag was appropriate when she predicted a desensitization from overexposure. This is why the exhibition feels prescient: it’s for these sufficiently old to recollect what enraged and decided activism was, and for youthful viewers to take notes. Get off your telephone and look — actually look, look for a very long time — at what activism was once and maybe remains to be able to. Don’t let the apathy — a elementary side of the telephone’s operational design — drown you. 

In this present, we get an in depth have a look at these within the struggle. There are a number of portraits, or shut crops, of robust Black leaders, together with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglas — though admittedly no Angela Davis, or Rosa Parks, or Gloria Steinem. While a couple of girls topics seem, there are, in actual fact, no girls photographers right here in any respect. Where is Susan Mieselas? It’s no secret or shock that the medium has been dominated by the Western masculine presence since its invention; nevertheless, girls have at all times wielded a digicam. So, the place are the ladies right here? 

One fairly small {photograph} of Dominique was faraway from the exhibition on the final minute. It is a picture of her talking on a rotary telephone, flanked by two massive totems. Here, the ladies — barely faraway from visibility — are the cultural innovators. They are main globally acknowledged arts organizations (FotoFest started in 1986 and the Menil Collection was established in 1987) with the assumption that bringing internationally wealthy artwork, from a spot of outstanding style and imaginative and prescient, to Houston (and past) was the half they performed in serving to to form the world wherein they belong.

Photography from the Menil Collection: Curated by Wendy Watriss is on view via May 31, 2026, on the Menil Collection in Houston.