Laure A. Leber
Given today’s surfeit of images--when photographs taken on a mobile phone of a comedian cracking up or the hanging of a dictator can effectively change public discourse – documentary photography is asked to be even more technically and aesthetically sophisticated to gain any traction from viewers. Laure Leber has focused her lens on her subjects with an exceptional commitment and grace that reminds us how a medium can transcend genre to become art. Working within a community of underground artists in New York since the mid-Eighties, Leber has produced a body of work that is not about well-known art stars but rather about voices central to the scene yet marginal to the market. Her portraits, ongoing unfolding histories that in many cases now span decades, are as much about the nature of creativity as they are about the idiosyncratic personalities in front of her lens.
Leber’s sense of community is an extension of what we commonly think of as family. Best known for her extensive tenure in the cultural demimonde of Neo-Burlesque in New York City, Leber is also interested in women’s personae generally, from artists to boxers to rodeo clowns. She focuses on the individual within the spectacle, and the empowered subjects in her photographs undermine any tendency to approach these images voyeuristically. With a body of work that runs from the early days of women’s boxing to Na’ii’ees, the Sunrise Ceremony that marks a girl’s passage into womanhood in the Apache tradition, her work features an underground pantheon of characters (many of whom are now rising to greater art world attention), including Julie Atlas Muz, Kembra Pfahler, Genesis P-Orridge, and Joe Coleman.
Leber’s post-feminist approach extends back to her long involvement with the New York glam-shock-rock band the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, and her art is an immersion into such other-worlds as the Coney Island Sideshow, the Mermaid Parade, and the Miss Exotic World Pageant, with a cast of characters like Dirty Martini, Mangina, the World Famous Bob, and Bambi the Mermaid. It is not just a matter of the trust she has earned, nor even the way in which her work weaves inherent gender contradictions within a broader story about a generation of women who have reworked traditional power structures. There is something about the moments she captures in her photographs--dreamy and ethereal imagery that nevertheless transforms her subjects into icons--that recalls the work of her mentor, the late Fluxus photographer Peter Moore.
Moore’s assistant and now the master printer for his estate, Leber has extended his vision in a manner that is as much formal as it is social. Like Moore, the photojournalist whose record of the 1960s avant-garde performance world of Happenings, Fluxus, Saint Marks Poetry Project, and Judson Dance Theater helped define such iconoclastic figures as Charlotte Mormon, Nam Jun Paik, and Yoko Ono, Leber is interested in investigating the evolution of an artist over the span of his or her career. It is this conception of extending the picture moment through time that takes shape through her performance photography. Using a Wide Lux camera at slow shutter speed with no flash, she works unobtrusively, capturing the light, the ambiance, and the motion of what was never meant to be seen still.
Carlo McCormick is senior editor of Paper magazine.