Photography Collection

AP - Photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann don't do candid photos. They let the everyday people they photograph construct and present themselves deliberately — and that's the point."All that mental energy is what the pictures end up being about: the ideas about who you are and who I am, who we are," Lindemann says. "All that feeds into it."And they prefer to work with more traditional processes, such as daguerreotype, ambrotype and tintypes and mostly photograph with an 8x10 view camera — giving their portraits an antique feel.Forty-three of their portraits are featured in "Unmasked & Anonymous: Shimon and Lindemann Consider Portraiture," which runs through Nov. 30 at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee.Their work is juxtaposed with 54 portraits mostly owned by the museum, from Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus, Sally Mann and Larry Clark. It's the couple's first major museum show.Lisa Hostetler, the museum's curator of photographs, said she and the couple spent the last two years poring through the museum's portraits to put together the show. The pair's collection and the museum's enhance each other in the juxtaposition, she said."When we were looking at their work we were seeing connections back in history so the time and eras started to kind of intertwine and move back and forth — that was one really interesting part of the whole experience," Hostetler said.They have had other solo shows including Sarah Bowen Gallery in New York and Wendy Cooper Gallery in Chicago. They've photographed for Fortune, Metropolis, New York, People and The New York Times Magazine.Shimon and Lindemann want to blend history with the present by recycling photographic practices and appearances from different periods. "This allows us to make pictures that move time in multiple directions, to create spaces for ideas simultaneously familiar and new," they say in the catalog's essay.For example, a 10-inch-by-8-inch black and white tintype of "Caitlin With Rose Dress" is juxtaposed with a series of small, anonymous daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes from the mid 1800s owned by the museum.The couple generally photograph people they know or friends who come out of their work.

Sally Mann, Candy, Cigarette, 1989. Gelatin Silver Print, 8 x 10 inches, S&R Pieper Family, © Sally Mann

They don't like to refer to them as "models" because Lindemann said that objectifies them, and they don't call them subjects either — "it sounds like we are the king and queen or something," Lindemann says. Instead they call them collaborators."They are open to being photographed and giving us something of themselves that we can work with or respond to, which is generous of them," she said.They refer to themselves as non-famous artists photographing non-famous people in rural and small-town life. In the essay, they say photographing the nonfamous allows them to "question the prevailing social order."That can been seen in photos of longtime friends Brad and Amber Daugs, who work at a pizza restaurant. The multimedia installation "Brad & Amber's Backyard, 2008" shows a session at the Daugs' house, with Brad sitting at a fire pit drinking beer and Amber standing at a chair nearby. A film strip showing Shimon and Lindemann photographing the couple plays across from a video showing the couple during the photo shoot. On the walls hang four photos from the session. Elsewhere in the show are one of the pair cooking ribs and one of Brad alone, from 1996.Also in the show are four photos at various ages of their friend Nigel. He's in prison for rape and assault but they still visit him and he writes them letters. In one, Nigel said he was happy the couple is being recognized but tells them they are selling out for having a museum show. But Lindemann said most of their friends are supportive and happy for their success. A series of photographs depicts area residents at work juxtaposed with August Sander's "Circus Artiste," which was made between 1926 and 1932. There's "Rich With Ice, Manitowoc, Wisconsin""Mel With His Bottling Machine, Seymour, Wisconsin" or their neighbor in "Ryan at Work, Manitowoc, Wisconsin."The idea of dressing up is featured in the juxtaposition of the pair's "RJ as Glade Boy, Manitowoc, Wisconsin" in 1996, and Julia Margaret Cameron's "Beatrice," from 1866. RJ is posing as a made-up superhero Glade Boy with Glade cans taped around his waste and "Glade Boy" written across his white T-shirt. In "Beatrice," Cameron's niece portrays Beatrice Cenci, a 16th-century noblewoman who murdered her abusive father.

Unmasked and Anonymous
Shimon & Lindemann consider Portraiture
- November 30
Milwaukee Art Museum
700 N. Art Museum Drive
Open daily 10 a.m. –5 p.m., Thursdays until 8 p.m.