The Curious and Creative Eye – The Visual Language of Humor

NOVEMBER 12 – DECEMBER 13, 2022

The Curious and Creative Eye is our way of both distracting you from your daily tasks and bringing you a light hearted smile.

If there was ever a time to appreciate humor as a panacea and tonic to our souls, it is now. Our modern world can seem overly complicated. With the internet, instantaneous communication and an almost constant barrage of visual and audio information, overload our senses and give us little peace and quiet. Gone seems to be the idle time where we are left alone with our thoughts and undisturbed. Coupled with this, bad news travels faster than good news and collectively our daily stimuli weighs heavy on our spirits. Humor elicits momentary happiness and joy. It lifts us out of the routine of our daily lives. Humor and visual surprises can take many forms and are difficult to codify.

If there was ever a time to appreciate humor as a panacea and tonic to our souls, it is now. Our modern world can seem overly complicated. With the internet, instantaneous communication and an almost constant barrage of visual and audio information, overload our senses and give us little peace and quiet. Gone seems to be the idle time where we are left alone with our thoughts and undisturbed. Coupled with this, bad news travels faster than good news and collectively our daily stimuli weighs heavy on our spirits. Humor elicits momentary happiness and joy. It lifts us out of the routine of our daily lives. Humor and visual surprises can take many forms and are difficult to codify.

The great silent comedians of the golden era such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, and Harold Lloyd set up visual gags that were sometimes very complex and involved feats of athleticism. They presented unexpected and surprising situations in which actions occurred without consequences. We would often know what would happen before it happened and watch with delight as good triumphed – the powerless grew into power and stature, and depictions of evil met with their rightful consequences. In film, it is easier to set up visual narratives because filmmakers can use continuous action.

The photographers in this exhibition who rely on humor to bring their photographs to life have to create or depict, in an instant, a phenomena that defies our expectations and creates an element of surprise. Photographers such as Elliott Erwitt, Sabine Weiss, and Robert Doisneau are ‘flies on the wall’ so to speak. They have spent their days wandering the streets, camera in hand, reacting to the candid, and the unexpected – or have waited patiently for the right situation to arise. Their light touch and agile minds stop the transitory instant for posterity. Their work is fresh and exemplifies the human spirit, sometimes with the innocence of children, a fleeting glance where they should not be looking, or doing something that defies social conventions. Humor can be universal or idiosyncratic, but either way we loose ourselves in the situation that is presented and make a humorous or surprising connection.

Rodney Smith, Jim Lee and Arthur Elgort create visual surprises in their pictures. They construct situations in bars, beaches and restaurants in which the subjects are empowered in a world governed by fashion. They create ‘spectacles’ with indulgent behavior – magnifying our own desires to rebel against a world in which our own responses are limited by proper etiquette. Humor has always operated on a violation of expectations, whether in pictures, written word, or spoken word. The subject finds a way of reclaiming their world and is given an agency toward an outcome. There is grace in the presentation of a situation in the photographs of Rodney Smith. On the opposite spectrum, there is a more dynamic freezing of the moment in the work of Jim Lee. Arthur Elgort’s work often mixes context and presents us with a juxtaposition of beauty in a place we hadn’t been looking.

A third kind of humor is evidenced in the work of the photographers Sandy Skoglund and Gilbert Garcin. They are, in some sense, ‘absurdists.’ They work with metaphors – and create pictures in which there is often an over-proliferation of objects and events – or a conflict of scale in which there is a ‘man against the world’ scenario. We find humor in a world taken over by such things as animals, cheese doodles, jelly beans, and clouds – our sense of order is subverted and the world can appear physically as topsy-turvy, while psychologically allowing for dream fulfillment.

We all have desires – whether we are consciously aware of them or not – and realizing them, if only for a moment, can put a smile on our face. Visual surprises can instantaneously unblind us from our field of vision and free our psyches. In these photographers works, life doesn’t always make sense on a material level – but we use our imagination and are invited to think in a different way. We become unbridled to logical confines and our possibilities become imaginable and endless.

The photographers who ‘capture’ these instances of humor have a job that is both simple and complex. Humor is far from universal. Sometimes it is predictable, but most often is spontaneous. Life presents us all with challenges – and these tend to ground us. Humor, at its best, helps elevate us and rebalance our mood and spirit. Its importance to our well-being should not be forgotten. It can change the way we feel and provide us with true insight into who we are and what we care about. The Curious and Creative Eye is our way of both distracting you from your daily tasks and bringing you a light hearted smile.