In Plain Sight

Titre : In Plain Sight: The Photographs 1968-2017

Auteur : Jean Pagliuso

Date de publication : 2018

Editeur : Damiani Books

Type : Livre de photos

Jean Pagliuso is a world-class fashion photographer whose photographs of fashion models, music and film stars filled the pages of Vogue and Rolling Stone for nearly three decades. Born in Southern California in 1941, Pagliuso graduated from the UCLA College of Fine Arts in 1963. Moving to New York, she worked as assistant art director at Condé Nast in New York, then moved back to California where she began a life-long career in photography.

In addition to her work in fashion, she collaborated with film studios and directors and photographed movie posters. Her images, such as the unforgettable American Gigolo, have found their place in the visual history of the Motion Picture Industry.

Portrayed by Jean Pagliuso: Robert Palmer, Richard Gere, Keith Richards and Jimmy Buffet

Published in 2018, the monograph entitled In Plain Sight is a survey of the multifaced career of Jean Pagliuso. It features a picture of Robert Palmer with renowned model and actress Susan Forristal. The photography was taken in 1977 in Bridgehampton, a hamlet located on Long Island, New York State.

Robert Palmer and Susan Forristal (1977)

In May 2018, a retrospective of Jean Pagliuso's work also entitled In Plain Sight was shown at the Mary Ryan Gallery in New York and reviewed by The Brooklyn Rail, a local publication which provides "critical perspectives on arts, politics and culture."

Jean Pagliuso's exhibition at the Mary Ryan Gallery in New York (2018)

Excerpts :

"Retrospectives differ from subjective forms of curated exhibitions in that their narratives are incidental. They exist as a record log—a history of past events contextualized by broad social and art histories, rather than as a premeditated curatorial concept. The latter presents a unique detective challenge for viewers, especially absent any narrative aid from wall texts, as was the case in Jean Pagliuso’s retrospective and accompanying monogram, In Plain Sight. What life events could have caused an artist like Pagliuso to move from photographing Hollywood actors and directors to Malian ruins and fowl? And if the subjects spanning her fifty-year career are so different, why does the exhibition have such uniformity in color, tone, and style? Viewers willing to investigate such questions were rewarded by the leveling effect of Pagliuso’s lens, which humbles the loftiest of icons and glamorizes the fixtures of everyday.

Pagliuso began her photography career working in fashion and stalking the sets of Hollywood movies. The resulting portraits set the tone of the retrospective. The first such picture viewers encounter in the exhibition is of a young Alan Kleinberg, a Hollywood producer and actor, submerged in the soapy suds of a bath, reading a book about Mussolini. Captured with the biography of a tyrant, Kleinberg gives a deadpan stare back at the camera, which is both comical and unnerving. The book isn’t exactly bubble-bath material; is the unlikely combination born out of efficiency—research for a production during his limited downtime—or is it light vacation reading? Pagliuso has a way of framing her portraits as cliffhangers, posing philosophical questions for the viewer to ponder in the few steps between photographs.

Robert Palmer (left) on the wall of the Mary Ryan Gallery in New York (2018)

Exhibited next to Kleinberg’s portrait is a photograph of a two-story colonial house on a truck bed parked in the middle of a field. Vines crawl up the paneled siding to the second story and hint at a past sedentary life. The viewer is left to wonder at this uprooted house and the family that once lived in it—the circumstances that led it to this unexpected place. The photograph has the feel of a portrait—the house embodies the same deadpan air as Kleinberg’s gaze and both subjects seem to have been caught, in a sense, backstage.

They unabashedly reveal their true nature—a theme that is further extended by the adjacent photo of Robert Palmer, who quite literally idles backstage before or after a show. He is seated in a chair with his head tilted back, his eyes are closed, his hands clasped gently in his lap; he is objectively at peace. Behind him, also seated, is a graceful Susan Forristal, wearing nothing but white socks and heels. The viewer notices all of this through blurry, discolored film, presumably from a broken camera. But the picture was too precious to be discarded, as if Pagliuso found the error added truth. The intimate perspective of these three photographs creates an approachable honesty in sharp contrast to traditional larger-than-life portraits.

Pagliuso approaches objects of admiration by stripping away layers to portray a more honest version; conversely, she approaches familiar objects by building them up. Further down the wall from Palmer and Forristal are three portraits of waitresses, taken during Pagliuso’s trips across the US in the seventies and eighties. Each waitress stands proudly in front her respective middle-American, sand-swept establishment, as if they own all of what is behind them. And in a sense, they do: Pagliuso positions them as the unsung heroes who give both a face and a heart to the vast stretches of unmarked land in the middle of the country.

Looking at the waitress photographs in relation to the exhibition as a whole, one senses that after spending years humanizing icons with her lens, Pagliuso was searching for subjects to elevate. (...)

As a term, In Plain Sight is commonly used ironically, in reference to something that one doesn't see but should. Walking through In Plain Sight, there comes a moment when this meaning moves from irony to ontology, when the entire exhibition of seemingly distinct images snaps together because a single view of the world, rather than a collection of photographs spanning fifty years."

Adam Beal (The Brooklyn Rail - 2018)