Immortal Images

Sheila Metzner exhibits her early photos in Petaluma

By Maja Wood

LIKE MOST parents, Sheila Metzner took many pictures of her seven children. One day she was snapping photos of the kids, the next day Warren Beatty was calling her at home, asking to have his picture taken.

Then the editors of Vanity Fair and Vogue, as well as companies such as Chanel, Victoria’s Secret, and Ralph Lauren started throwing photo assignments and contracts at her. And let’s not forget all those museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which began adding her prints to their collections.

“Life can be surprising and amazing,” Metzner muses, speaking on her cell phone from Utah, where she’s on assignment for Condé Nast Traveler.

Metzner launched her career 23 years ago with a New York gallery show that, not surprisingly, included many pictures of her favorite models–her children. Since then, she’s become an internationally known photographer, a contemporary master of the art form with a unique style and a dazzling diversity of subjects.

Now, after nearly a quarter of a century, those early photos will be exhibited for the first time since that premiere showing. Many of the prints are the only ones available outside of Metzner’s personal collection, but they’ll soon be on exhibit in downtown Petaluma.

The exhibit opens with a talk by Metzner on Saturday, May 5, at the Barry Singer Gallery, a gallery known among photography aficionados for its collection of work by the likes of George Rodger and Lloyd Ullberg. The gallery has now moved to larger quarters in a street-level location just around the corner from the former site.

“I wanted to inaugurate the new space with a blockbuster exhibit,” owner Barry Singer says. “I wanted a strong show, something that would make a big impact. And this is it.”

Metzner, 62, is also excited about the new exhibit, explaining that the photographs hold many memories for her.

“Back then, when I was taking those shots, I was hoping that someday I could work as a photographer, but I never dreamed all this would happen,” she explains.

Building a career, plus raising five children of her own, plus helping with two children from her husband’s previous marriage, left Metzner with barely any time to sleep.

“I learned that I could shoot even if I wasn’t fully awake and even if the kids were pulling my hair,” Metzner says. “So, during the day, I’d take photographs with the kids. And then around 9:30 at night, when they were asleep, I’d take a shower and get dressed up in high heels and lipstick so that I wouldn’t feel like it was the end of the day. And then I would go in the darkroom and make the prints until about 3 or 4 in the morning.”

Many of the shoots included outings to nearby areas of upstate New York. “The kids were young, and I wasn’t able to travel,” she recalls. “So I would take them somewhere close to home to do a shoot, somewhere that was somehow symbolic of an exotic place, such as Egypt, and we’d pretend to be there.”

Metzner was very particular about her photographs, and at the end of nine years she had 22 prints that she felt were worthy of being shown. She went to a gallery and spread her 22 photos on the floor, and the owner agreed to do a show on the spot.

During that show, a picture of Metzner’s stepdaughter, titled Evyan, Kinderhook Creek, caught the eye of John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski included it in his famous and controversial exhibit “Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960.” There, it was noticed by powerful New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, who devoted an entire page to Metzner’s picture. (This print is included in the upcoming exhibit at the Barry Singer Gallery.)

On the heels of that success, Metzner was given a solo show, which garnered a half-page review in the Sunday New York Times Magazine section. All those raves caught the attention of a Vanity Fair editor, who called Metzner and hired her to do a photo shoot of French actress Jeanne Moreau. The editors of Vogue noticed that photograph and signed Metzner on to an exclusive contract for the next eight years.

“The whole progression was just shocking,” Metzner says. “Things just started coming together.”

For example, early in her success she was interviewed by the New York Daily News and was asked her future plans. “I said I wanted to photograph the Chrysler Building and some vases and Warren Beatty,” she says. “A few weeks later, I was at home and my daughter answered the phone and yelled out, ‘Mom, Warren Beatty wants to talk with you.’

“I got on the phone and, sure enough, it was him, and he said, ‘So, I hear you want to take my picture.’ ” Metzner recalls. “Just like that. Things just became simple.”

In addition to her celebrity shots, fashion photography, and other commercial work, Metzner has always maintained a parallel career in fine art photography. Several of her more recent works, as well as the early prints, will be on exhibit at the Barry Singer Gallery. Among these are landscapes, photos of New York buildings, and some Fresson color photographs of flowers.

Invented in 1895, the Fresson method uses a carbon printing process utilizing pigments instead of dyes, which not only renders the color photos archival, but also leaves the colors looking very rich and textured. The process is a family secret that was passed down from the inventor, and now his grandson and great-grandson are the only ones who know how to do it. Metzner is one of only about 11 photographers worldwide with whom the Fresson family has chosen to work.

Many of Metzner’s fine art and commercial photos can be seen in her fourth book, Form and Fashion (Arena; $60), which was released last month. Her landscape photographs can be found in Inherit the Earth (Bulfinch; $75), which came out in October.

Metzner says that one of the main perks of her job is that she is given assignments around the globe, and that’s when she takes the landscape photos for herself.

Two of her photographs in Inherit the Earth are of the pyramids in Egypt. But this time, it’s the real Egypt.

Sheila Metzner gives a talk on her work on Saturday, May 5, at 5 p.m. A reception follows from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibit of her photographs continues through June 23 at the Barry Singer Gallery, 7 Western Ave., Petaluma. For details, call 707/781-3200.

From the May 3-9, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Wrap Act

Reflections on a religious icon and the art of dying

I ROSE EARLY on Easter Sunday, shortly after daybreak. With a thermos full of coffee and a few well-chosen medical supplies, I left the house and headed for the cemetery. I had a date with Jesus. Our rendezvous had been planned since last fall, ever since I bumped into Mary’s favorite son while strolling through the graveyard’s peaceful mausoleum. He was a statue, almost life-size, carved in wood, propped up at the end of the corridor. The arms were outstretched, hands upturned to display the famous gaping nail wounds, painted Day-Glo red for maximum shock value. Though the artist obviously meant for Jesus to appear transcendent, God-like, reaching out to beckon us all lovingly to his side, to me he looked like some poor guy saying, “Hey, man, can I borrow a Band-Aid?”

I’m serious. And I truly mean no disrespect.

My first impulse when I saw the thing was to jog home for some gauze and surgical tape.

I’m 40 years old. At various times I’ve been an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Baptist, and a “nondenominational Born-Again.” In short, I’ve seen my fill of bleeding Jesuses. The only thing they have ever inspired in me–beyond a certain revulsion–is sympathy. So gazing upon this one, all I wanted to do–and I really wanted to do this–was to bandage those hands.

But I resisted the urge. Still, I couldn’t get the notion out of my mind. I kept thinking of those mangled wooden hands, imagining them all wrapped and bandaged, safe and sound. Yet the very idea of a bandaged Jesus, a healed Jesus, runs counter to our expectations. It’s abnormal. It’s spooky. “A triaged Jesus! What the hell is this? Hey, where’re the damn nail holes?” It’s obvious that, with or without the whole sacrifice-and-salvation view of the crucifixion, a lot of people just plain like to see Jesus bleeding.

The history of Christian religious art is, in many ways, one long odd tribute to our fascination with the bloodstained corpse of the poor carpenter from Galilee. The crucifixion, clearly, ranks among the most powerful and oft-repeated images in Western art. From Hieronymus Bosch and Michelangelo to El Greco and Rembrandt, from Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso to Andres Serrano and Salvador Dali, few major artists seem able to resist doing Jesus on that cross.

Whenever artists dare to tinker with the sanctified symbol of the gleefully murdered Christ, a hailstorm of controversy inevitably rains down on them. But these are often the most daring and, one could argue, spiritually transforming images of Jesus that we have. In Man of Sorrows: Christ with AIDS, painter W. Maxwell Lawton transposes Jesus’ suffering into modern terms by taking him off the cross and showing him shirtless and silent, his nail wounds replaced by telltale body sores. Arthur Boyd’s Crucifixion, Shoalhaven gives us a cross erected in the midst of a flowing river, and its naked, crucified Savior breaks tradition by daring to be a woman, thus insisting that Jesus truly represented all humans. These works are controversial, to say the least. Serrano’s Piss Christ is perhaps the best, and least understood, example of what happens when an artist throws the cross into a different light. So incensed were Christians by the infamous photograph of a crucifix floating in urine that they never bothered to ponder the deeper meaning of the work–or recognize its visual beauty–calling vehemently for an end to the National Endowment of the Arts funds that helped pay for the exhibition.

Perhaps a crucifix floating in a vat of blood would be more to their tastes.

Even back in the days that I believed Jesus died as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, I was uncomfortable about our obsession with the gory exhibitionism of so many Christ images. I preferred the laughing Jesuses, the meditating Jesuses, the living Jesuses, to the battered, blood-drenched ones. Even resurrected, Jesus always seemed to be leading with his wounds. Whenever I found a crucified Jesus that did not repel me, it was usually one that minimized the wounds and maximized the humanity. My favorites include Gauguin’s Yellow Christ–a jaundiced Jesus draped on the cross, breath-stopping despite its lack of oozing wounds–and Dali’s Corpus Hypercubus, showing Jesus floating before the cross in a crucified pose, not a sign of nail prints–or even nails–to cast the ghastly shadow of sadism onto the otherwise heightened beauty of Jesus.

Yes, I understand that the idea of salvation, as symbolized by those ever- clotless, public execution-made lacerations, is itself a meaningful and powerful and beautiful thing to many. So what? If we love Jesus, why would we want to keep the guy crucified?

AS I THOUGHT of the statue in the mausoleum, I couldn’t avoid thinking that the crucified Jesus, as art, is a symbol of more than salvation and sacrifice. It’s a symbol of psychological damage on the human species.

A friend of mine who’s done a lot of traveling once remarked that while passing through some of the world’s most impoverished, disease-ridden, politically oppressed countries, she began to notice that the local religious artworks, in and around the churches and chapels, tend to be stunningly gory. The images of Jesus–whether they show him in mid-crucifixion, being laid to rest in the tomb, or right after the Resurrection–are positively dripping in blood. As she continued through the tiny villages of central Mexico, it became clearer and clearer: The worse off the people have it, the worse off their Jesus is.

The reason is fairly obvious. According to Christian tradition, Jesus came to offer comfort. Even the thought of Jesus’ death–an event the early church spinmeisters turned into a metaphysical blood-for-sin exchange, bringing salvation to the world–offers comfort to those worried about what happens after death. If certain cultures are subconsciously moved to put their paint-and-plaster saviors through the artistic Cuisinart, it’s clearly because doing so makes them feel better. So they erect crucifixes bearing corpses so pummeled that they barely look human. In the face of a Jesus so unimaginably brutalized, their own suffering diminishes in comparison.

But what’s our excuse?

Are things so tough in America that we need to make our statues bleed just to feel more whole? Is the stock market so bad, are the crime rates so high and the high school test scores so low that we need to find comfort by running into a sculpture with its hands and feet punched full of holes? Is this a tradition we really need? I don’t.

So this year, I initiated a new tradition. While others were sleeping, or scattering Easter eggs on their lawn, or gathering on mountaintops for sunrise services, I found Jesus, I touched those twin faux nail-prints painted on those hand-carved hands–and I wrapped the hands carefully in clean white bandages.

Standing back to look upon my handiwork, I experienced what can only be called a religious experience. A mix of emotions moved through me as I looked at Jesus, his arms outstretched, his scars invisible beneath the soft, soothing gauze. And that’s how I left him.

While I have only the wispiest illusions that my little act of philosophical performance art could ever become a national movement on a par with tying yellow ribbons on trees during times of international strife, I like to imagine that my act may be repeated in years to come by those who, like myself, were moved by the unexpected sight of a bandaged Messiah, and are inspired, on future Easters, to make their own offer of comfort to a champion comforter. The way I see it, Jesus has been bleeding for 2,000 years.

It’s time to let the man heal.

From the May 3-9, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.