Snapshots and Harleys at Currier’s Summer of Photography
Instagram didn’t invent self-curation, a point brought home by a pair of commingling exhibits currently at Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art. Long before “personal brand” was an everyday term, people arranged themselves for the lens, deciding which version got preserved. The platforms changed, but the impulse did not.
“Together, Apart, Away: Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Collection” offers the sorts of family photos never intended for public viewing. “The Bikeriders,” conversely, is Danny Lyon’s celebrated collection of documentary photographs, taken in the 1960s while he was an actual member of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club.
Initially the two were separate, until Currier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Anastasia Kinigopoulo decided to join the exhibits “in conversation.” With a history of showing his work in museums, Lyon’s photos are more artistic, but Kinigopoulo realized they had much in common with the snapshots in Cohen’s collection.
“One of the things that Danny Lyon pioneered was a style of photography that feels very personal; in some ways, he was taking cues from vernacular photographs,” she said by phone recently. Joining them made sense. “For a long time, they wouldn’t have been found in museums alongside each other, but that’s very much changing now.”
What sharpens the pairing is a constraint both bodies of work shared, but one nobody currently under 30 ever lived with — not knowing right away how a photo came out. Shoot 100 pictures, discard 99 and keep the perfect shot is today’s rule. With vernacular photos, however, the process was snap the shutter, then wait to see what developed.
For example, there’s a Lyon photo of a biker’s reflection caught in a rearview mirror. It’s a shot that couldn’t be restaged after the fact. This was the mid-1960s, and no biker in Hell would be expected to take direction from a photographer seeking the perfect pose. “Mr. Barger, could you move over just a skosh?” Not happening.
The snapshot collection’s timeline runs roughly from 1880 to 1980 — a century of ordinary people, none of them artists, working from the same instinct that fills social feeds today: photograph the picnic, the road trip, the friends piled into a human pyramid, or a dog stuck in the motorcycle sidecar as a joke.
The Cohen collection is grouped in thematic “frames” of photos, all arranged by Kinigopoulo. For one, she paired a wall of open-road imagery with vernacular motorcycle photos. The choice pushes back against the violence-filled mythology of motorcycle gangs by showing ordinary people on bikes.
“I love the juxtaposition of this cultural symbol that permeated families and people’s lives in very different ways besides just as a sort of focal point of this very intense subculture,” she said, describing a photo of a father giving his daughter a ride, women on motorcycles, and bikes as punchlines instead of threats.
For a glimpse of Instagram’s vanity roots, she grouped snapshots of people performing for the camera. “An entire wall of photos of individuals essentially strutting their stuff … posing and building an identity through photographs,” she said. “People have always done that … they’ve always put on a persona for the camera.”
Lyon was Hunter S. Thompson with a camera, defining the difference between a documentary photographer and a tourist with a press pass. Kinigopoulo pointed to a portrait of a biker’s wife, Kathy, caught directly and then twice more in a pair of mirrors, a triple-exposed glimpse few could have gotten that close to.
Something Kinigopoulo has enjoyed during the “Summer of Photography” exhibition, which opened in May and ends Aug. 16, is seeing visitors linger on an object’s relatability. A group visiting during Bike Week marveled at how Lyon’s work reminded them of rides they’d taken and bikers they knew.
To her delight, everyday people will often see themselves or a loved one in a century-old shot.
“One of the things I really love about vernacular photography is its amazing universality,” she said. “People … look at those images and say, ‘I keep expecting to see an image of my grandmother or my aunt, or, ‘my God, look at this person, it looks so much like someone that I’m related to.’ That’s one of the magical things about the show.”
Summer of Photography: “Danny Lyon: The Bikeriders” and “Together, Apart, Away: Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Collection”
When: Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., ending Aug. 16
Where: Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester
Admission: $5 – $20, currier.org
Featured photo: Courtesy photo.