Connections/Introspection

My name is Jeff Rosenheim. I'm a curator in the department of Photographs, and my topic is "Introspection."

Introspection is a reality that we all have to deal with. We suppress it and we allow it out.

I can scan the subway car, and know who is thinking about their emotional present tense

and who is distracted. Some people are more

expressive than others. I think we do this all the time in our public lives. It is about a management of one's exterior form and that's

what artists start with. The presence of the subject. I feel that there's this

factuality of expression that I am attracted to

of someone who has lived, or breathed, or been alive.

This little girl, she's having a reverie. Her arms are like snakes wrapping around these eggs and she's off in a beautiful space, but I can enter it based on the gesture, the tilt of the head, the closing of the eyes. The artist

has to let you in in some way, and when it happens, we can enter a space that's generally hidden to us as viewers.

Atkin's painting of Louis Kenton, it's called The Thinker. The hands in the pockets, the gesture, it is the modern dilemma that I feel every day.

Those Roman busts look within as much as they look out.

The artist has provided a glimpse of something that was extraordinarily alive and fresh.

When an artist makes a self-portrait, I think they are often trying to project something, and to reveal something to themselves at the same time.

He may be looking at himself in some sort of mirror to create the image, but he is definitely looking at himself when he finishes it.

Lee Friedlander went traveling around the country on his journey of exploration but the best pictures are these self-portraits made in hotel rooms, when he's done with his work out on the streets. He's back in the room, wiped out from his day, and all that's left is himself.

I think that the medium of photography has been always struggling to deal with more than surfaces.

Richard Avedon's picture of Marilyn Monroe, I mean she's the screen goddess that she is, but she is really, really vulnerable, and just as powerfully in control of her image. But we are seeing something of Marilyn, and something therefore of ourselves thinking about Marilyn, that is so much beyond what the pictures probably before and after achieved.

When the eyes in a work of art are so focused on something that you feel like the subject

is about a look at something, rather than a look within, I don't feel like I can engage in the same way, and I'm less charged with all the emotions that I feel, when I am present in this interaction.

The journey to the limits of direct observation is something that every artist has to deal with no matter what

medium they use. And that journey, and where you stop on the journey, kind of defines

who you are. And some artists are willing to go past the surface and to try to reveal something far deeper.