Gohar Dashti. Untitled #5 from the series Today’s Life and War, 2008; pigment print. Courtesy of Cantor Arts Center, Palo Alto.

Countless narrative threads run through this unprecedented exhibition. Most of the women photographers who are featured hail from the Middle East, and all engage with dynamics of contemporary Muslim culture, violence, and the region’s complicated relationship with Western ways of seeing (and thinking). The curators who assembled the exhibition clearly meant to highlight photography as a storytelling device; almost all of the works in the show are drawn from series.

The decision to focus on women photographers exposes a [Western] political subtext of presenting the world from a female perspective. The politics involve the reversal of the gaze, the refutation of stereotypes, and the repudiation of Orientalism, that long-standing tradition of representation emerging from Europe that so often placed “exotic” women from “the East” in the position of objects to be consumed. This subtext introduces a curious paradox to the exhibition: These artists are not usually interested in telling stories that return the gaze of “the West” or correct false stereotypes. Certainly there are exceptions—Boushra Almutawakel offers correctives to the incursion of more restrictive veiling, while Shadi Ghadirian delivers send-ups of nineteenth-century Orientalist images of Middle Eastern women—but the overall message that emerges from this exhibition is not concerned with the perception of Middle Eastern women by Westerners or conservatives in their own countries. Instead, the viewer encounters moments of experience and glimpses of protest in images that are sometimes staged and sometimes straight but always full of personal meaning.

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Robert Frank. Detroit, 1955; gelatin silver print, 8 ½ x 13 in. Courtesy of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. © Robert Frank.

Few landmarks in photographic history loom as large as Robert Frank’s The Americans. This seminal book has been so widely exhibited, riffed on, and dissected, it would be easy to assume that the Cantor Arts Center’s current exhibition, Robert Frank in America, does little to expand on the narrative surrounding this body of work. Instead, the exhibition, curated by Peter Galassi, surprises with a host of unfamiliar photographs drawn from the Cantor’s collection paired with some favorites from the original series. The result is a survey that reveals how The Americans was distilled from hundreds of equally captivating photographs to a neat eighty-three.

Swiss photographer Frank was most productive between 1955 and 1956, when a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to travel across the country. Aside from the photographs that eventually became part of The Americans, the bulk of Frank’s work from this time has been largely unseen. The Cantor’s exhibition flushes out this period. As Galassi writes in the accompanying catalog, “In all of Frank’s American work there are no natural wonders, no amber waves of grain, no mighty ports, no grand public monuments, no cozy towns or bright lights of Broadway.” Instead, Frank focused on politics, race, religion, Hollywood, and cars—themes that organize the Cantor’s exhibition—creating compositions that highlight the quirks and eccentricities of American culture.

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