I was at a reception for the visiting delegates to the Conference of Young Alaskans on Monday. It was hosted at the Juneau Douglas City Museum and while I was searching for the stuffed mushroom platter I stumbled across Mark Daughhetee’s brilliant “Reconstruction” exhibit.

When I walked into the room I overheard a girl say “I’ve seen that somewhere before.. I just can’t place it.”

It’s exactly that feeling of deja-vu which breathes life into this clever collection of photos.

In the exhibit, Daughhetee recreates some of the most recognizable images of our time and questions why a particular photograph rises above millions of others to stand as an icon. He takes the moments out of their context, he changes the visual elements, and he reshapes the images in a way that playfully distort our vision by playing off memory.

Following are images and some of Daughhetee’s commentary from the “Reconstructions” collection. If you click on an image you can see a larger version in comparison with the original source.

Migrant Model
In 1932 Dorothea Lange was a photographer working for the Farm Security Administration. She was documenting the plight of migrant farm workers in California when she came upon her now famous subject, Florence, a 32 year old mother of seven, living in a lean-to tent in Nipomo, California. Lange made five exposures of Florence and her children using her 4×5 Graflex camera. According to Florence’s grandson, Lange had promised that her picture would not be published, but would be used by the government to help the struggling farm workers. And though the promise was broken, Lange’s image became a symbol for the Dust Bowl era and was instrumental in drawing attention to the needs of the people in the camps.

Insulating Foam
Associated Press photographer Bruce Weaver was one of many who documented the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. To reconstruct his image I sprayed expanding insulating foam onto sheets of waxed paper from a pressure filled can. Eventually I was able to get a reasonable facsimile of the shape of the explosion captured in the widely published Weaver photograph. The foam was allowed to set, removed from the waxed paper, affixed to a painted board and photographed.

Hosed
Hosed is based on the Eddie Adams Pulitzer Prize winning photograph depicting the 1968 execution of a Vietcong prisoner on the streets of Saigon. The Adams photograph was so powerful that it was credited with having a galvanizing effect on turning the tide of opposition to the war in Vietnam. The unidentified prisoner, who had just murdered eight South Vietnamese citizens, was shot by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, director of South Vietnam’s police force. For the rest of his life, Loan was haunted by the execution. He relocated to the United States after the fall of Saigon where he ran a pizzeria near Dale City, Virginia until 1991. His identity was eventually discovered and shortly thereafter his business failed. He died of cancer in 1998.

911
An indelible image, yet it is the only photograph in this exhibition that is not based on a single image. Instead, it was created from a compellation of many images that we saw that day and in the days that followed. The model; built from cardboard, plastic, foam rubber and steel wool, was constructed within a week of September 11, photographed and destroyed. The print was finished and put away from view. Many months world pass before I began the second image of this series.

The exhibit at the City Museum is closed but you can still catch it at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage in September or visit Daughhetee.com to see these and other photos.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 10:52 am and is filed under Juneauite, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.