Photography Month at Elizabeth Leach

Call me old-fashioned, but I've always had trouble thinking of photography as fine art. Well, Photolucida's Portland Photo Month shows at Elizabeth Leach are forcing me to reconsider. One of them, at least. 

Leach is showing two photographers, Christopher Rauschenberg and David Hilliard, who respectively redeem and undermine photography's potential. Rauschenberg, a longtime leader in Portland's art community, co-founded Blue Sky Gallery and previously spent nine years documenting every quadrant of the city for the Portland Grid Project. Here, he pushes against his own preconceptions, encouraging viewers to follow suit. Meanwhile, Hilliard, a Yale-educated, much-collected Massachusetts artist, shows 15 years' worth of semi-staged panoramic images that explore a middle ground between fact and fiction, but which didn't engage me.

Rauschenberg's show comes from a recent trip to Africa. Immediately, his photos from Tanzania had me on edge: a white American photographer in a sub-Saharan African nation? No, I've seen enough of those volunteerism trips, thank you. But Rauschenberg has an eye for details. Zanzibar XV captures the corner of a single story building, antennas rising above the shingled roof, where a mural shows schoolchildren stirring and measuring experiments above the phrase, "Better learning through science." Rauschenberg evades the Western trope of exotic, desolate cityscapes, curtailing viewers' tendency toward fetishized benevolence. No travel porn here.

There's no porn in Hilliard's show, either—but to a less admirable effect. Our Nature is a world of photoscapes populated by white men, but meant to represent our universal human nature. In the center of a five-paneled display, Ransom Turned Around, a shirtless man holds a staff, his hand and a leaf covering his groin in a manner that recalls Adam's shame. He gazes away, deep into the woods across the additional four images. Hilliard's semi-dressed men are in settings without any real emotional tension, intensity or spontaneity. The wise @GuyInYourMFA tweeted it better than I can say it: "Homoerotic subtext. But only subtext."

SEE IT: Our Nature and On African Time are at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, 417 NW 9th Ave., 224-0521. April 2-May 2.

WWeek 2015