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Two photographers interpret Albania
Thursday, July 20, 2000 By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Beauty isn't the only thing in the eye of the beholder.
At 7:30 p.m. July 28 at Silver Eye, Rial will present slides from Post-Gazette assignments, both at home and abroad. She will share photos from a recent month-long trip to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Those images are part of a package being prepared for the Post-Gazette.
Lectures are $3 for members, $5 for non-members. Refreshments will follow. Reservations are recommended. Call 412-431-1810 for more information.
So are truth and photographic expression. Walk into the Silver Eye Center for Photography on the South Side and you immediately see that.
On the left, you find photographs of Albania, taken in 1991 by Jim Stone, who managed to get into the country about the same time as then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. Stone left a motorcycle tied to a tree outside the border and hired a driver, determined "to see as much as I could before the money and the film ran out."
The 52-year-old Stone, a fine-art photographer now teaching at the University of New Mexico, shot in his signature black and white.
"It was kind of a black and white place. So stark, so desolate. I was there in the full blast of summer -- July or August -- and it was hot as blazes. The place is not particularly fertile or well-irrigated. It wasn't black and white, it was brown and white. ... Basically, everything looked like dirt. What wasn't dirt was crumbling concrete."
Eight years later in May 1999, Post-Gazette photographer Martha Rial traveled to the Balkans "to see how ethnic Albanians were holding onto their dignity during the NATO bombing campaign." She returned in November, again on assignment and again focusing on faces streaked with uncertainty, alarm, weariness, a flash of hope and -- in the case of one cherubic boy, clad in a "101 Dalmatians" sweatshirt -- the peace only sleep can bring.
Rial's color prints largely inhabit the right side of the gallery, snaking down and across the middle wall. But there is a section where the work of Rial and Stone meet, which was the intent of Linda Benedict-Jones, executive director of the gallery.
"I thought it was really interesting that these two photographers, photographing in the 1990s in the same part of the world, would come away with such very different statements," says Benedict-Jones, who came up with the idea for "Point of View: Photographs of Albanians by Martha Rial and Jim Stone," on display through Aug. 5.
"Sometimes the general public believes it's the camera that takes the photograph -- we know the camera never lies. But the truth the camera tells is closely aligned with whatever truth the photographer believes."
Rial, a 38-year-old who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for documenting the human costs of the ethnic conflict that ravaged Rwanda, specializes in people, seen in vivid close-ups.
Rial does what a good photographer should do; she disappears from the frame and puts you in her shoes. You feel as if you are watching a man balancing five foam mattresses on his head and shoulder, as if you are peering over the shoulder of a barefoot girl sketching on a hillside above a camp, as if you are gasping for breath on a bus where the passengers are human pretzels and the children's damp hair clings to their foreheads.
"Jim isn't really at all interested in people, except they may be in his photographs but they're not about the people," says Benedict-Jones. "They're about the place, the way it looks, the way it's structured. He's sort of more interested in form, in a sense, and Martha in content."
Stone captures a school where most of the windows appear to be broken, along with food, fertilizer and chemical factories that are deserted or unkempt. He also documents a lonely sentinel named Bujar, who is in his ice cream stand but has nothing to sell because there is no milk. And always, in the foreground or background, are bunkers built in the 1970s.
And yet Stone and, later, Rial discovered the resilience of the people. "It was a place as broken as any place I've seen, but people got up every morning and did something," says Stone.
Rial also witnessed how people persevere under duress. "It's given me a lot of inspiration," she says.
Most of Rial's photos originally appeared in a pair of Post-Gazette special sections, but Silver Eye showcases larger, color versions of the images. Rial thinks the colors of Kosovo and Eastern Europe, as a whole, are unique. The skies were intriguing, and their leaden colors are captured on film.
If her first visit provided a measure of protection in the camps, her second to the provinces brought an unsettling discovery. Take the village of Obilic, outside Pristina in Kosovo.
"It's where the power plants are located, and the pollution there is just horrific, and it's a town of mixed population where the Serbs and Albanians still live pretty much next door to each other. So not only do you have these foreboding skies, but you have the tension in the air, as well."
Add Gypsies to the mix, along with tanks rolling through and Rial says, "I don't think I've ever been any place as tense in all my travels." Still, Rial was struck by the importance of family, community, friendship and the refugees' ability to treasure a single moment, such as the sharing of a meal.
People would gather at the hilltop of the refugee camp at sunset to play guitar, drink tea, watch the setting sun and enjoy a break from the heat of the day. Planes were flying north to Serbia, and they would leave illuminated exclamation points of light in the sky. "It was surreal. You would wake up and hear the planes. We were an hour or two drive from the heart of the war," Rial recalls.
The lessons and messages of "Point of View" are many.
"Jim's a fine art photographer, she works for a newspaper. He teaches at a university," says Benedict-Jones. Stone works with a large-format camera and black and white film, while Rial uses a typical photojournalist's tool of a 35mm camera loaded with color film.
"They had totally different agendas in terms of what their missions were. And yet to look at them together is a lesson for all of us about the potential of photography and the richness, really, of photographic expression."
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