Carolina Weatherall

Last Friday, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) opened its exhibition titled “Hello Stranger: Artist as Subject in Photographic Portraits since 1900.” The exhibition explores themes of strangeness and queerness in the form of the portrait.

The exhibition contains 35 images from a collection of photographs generously donated to the BCMA this past year by David and Gail Mixer and was co-curated by Isa Cruz ’27 and Frank Goodyear, co-director at the BCMA.

The exhibit emerged from Cruz and Goodyear’s collaboration this past summer. They came together on this project through Cruz’s BCMA curatorial internship.

“It was important for me, as somebody who has spent 30 years in the museum world with a particular interest in photography, to step back and to listen and to look together with Isa at the pictures,” Goodyear said.

Casey Braun, the BCMA curator, finds student collaboration and curation to be a unique aspect of the BCMA.

“Every object can tell a million different stories, but the ability to really incorporate student voices and perspectives and interests, is what I think makes the BCMA such a special place.  And I think that this exhibition will be a great example of that,” Braun said.

New to curation, Cruz brought their personal experiences to the process and connected with the images in the Mixers’s collection.

“There’s a certain personal relationship I developed with each of the photographs that I really cared about or saw potential or some spark of something interesting,” Cruz said. “It definitely makes me want to continue thinking about art and the stories you can tell together across time and space.”

Additionally, Cruz drew upon their own experience as an artist and photographer. To Cruz, “Hello, Stranger” is a way of “rethinking, not only the [form of the] photographic portrait but also but also the self.”

“I think what’s unique about photography is that there’s this presumption of realism or reality … whereas with [something] like the painted portrait, it feels more artificial,” Cruz said. “It feels like you know what’s constructed. But photography has that same sort of artificiality, and so I feel like a lot of the artists in this exhibition play with that.”

Cruz and Goodyear played with the idea of the self, considering what the photographic portrait brought to the conversation. They found themselves particularly absorbed in the distinctive nature of recent additions to the BCMA’s collection.

“Isa did a really fantastic job understanding that these portraits of other artists or self portraits were very much concerned with problematizing the notions of identity … questioning and  traditional binary ideas of gender and sexuality,” Goodyear said.

“The central thing that became apparent was this radical strangeness,” Cruz said. “Really what I’d been seeing early on was that all of these new ways of rethinking the photographic portrait are all huge departures from the genre as it was created in the late 19th century.”

Building upon Cruz’s history as a photographer and discussion of the self, the exhibition highlights the experience of constructing the self.

“It’s in an exchange of gazes that we become ourselves, in negotiating who we feel ourselves to be, what image others project onto us,” Cruz said. “In the reconciliation of the two that occurs and theories of the social self as created by those kinds of forces,… the camera itself is a sort of eye that gazes upon you.”

The interconnectedness of these images across decades became clear to Cruz even in their particularity. In considering the artist as subject, the clear and hidden relationships throughout photographs were crucial.

“There is a broader artistic approach to the self portrait and the portrait of another that has huge implications for how those relationships to self and others are represented, and behind each photograph there is this relationship going on and so much more to be seen,” Cruz said.

Cruz found that portraiture could examine and challenge societal roles and normalcy over time.

“What I really want to get at is that there’s just these from very diverse social, cultural and aesthetic contexts across time,” Cruz said. “What is the norm, what is expected? How do we subvert that? How do we challenge that? How do we make the viewer uncomfortable? How do we provoke, but also how do we bare our souls in photographs?”

Isa Cruz ’27 is a member of the Bowdoin Orient.