represent

Visual conversations

I showed up late for Michele Ashlee-Meade’s solo show, too late to hear her talk at SUNY/Finger Lakes Community College—only a couple stragglers were still there studying her photography. Yet the room was a beehive of silent conversation. A dozen voices spoke from the walls around us, both in the photographs, and in the brief oral histories transcribed beside them. Letters to Myself, Portraits of Adversity is a marvelous assembly of the photographer’s friends: homeless, ill, struggling with addiction, celebrating modest personal victories, remembering things that made them cry, and yet everywhere looking as if they were reveling in life.

Her photographs exude emotional strength, self-awareness, wit and in a few cases startling glamour. She asked each of her subjects to write or talk briefly about themselves, mounting their statements—sometimes in their own hand—alongside each portrait at Williams-Insalaco Gallery 34.

She’s an engaging talker herself, articulate about what she’s doing with her photography, but what comes through most clearly is her deep appreciation for and delight in nearly anyone she meets. It’s what charges her work with life: this ability to see someone else from the inside out. She documents the lives of men and women she meets in all phases of her day, including her work at St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality, where she helps care for the homeless. As with Avedon’s portraiture, much of her work captures a spontaneous moment, while other portraits are posed with

care against backdrops that amplify or contrast with the subject’s character. A beautiful woman in an elegant dress bares one shoulder in front of an abandoned lot strewn with detritus. A bisexual, married woman who wanted to remain unidentifiable is covered from head to foot in black drapery, wearing eyeglasses outside her costume like Cousin Itt hiding behind a body-suit of hair. She’s posed in a narrow alley between brick walls with a fire escape behind her offering a retreat that looks more like a trap. Homeless since 2007 and sixty days sober, a smiling man lofts a half-finished pop bottle like a trophy beneath bright, white clouds.

What comes through in the faces and the personal, biographical accounts she excerpts from each subject is how much they not only have suffered adversity, but have overcome it and drawn energy from the strength it trained in them. Her images are rich with shadow—she luxuriates in value and focal contrasts that highlight the detail that give immediacy and history to her faces, yet the photographs are anything but dark. After having read the terse personal accounts of these people and recognized even more in their faces, you want to keep looking, and, most of all, to hear them keep talking.