PhotoNews, Oct 2006

SPECIAL TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Art Review by Leah Ollman, October 2001

Two basic truths emerge from Robert Lyon’s Rwanda photographs at Paul Kopeinkin Gallery. First, photographs remain fundamentally ambiguous until words are implied to direct their meaning. And second, humans don’t fall into mutually exclusive categories of victim and perpetrator, but are born into the potential for both.

Lyons has been photographing in Africa since the late 1980s, and his 1998 book, “Another Africa,” is a gem of humanistic poetry and environmental portraiture. In this new series on Rwanda, Lyons takes a radically different approach, shooting in black and white, and stripping his subjects of context. The men, women and children in these portraits are rendered with startling clarity, but even more startling is the realization that such straightforward, direct representation s yield no obvious interpretations, but only unanswered questions and moral equivocation,

The portraits are beautiful, elegant, sympathetic. Most of the subjects look clear –eyed into the camera, which neither accuses nor aggrandizes them. A gentle evenhandedness applies throughout, whether the subject is a man who confessed to having killed a child in the Rwandan genocide, a child confessed to having killed his neighbor, a man with a soft crater in his skull from a bullet wound, or a young women who survived the killings by living in hiding. Cues to the identity of each have been suppressed to the point where the captions alone tell us whether the subject is guilty or innocent.

“No Single Truth” is Lyons’ title for this work and his bottom-line take on the complexities of the Rwandan genocide. His photographs are powerful in their ambivalence, striking for their paucity of answers. The give the lie to the pseudo-science of physiognomy, which claims a correlation between a person’s physical features and his or her character. Here, an utter democracy reigns, and the hands of a woman who admits her capacity to murder are pictured with the same dignity and studied elegance as the fronds of a banana tree. There is no single truth to be drawn from this collection of images, only multiple questions, and not just about tribal politics, but about our faith in photographic documents to serve as evidence.

Embassy - Canada’s Foreign Policy Newsweekly

Portrait of a Génocidaire as a Human Being, April 2006

April 6 marks an anniversary that most Rwandans--and indeed the world--would rather forget. It's the 12th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, which lasted for three months. In that time, 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu lost their lives, while thousands more were irreversibly affected by those crimes.

It's these survivors --the victims, génocidaires, and those involved distributing justice--whom Robert Lyons and Scott Straus turn their undivided attention to in the new book Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide. The abstract and horrific concept of genocide is rendered vulnerably human in the dozens of faces and corresponding stories of the men, women and even children who participated in the killings, or who lived through the ordeal (men who survived attempted murder, and women who were raped while their families were killed).

While raw, unanalyzed interviews given by these Rwandans with Scott Straus, an expert on violence in Africa, open the book, it's the striking black and white portraits taken by Robert Lyons which are so absorbing. Over 59 faces stand alone on the pages --some defiant, some confused, others filled with guilt and grief-- uncluttered by their names or details. You can almost guess at their stories, before turning to the back pages revealing their names and predicaments.

Photography this poignant is a good reminder that a picture really can speak a thousand words. This is a hauntingly beautiful book.

christina@embassymag.ca

Die Welt

“Robert Lyons’ Homage to his wife Mariam”
Galerie Michael Schultz, December 2003

Michael Schultz broadens the agenda!!!!!

A novelty! And a double one at that. The first: photography at Michael Schultz Gallery. The second: the American photographer Robert Lyons because he has never exhibited in Germany. Robert Lyons was born in Massachusetts in 1954 and lives in Seattle and Berlin. –just like Drake Deknatel, who is also represented by Michael Shultz (Welt, May 16th). Robert Lyons has already attracted worldwide attention with his thorough and detailed way of conveying the seemingly cold and distant, while retaining and relaying at the same time multiple emotions.

And his works, not only the individual pictures, but also those resulting from the diverse and similar subjects of the series, are quasi portraits of peoples and countries. He accordingly provided photos for Chinua Achebe’s poems in “Another Africa” and for Naguib Mahfouz in “Egyptian Time.” The pictures were accumulated during long and numerous stays in Africa and Egypt, and have already been seen in multiple exhibitions. The current exhibition “The Company of Another” is certainly of a woman’s face. It is always the same woman, his wife Mariam, in the bathroom in the morning: in her bathrobe with a tea cup in hand: in the afternoon under covers on a sofa: or somewhere in a lake. Smiling, reflective, dreamy, expectant, crying. She looks aloof and unapproachable-and yet also familiar and vulnerable. Wonderful, sentimental photos, which are conditioned by both model and motif.

By also displaying two photographs that originated in Egypt, Lyons interferes with the homage to a person, thereby bringing back a lost viewer during his consideration of the images. This makes the woman appear even more mysterious. Robert Lyons-a name that from now on will not go unnoticed in Germany.

Art Scene

Robert Lyons, November 2001

How does one depict suffering and tragedy in times of war? As I write this is the US has begun to bomb Afghanistan. We can imagine the images of before and after. Buildings are leveled, fires erupt, bodies are strewn. After the initial impact of the event we are left with the destruction. We can try to picture what it was like before but will ultimately rely on images to refresh our memory. Who makes these images of war? Photojournalists are often commended for their courageous acts. Their tremendous images grace our newspapers ‘ front pages and television screens. But after the currency of the event subsides and the devastation is cleared away, what happens to the people who are cleared away, what happens to the people who remain?
Robert Lyons is a photographer who has spent a good deal of time photographing in Africa. His interest in other places began when he was young. He always knew he wanted to be a photographer and although he got his MFA in Photography from Yale he spent many years working as a conservator of nineteenth and twentieth century works. When he felt that he was becoming better known as a conservator than as a photographer, he decided to focus on his commercial career. As a photojournalist he took many trips to the African continent. In the 1980s and early 90s his work was concerned with the culture of Egypt. He made seductive color images that portrayed its people as well as exotic people. He was welcomed by the people he documented and even befriended the writer Naguib Mahfouz, who later collaborated with Lyons on his first book, Egyptian Time, in 1992. In 1998 Lyons worked with the poet Chinua Achebe to produce the book Another Africa. This book juxtaposed Lyon’s images and Achebe’s poems in order to reveal the complexity, diversity, and humanity of Africa and its people. The book was an attempt to counteract the portrayal of Africa as a place of famine, drought and civil war. Lyon’s images show Africa as a beautiful place where people go about their daily lives without the constant threat of war.

Lyons began visiting Rwanda in1994. He was sure there was another story to tell besides the one that the media reported about the genocide. He focused on the people of Rwanda, both the oppressed and the oppressors, photographing victims as well as soldiers. In addition to portraits he took on these many trips, he also documented the communities that remained unchanged (but not unaffected), as well as the ones that now exist as monuments to “man’s inhumanity.” Lyons’ investigation was concerned with memory and mourning and how life in Rwanda related to the images. They ask: Do we want to know the subject’s story? According to Jody Ranck in her introduction to Rwanda Photography and the Work of Mourning. “Robert Lyons’ work is an effort to create a space to interrogate how the genocide and identity have been represented and to think about the limits of representation.” It is impossible for us not to think of the images presented by the media from 1994—the corpses, the victims—that became icons for Rwanda. Ranck continues: “Lyons’ work is an attempt to search for the questions as a first task in an ethics of remembering.”

Lyons chooses to depict the aftermath of the genocide and the suffering through black and white portraits. The images become more powerful for what they do not say. Can one really tell the difference between a Hutu and a Tutsi? Death haunts us an absent presence. During Lyons’ visits to Rwanda he photographed people; people in villages as well people in prisons, always trying to answer the question, what does a face signify?

In this exhibition moderately sized black and white square formatted skulls, nature, and interrogation chambers are presented alongside seemingly straightforward portraits of people from Rwanda. The portraits are of men and women, of Tutsis and Hutus, of prisoners and survivors. Often the photographs are arranged as diptychs or triptychs where the juxtaposition of images may include portraits of enemies in an attempt to study what the human face can tell us about a person’s actions. Often the photographs are accompanied by descriptive captions. These captions list the offenders ‘date of birth, profession, when arrested, as well as the place and date of the image. The reason for the subjects’ purported guilt or innocence are objectively stated and almost always circumstantial. Still, most are serving life sentences. For example, a close-up image of a women’s hands casually placed in her lap, has the following caption: “Donata was accused of taking part of organized group killings; she has confessed that, ‘she brought people to a place where they were killed but did not take part in the killing.’ When asked if she could kill she answered: ‘if I was forced to, if I was told to kill, I would kill.’”
Young and old alike were implicated in the genocide and faced the consequences. Although image and caption cannot be separated, the caption confirms what the image suggests. In a portrait of a 12-year-old boy who gently gazes away from the camera’s lens, one wonders if we are really looking at the face of a killer. The accompanying text suggests that the boy, Boniface Mbonyizima confessed would be released. The text goes on to report that there are over 2100 detainees under the age of criminal responsibility during their involvement in the genocide. Similarly we learn from the caption alongside a portrait of Charles Nkurukiyinka, who was an accountant before the genocide, that he was sentenced to death for inciting others to violence. In the photograph he appears as a once confident man gazing longingly out beyond the frame. Shirtless, his shaved head cocked to the left, he seems to emanate an inner calm.
Do these images truly capture the subjects’ inner being? Can we know what a person is like, what they did, from their image? Lyons’ work begins to address the inherent complications in the depiction of war and it’s aftermath. He is not interested in presenting what we expect to see. Rather he portrays both the guilty and the innocent with equal compassion, allowing their features and gestures to speak—or not to speak—for themselves.
Jody Zellen

The Oregonian
By Randy Gragg, April 1998

In his Photos from Africa, Robert Lyons sees a poetic tension in the absorption of foreign ideas

From the time of its invention, photography has been entwined with travel. One part show-and-tell, another part proof “I was there,” travel photography made use of one of the mediums most powerful aspects: making the world more portable.

But with most early travel photographers coming from the First World, and most of their subjects being in the Third World, the genre also became entangled with colonialism. As capitalists exploited foreign lands and missionaries converted foreign people, photographers often preserved the foreignness of both.

To twist an old slogan: “Kodak-it’s the next best thing to being how it was.”
These days of course photography has become such an extension of living that few of us would even think of traveling beyond the city limits sans camera. Like bats projecting sound waves to “see” the world around them, we photograph, perhaps to navigate a world ever increasingly shaped by images.

Any photographer of foreign places, however, who calls himself an “artist”, lives by a higher law. Hanging the pictures in a gallery, selling them to collectors and, perhaps, one day establishing them in a museum collection is about more than snapping cool shots. It’s a self-conscious effort to present a historic vision.
And far more than being about reportage, exotic landmarks or pleasing compositions, this kind of photography is about ethics.

At first glance, Robert Lyons’ photographs of Sudan, Mali, Niger, Ghana and Morocco might not seem worthy of such high-falutin’ scrutiny. The photos, now on view at Savage Fine Arts, often seem rather casual: a straightforward portrait here, a still-life there, and the odd-occasional landscape, sometimes not. But over time, Lyons’ images tend to collect in the mind, much like the patina of humanity so frequently found in each of his compositions.
Lyons is a photojournalist by trade who frequently works for the New York Times Magazine and other high-end publications. But left to his own devices, he’s interested in almost anything but the news.

He shows us the Safari Nightclub in Zinder, Niger, festooned with mirrors, foil-covered plywood, lace and Christmas tree garlands-but entirely empty. His still-life of a pair of blue fish crossed like swords on a cutting board is isolated against the gray floor of a Ghanaian market, blank but for a rotted banana peel.

Yet imbedded in each of the photographs is a quiet and often poetic tension between the evidence of Western influence and the absorption of it. We see things we know-molded plastic kitchen utensils, high-design modern chairs, or a children’s swing set-but they’ve become African. Like surrogates for our own Western sensibilities, they have been subsumed, altered and sent back to us, via Lyon’s pictures, in ethnic dress.

The complexity of Lyons’ work is perhaps best understood by his simplest images-those of people. The man standing in La Gingette River of Burkina Faso; the sinewy and scarred Sudanese boxer raising his fists; and the Nigerian nanny cradling a white baby, each show profoundly different emotions, and consequently widely different interactions between photographer and subject. Though he is ultimately just another white man in a long tradition of photo-colonists, Lyons quietly shows us the many reactions to the handshake of the camera, whether friendly, bemused, theatrical, careful or, occasionally, hostile.

Indeed, one of the most engaging images in this show is a large panorama of the Dogon Market in Tirelli, Mali. Here, poetry and fact flirt but remain in separate rooms, in a metaphor for the parallel dilemmas of understanding other cultures and photographs. In a collage of patterned fabric, meager wares, blurred movement and the tightly entwined interactions of daily life, a man at the center stands staring baldly back. As you meet his gaze, it’s the classic experience of photography as both a window and a mirror: a view on another culture and the reflection of what’s different about our own.

Seattle-Post-Intelligencer

By Regina Hackett, April 2006

Candida Hofer wants to be alone. Hey, no problem. After 30 years in the limelight, her fame paves the way. When she asks to shoot an empty library, concert hall or museum, gatekeepers hand her the keys. Organized by Florida’s Norton Museum of Art and California State University Museum in Long Beach, “Candida Hofer: Architecture of Absence” hangs in the hallway at the Frye, a minor space for a major figure.

She’s one of Hilla and Bernd Becher’s most celebrated students from the Düsseldorf Academy in the 1970s. Using a brutally reductive vocabulary, the Bechers articulated the serial rhythms of industrial structure. Their students took the Becher approach uptown, rejecting the raw in favor of the florid.

Some hit gold with sumptuous serialism. Hofer’s the weak link. She’s responsible for some notable pictures, but none of the images root into the content and wake you up.
This is Hofer’s first North American Retrospective, although she’s in frequent gallery rotation, including at Seattle’s Winston Wachter.

What Jay Gatsby said about Daisy’s voice, that it was full of money, is true of Hofer’s photos. They cushion the world instead of cracking it open.

Remarkably, the Henry also is hosting photos that explore people-free, domestic spaces. Curated by Sara Krajewski from the Henry collection, “The Empty Room” throws in relief what’s wrong with Hofer’s efforts. Krajewski’s photographers don’t need to print big and decorate with color. Fourteen small, nearly all black and white photos fit into one little gallery without crowding and bring widely carrying worldviews into sharp focus.

The only light in Lee Friedlander’s “Philadelphia” comes from a TV set. On the screen is a beautiful young woman. If this is your room, she’s looking through you. If this is your room, she’s out of your reach.

Ralph Gibson’s untitled print presents a room as a lover. The corners of its walls are her thighs, pressing together, their tops shadowed into intimacy.
The gold streak in Gordon Matta Clark’s “Splitting” is not a reflection. That’s daylight pouring through the vertical slit the artist made by hacking into the wall. Talk about activating empty space.
Adam Barto’s “U.N. Room” is deliberately drab to set off its radiant core. Subtle color saves the scene from itself, warming the chairs and making the silver lamp and ashtray glow.
Evelyn Hofer’s “Two Chairs, London” suggests a cozy couple own them. Wearing identical baggy sweaters, they’re in the kitchen, making tea. Leland D. Rice inflects a dark wall with smoke. A white door on the right waits for you to walk through and change your life.
Christopher Rauschenberg uses light as a club. You know it’s just light, but you have the uneasy feeling that some brute might bring it down on you.

Robert Lyons’ “Siwa Oasis” is about beauty, how in some cultures it’s a given. This bar has a mud floor, but its walls are pink and baby blue, and its windows run a spectrum. Look closely, and you’ll see, along the Arabic writing, palm trees and roses.
Everybody in this exhibit is worth noting. Besides those mentioned above, “The Empty Room” includes Steve Kahn, Andre Kertesz, Joanne Leonard and Philip Melnick.

My Celebrity Soul - Frye Museum
By Robert Lyons, Summer 2005

"We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one and so on up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see."
John Berger, "The Shape of a Pocket"

When I was asked to write about portraiture I thought, this will be easy, I can write about my ideas as they relate to photography. But the more I thought about this, the more complex it became-really, what is a portrait?

This simple question leads to many more, and that is of interest. If we take the premise that a portrait is a likeness of someone then whose likeness is it-the subject or the artist? What effect does the medium in which the portrait is created have upon the portrait? Does a painted portrait (e.g., by Lucian Freud) contain some special “truth” because it took time to make and, therefore, the artist and the subject have a shared intimacy? Is a photographic portrait more precise and “realistic” than a painted portrait, and if it is, does it carry with it more “truth”? And finally, the proliferation of video portraits suggests that over time a more accurate (i.e., truthful) likeness can appear-but this leads us full circle to my initial inquiry. Is it a depiction of the sitter or the artist?

The Berger quote above is poignantly accurate. As an artist, I strive to “peel back” layers to show something of my subject and myself. It is difficult to describe precisely how this accomplished. I am always looking for that moment, that light, that gesture or look in which to frame the image. If the fiction created reveals something, I have accomplished my work. It could be simply that image helps frame the right question, or makes the viewers reflect upon a moment in their own life that is in some way analogous to the portrait-to an overall psychology it is not possibly to quantify.

Works that possess this quality-portraits by August Sander, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Nicholas Nixon-continually challenge me to look deep into the image, the artist, and myself. I marvel at the revelations I experience with each viewing of images that contain simultaneously the specific likeness of the sitter and an archetype that I carry in my mind’s eye.