Large Extreme Close Up Photographs of Drag Queens In a Tiny Gallery = Beauty

Factor 1: The Curator’s Office is a single room, and it’s a small room. Cozy, you might say.

Factor 2: Jason Horowitz’s photographs are, in a sense, larger than life.

Factor 3: The opening of the show “Drag: Jason Horowitz”, at the Curator’s Office was crowded.

Put these factors together, and you have an interesting equation for viewing Horowitz’s work. Although I was initially reluctant to squeeze through the glass door of the space with my glass of red wine bumping dangerously close to my torso, I can say now that it was the right move. Although the crowding was uncomfortable, so can be the close-up, revelatory aesthetic that Horowitz brings out in the subjects of his photographs. Perhaps one could say they are beautifully or astutely uncomfortable. In other words, the unapologetic, fine-grained “reality” to which each image in the show strictly adheres was compounded and enhanced by the circumstance. What could better complement exposure than claustrophobia? As I viewed the isolated facial features of the drag models from each photograph, I found myself touching my own eyebrows, and feeling the cracks in my own lips; I found myself thinking about the nature of make-up, disguise, and identity. When we cover flaws, stylize ourselves, or take on alternate identities, we are always simultaneously exposing something else.

The craft of photography is by no means only intended to reflect reality exactly as the eye perceives it. With the availability of photo-editing software, it is perhaps more likely than ever that photographs bend, enhance, or alter the mind’s reality in some way. Particularly in the mass media, human portrayals tend towards gloss and the current (often generic) definition of perfection. The definition and detail of Horowitz’s images avoid the techniques of air-brushing and alteration in post-production; they stay true to, frame, and enhance the details he set out to capture in the first place.  These details are what his subjects strive to take on and wear into the world; to brush over them is to deny us the opportunity to think about the origin of such details in ourselves. In these photos, the face becomes a landscape, and identity a construct of facts and minutiae, suggesting that we evaluate one another on finer grained scales than gender or beauty.

Realism is defined as: A concern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary. It’s hard to say exactly how Horowitz’s work relates to definitions of reality, but it’s a question that comes to mind. Perhaps “Drag” doesn’t exactly embrace or reject realism as a concern. Granted, he uses technology and photographic techniques that lend themselves to a reality that we aren’t privy to during everyday observation. He also entertains the idea that identity and beauty come from many realities, angles, or scales. Whether or not the isolated features of Horowitz’s drag models make a collective statement about human realism is something each claustrophobic viewer with a glass of red wine may have to decide for herself. 

DRAG: Jason Horowitz, February 20 - March 27, 2010, Curator's Office, 1515 14th Street, NW.