Art Review: Petra Barth's 'Al Margen'

By: Tong Xiang

The lower half of a Patagonian rancher triumphantly stands over a comatose sheep, shears in hand. It’s a beautifully composed photograph, but it appears three times—unaltered—in Petra Barth’s new photography exhibition Al Margen: Photographs of Latin America and the Caribbean.

With 40 gelatin silver prints displayed in the Friedl Building and 30 more in Perkins Library, Barth’s exhibition is a beautiful and frequently redundant collection intended to “reveal moments that are not captured because they happen every day.... Al Margen is a candid photographic work that attempts to establish documentary photography as an art form as well as a method of communication.

Although art gallery captions tend to be worded with the sweet-sounding vagueness of wine bottle labels, their purpose is quite concrete: to state the artist’s intentions. But Barth’s artist statement doesn’t draw our attention to anything original or specific—she wrote that she “would like to raise awareness about the living conditions of those who are marginalized,” also focusing on “people and the beauty of ordinary life.”

Barth executes these cliches well. She emphasizes spatial thresholds by framing subjects with gates, doorways and windows. Enlarging many of her prints to expose the film’s grain, she lowers resolution to produce a kind of surreal intimacy.

Barth emphasizes texture and shadow by shooting black-and-white film—quite appropriate for rubble of buildings and wrinkles on skin, the two signs of wear she seems to be preoccupied with. She pays a lot of attention to the printing process and extends the range of gray tones post-production—in one outstanding example, the texture on a boy’s face is preserved even with the sun setting directly behind him.

Another high point: a woman sitting indoors in the bottom third of the frame, developed with enough attention that the sweat on her dark skin is visible as well as the texture of a diaphanous mosquito net above. In another, a fine-browed man rests after stringing barbed wire, bracing himself between a tree and a post with canvas-gloved hands.

Even considering that the content of Barth’s prints—manual labor, tumbledown shacks, sad dark faces looking away from the camera—is often akin to DukeEngage Facebook albums, she manages to keep Al Margen from seeming entirely exploitative of poverty with a few photos of dancers and singers.