Isabelle Landry’s photo exhibition Israel’s Entourage, at Lilian Rodriguez Gallery until December 22nd, takes us into the home of a Hassidic Jewish family of five, and behind the veil that shrouds much of this closed culture. Each color image in her brief, stunning series of domestic interiors and posed portraits is flooded with daylight, and seems stilled as if stopped in time. There is absolutely no trace of activity or movement, and Landry’s clean, simple compositions add to a sense of torpor. Among the photos is a close up of two children’s shirts, hung from hooks behind a door; a sheeted bed corner beneath a light filled window and knotted curtain; two young brothers seated next to each other on a bed; and a mother, hands neatly folded on her lap, sitting on one half of a pair of twin beds. The faces all stare out at us with passive expressions. Reflecting this neutrality, Landry’s color range is almost entirely confined to whites, grays, browns and beiges.
“Chavi,†Landry’s award winning image*, is the most striking portrait in the exhibition. Its light quality and domesticity, added to an the inertia in the model’s, pose make it unmistakably reminiscent of Vermeer’s Dutch masterpieces. Before a white wall, a woman dressed in black from head to toe stands with her back to a clean white dresser, in profile to us. Her head is turned and she looks straight out of the frame, holding our gaze. Is she sad? indifferent? resigned? It is an expressive face, but cryptically so. The dresser that takes up a large portion of the photo behind her is a repository whose interior is unknown. Within this exhibition, the dresser, whose importance is signaled by its size, acts almost as a synecdoche for our outside view of this culture.
In another way, the overall intimacy of the images in the show gives the impression of getting an inside perspective of a Hassidic life. We feel let in, somehow, to a part of a religious community that is traditionally very insular. The images, with their stillness and interior, domestic settings, can not help but be honest and open. Landry lets us, the viewers, inside like voyeurs.
The photographer herself is not a member of the Jewish faith, and she therefore took these photos as an outsider. In this way, even while the collaboration appears to have been harmonious, the project itself treads into the territory of a type of ethnographic photography where humans acting as bearers of culture are arranged and posed to be anthropologically documented. Even while this practice haunts Israel’s Entourage, the softness and vulnerability of the photos ultimately overcomes it.
Lilian Rodriguez Gallery, space 405
Isabelle Landry
Israel’s Entourage
November 10 – December 22, 2012
www.galerielilianrodriguez.com
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*2011 Quebec winner of the BMO 1st Art! Invitational Student Art Competition
