Exhibition review: James Pfaff, Alex & Me, Street Level Photoworks

James Pfaff, the Me in Alex & Me

There is a big splash of an exhibition at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow. It is a potent mix of photography, text, and painting that mines an archive consisting of nine rolls of 35mm film exposed twenty years ago and a prolific stream of journals that flowed from that time onwards. The show is Me’s reflection on his brief love affair with Alex back then and the road trip they shared from somewhere near Toronto south to New Orleans and north to New York City.

The first work in the exhibition is a journal page blown up to become a large floor standing tablet. In a loose hand written scrawl it announces the exhibition title Alex & Me and the artist himself, James Pfaff. James is the Me in Alex & Me. If you look carefully you will also see the verso trace of a third name, Francesca, Pfaff’s curator. The work in gallery one is black and white save for a neon sign mounted on a blood red wall. This intense red wraps around into gallery two where most of the photographs are in colour. The neon sign asks the question “Ever been Changed by Someone?” and the exhibition responds that Me’s life has been indelibly marked by his encounter with Alex.

In the centre of gallery one there are two display cabinets containing more than forty journals: half diary, half sketchbook. The thick journals are a clue to an obsessive personality that struggles to let go of the past. On the walls we see pictures from the road: trucks, eateries, Alex. There is even a photograph of Me driving. Between images of the classic Peterbilt 379 truck and a waffle house there is an undisclosed portrait of Me made by Alex, simply titled Heading South. It is a large dark print showing the side of Me’s head traced in blurred light. 

There are a dozen or more pictures of Alex in the exhibition, which is problematic as a few years ago she requested that the work not be shared publicly. Me chose to publish anyway, first of all in book form, and the two have not spoken since. Alex is represented by Me in strongly contrasting ways. First we see her young, beautiful, loved and seemingly innocent through the fly screen of an abandoned house. Then we see her older, tougher, seemingly more world wise, and clutching a pump action shotgun.

If gallery one introduces the principle actors in this lopsided love story, gallery two opens up the vista onto iconic places of Eastern America: Memphis, New York, Niagara Falls. A large colour hoarding of the Falls seems to hover above the floor at the far end of the room, with lush turquoise water flowing freely in from the gallery window. Alex’s second and final photograph of Me appears discreetly printed in small scale mounted on an old journal page. Me is seen through an image of his hands holding a pornographic magazine. For the exhibition Pfaff has smeared a red stripe of paint across the breasts of a reclining nude shown in a photograph within this photograph made by Alex. This smallest of works is echoed on the adjacent wall in the largest of works, Outside. Here we see the Stars and Stripes of America obscured beneath a heavy layer of turquoise paint.

The curatorial essay by Francesca Seravalle that accompanies the exhibition discusses Me’s play with memory, his use of archival materials and aesthetic decisions surrounding the use of colour and their relationship to Pfaff’s emotions. Although Me has spoken openly and honestly about the problem, Seravalle’s essay does not mention Alex’s withdrawal of consent or the appropriation for display of two photographs made by Alex. These facts are important in understanding the dynamic between Alex, Me, the archive inspired exhibition and the audience. When we share photographs of someone without their consent we place ourselves on a line of exploitation that runs from innocuous street photography to representation of powerless people in degraded circumstances. In going against the expressed wishes of Alex, the "muse" within his love story, Pfaff has placed himself dangerously far along that line.

There are oblique, slightly clumsy, references within the exhibition to Japan where the next major chapter in Me’s life after Alex lay. Seravalle explains that Me is influenced by the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic that values imperfect beauty reflecting the transient nature of life. A large tablet of white painted journal pages titled, Tabula Rasa, suggests a Japanese screen. An alternative reading is a deep felt longing to clear the wreckage of the past and to begin again with a fresh clean slate. But it’s not that simple. 

At the exhibition opening the only photograph showing Alex smiling and happy lay quietly in the bottom right corner of one of the display cabinets. After a few days had passed, three more copies of this same photograph appeared unexpectedly alongside the original. On each new copy of the photograph were written the words: “The Pain I Feel.” This simple action reinforces a sense that the attempted exorcism by exhibition is incomplete, that the project is not one hundred percent resolved. Pfaff however is adamant that with the exhibition of Alex & Me a line is now drawn under that chapter in his life. This outpouring of a twenty year long obsession demands to be seen. Although ethically flawed it is thought provoking, visually interesting and has no parallel in Scottish photography exhibitions of the last several years.

Note: James Pfaff generously gave his consent for the sharing of the above portrait of himself in front of his photograph, Niagara Falls