Is Seeing Believing?

With last year's two major shows, Rodin and In Praise of Nature: Ansel Adams and Photographers of the American West, the North Carolina Museum of Art brought in a record number of visitors and new memberships, and a great deal of local buzz. However, the very obvious push to bring more visitors often seemed to be driving the choice of art being shown, as NCMA Director Larry Wheeler seemed to have an acute case of the Mona Lisa syndrome.

True, blockbuster names like Rodin and Adams will keep the galleries crowded and the gift shop and restaurant in business, but at what cost to the museum's artistic reputation, and the challenging and virtuous works that unfortunately go ignored?

Is Seeing Believing?: The Real, the Surreal, the Unreal in Contemporary Photography seems answer that criticism. Although I, considering myself a photographic purist and at least a slight neo-Luddite, was at first skeptical of an exhibition made up of postmodern self-portraits and digital photographic manipulations, I found the images provoked a good deal of thought long after I had left them.

The photographs, all from the 1970s to the near present, are roughly divided into self-portraiture and constructed images of nature gone awry and/or tamed. Admittedly most of the prints in the former category can be accused of navel-gazing, but there is, after all, a long tradition of that in the continuum of art from Pepys' "Diaries" to Van Gogh's agony of self-portraiture to the pelvic thrusting of Beethoven's Fifth Sym-phony.

Like these works, the pictures in Is Seeing Believing? come from a deeply humanistic source. Cindy Sherman, the photographer best known for her early series of film-stills, provides the centerpiece for the exhibition with three huge works (Untitled #140, #216 and #228), in which she has appropriated the lush surroundings and costumes of renaissance and medieval art to see herself, art and artifice in new and challenging ways. Sherman, along with the surreal photographers Nina Levy and Janieta Eyre present a common humanist perspective in their works. While viewing these works one is compelled to ask, "Why does one seek to see themselves in another form? Why do we change ourselves? How do others see us?"

In the other category of Seeing are the surreal portraits of Sandy Skoglund, James Snitzer and unfortunately, the ubiquitous William Wegman. Of this half, Skoglund's portraits of ordinary human scenes interrupted by nature-picture a nice café, two people at dinner and a waiter, all being overrun by a skulk of foxes-are the most interesting. Suggestive of the vast destructive intervention of humans on nature, Skoglund's work is at once playful and darkly prophetic. Snitzer's portraits of appropriated landscapes, lunadisney and nature.com create an equally disturbing tale of man's commodification of nature.

Wegman, who many people will know as the artist who uses Weimeraners in strikingly human poses, and who most serious artists know as the photographer who makes a killing by selling out, has three portraits in the show, which is its only fault. Of the selected work, Wegman's is by far the least interesting, though it does grace the cover of most of the material the NCMA distributed to promote the show. Even so, one can't help but give a thumbs up to this brave exhibition in a staid museum that often measures art by its relevance to the most common viewer.