On View: October 22 – November 22, 2019
Opening: October 22, 6pm
Pragovka: Entry Gallery, Kolbenova 923/34a, Prague 9
Curated by Thomas Beachdel
To look deeply at the Young American portraits is to see them looking deeply back at you. This is the essence of this work. It is about the hope of youth, the power of youth, and about the bond between people—the profound humanness that we all share. The portraits visualize an America in which individuality is valued as uniqueness and not judged as a lack of sameness. It asserts and acknowledges a sense of self not in terms of some idealized standard of gender, sexuality, or beauty, but as exactly who we each are as unique individuals.
As photographer Ryan McGinley writes in his introduction to the book Young American, “This is a future free of gender binaries and stale old definitions of beauty. In Marie’s world people can just simply be. I wish all of America’s youth culture looked like Marie’s photos of Downtown, diverse and inclusive.”
The idea of an affirmative space, particularly around the concept of belonging, is paramount in understanding these portraits not only with respect to the subject, but also to the photographer. In these portraits, the subject is precisely, precisely, precisely who they are, and so is Tomanova. They both claim the right to be themselves, present, visible, and seen. The portrait is a testament to the fact that we matter. “To photograph is to confer importance” as Susan Sontag writes in On Photography.
One could contextualize this body of work in the increasingly important and powerful voice of youth culture that is in the process of vitally reshaping gender, society, culture, and perhaps igniting a subtle and much needed ideological revolution that has its own history, as can be seen, most notably, in the 1967 Summer of Love centered in San Francisco, the events of May 1968 in Paris, or the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Prague. We could go far deeper, of course, and see this power of youth to assert and forge new cultural identity in early nineteenth-century Romanticism, the anti-establishment vision of the Impressionists, the anti-bourgeoisie stance of the German Expressionists, the automatic freedom of the Beat Generation, the bright veneer of POP, the disharmonious edge of PUNK and the Blank Generation, and the self-awareness of Generation X, Y,...Z.
John Berger wrote, “To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.” Like many others, emigrating to the United States has been one of the most significant decisions of Tomanova’s life. Displacement, place, community, self, and memory became the key themes in her photography work, first in her self-portraiture series and then in the Young American portraits that allowed her to connect with others, to see herself in the context of a new environment and society, to find her place in the American landscape.
--Thomas Beachdel