Photography is not Juliet Madsen's art form, yet her story-in-pictures may matter the most of all the hundreds of images taken by the eight winners of McKnight Photography Fellowships that are now on view at Franklin Art Works and Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis.
Madsen isn't a fellowship winner; she's a disabled U.S. vet with whom photographer Monial Haller collaborated. Haller is using her $25,000 grant from the Twin Cities-based McKnight Foundation to help veterans tell their stories by making books filled with their snapshots, letters home, diary jottings, memories and whatever else comes to hand. Together, they're a record of our time of endless war.
Fourteen of Haller's vet books are piled on a table at Franklin Art Works, Madsen's story among them. A lithe, pretty blonde in fatigues, she looks happy on the book's cover, the kind of reassuring face you'd want to hover over you after your leg or some other body part was blown off in Desert Storm, or Desert Shield or Operation Iraqi Freedom. She served in all those conflicts during 17 years as an Army paramedic that ended after she was involved in an IED explosion and suffered a heart attack, two strokes and kidney failure.
"Anything that could have been done correctly was done so wrong," Madsen writes, piecing her story together so her family can see "that I really do realize that I am not who I was."
The ordinariness of the images in these books, their blurry snapshot familiarity, brings the wars' chaotic awfulness home more vividly than even some of the best photojournalism.
Among the other 2009 fellowship winners at Franklin, Paul Shambroom continues his decades-long investigation of the U.S. military-industrial complex with a series about what happens to decommissioned nuclear-armed missiles, tanks and warplanes. Turns out they're deployed to small towns and public parks, where they nuzzle up to the jungle gyms and basketball hoops, are clambered over by wedding parties, and land near motels and churches. There's a strange, elegiac melancholy about his photos of these domesticated vehicles of destruction.
Travel and autobiography drive the picture-taking of Carrie Thompson, who spent a season in Japan and returned with a baby on board, and Lex Thompson (no relation), who contrasts the romanticized Hawaii of popular culture (Elvis movies) with deadpan images of the real thing.
Autobiography also drives the work of Karl Raschke in a separate show of 2010 McKnight fellows at Midway. Raschke offers two boxes of photos that viewers are encouraged to shuffle into narratives of their own invention. One is a 50-image homage to the mundane life of Raschke's father, the pro wrestler whose professional moniker was Baron von Raschke. The other holds 42 scenes testifying to the wisdom of the old adage that happy families are all alike.
Gina Dabrowski's Midway portfolio records the superficially benign wooded landscapes of former dumps whose autumnal grasses conceal half-rusted auto parts, broken glass and other detritus. Amy Eckert experiments, none too successfully, with strange juxtapositions between nature (waves, rocks, clouds) and human stuff (mattress, sofa, carnival ride). And Chuck Avery slyly documents incongruities and oddities in small-town museums and cultural centers -- a pale Euro-American mannequin wearing an American Indian headdress amid cases of arrows in a Kansas museum, for example.
