Providence, Rhode Island 1954

BINKSGEIST Exuberantly, laughing, hands gesturing; the trio, two adults, and a young boy are spontaneously celebrating their survival in devastated postwar Berlin. The picture is full of clues to identify the city: a distant Volkswagon or the background buildings. Ron Binks, the photographer, first saw Berlin still in rubble and has spent years there witnessing the city’s rejuvenation. The urban environment, the evolution, the force of the environment on individuals are continuing motifs through the decades of images collected here. The laughing trio react to the destroyed city with vivacity. Binks commented, while selecting images for this show, that there were not many happy faces in Berlin at that time.

While observing the changes in the cityscape across time, we also witness Bink’s amalgamate early influences (Paul Strand, Minor White, Helen Levitt) into a personal vocabulary. Illuminated cigarette smoke, stroboscopic quarry smoke stacks, the fires of hell burning behind the bull’s eye, all continuously demonstrate the essential photographic magic of the play of light and shadow. And when the crush of the crowd has destroyed the wonder of the individual, the light flattens, as in the Prague airport. The Prague airport is at odd angles to the axis of the earth, seeming to belie Newton’s most basic observations. The facial expressions stoically accept this suspension of physics without resistance or irony. It is the circumstance of twenty first century people to live outside the laws of nature, or at least acquiesce to a temporary absence of them. The grayness of the silver process (well, there is still film) reinforces the bland antiseptic public interior and the vacant attitudes of the slightly askew people. The image of the complacent Prague travelers contrasts strongly our shared human plight with the defiant exuberant Berliners. When Binks deals with landscape, or more specifically the romance of Arcadia, the human scale even without the figure is still implied. The long, straight foot path through the woods is body width. The open expanse of grass beneath monumental clouds is clumped with humans. He quotes Caspar David Friedrich’s moody landscape paintings and uses them as a point of departure. Sometimes elements in the photographs conjure the figure; the looming rocks become a pubic V. Ominously, the idyllic Arcadia, the park like settings morph into the landscape of Bucanwald. Besides a bleak landscape Bucanwald is the antithesis of urban vitality. The camp is the elimination of the figure, the vaporizing of society, the nihilistic non-city. The dimensions of the dissecting table are for the dissolution of an individual, just about the same size as the figures in the Prague Airport. The dark side of the romantic dream. Binks relishes the defining characteristics of the several cities he photographs across these decades. This concern is not just documentary. He finds Atget in Paris, but also, the vagaries of contemporary urbanity pervaded by history. The figurative sense of scale alters in New York’s skyline; the elderly folks at outside tables are perfectly at ease in their steel and glass forest. And Berlin, always Berlin. A self portrait fractures the city’s streets into a cubist montage of facets and mirrors. We see him, and the baby stroller, but we cannot locate him, human perception cries for the logical thread and the artist is always jerking it. The span of time these images represent include all the critical thought and movements that left a pile of pieces on the gallery floor, which, of course, is fulfilling art’s job of reflecting society. Extinguishing a burnt landscape, defying the rules of physics, or merely existing in the bewildering cubist streets of Berlin, the people in Binks’s world (Binkgeist) are appropriately responding to the resounding mystery, ambiguity, and weirdness of the moment. The evolution of this idea in both visual and humanist terms becomes the equation of artistic maturity.

-- LAWRENCE LEISSNER

Providence, Rhode Island 1955

Berlin, Germany 1957

Berlin, Germany 1957

Berlin, Germany 1957

Foster, Rhode Island 1975

New Haven, Connecticut 1959

Vienna, Austria 1993

Parris, France 1993

Weimar, Germany 1997

Bexar County, Texas 1994

Rome, Italy 1961

San Antonio, Texas 2003

Rügen, Germany 1998

RON BINKS was born in Oak Park, Illinois. He studied photography with Minor White and Beaumont Newhall at the George Eastman House. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale school of Art and Architecture. He received a Fulbright award to attend the Hochschule fürbildende Künste in Berlin, Germany and the Rome Prize in painting for residency at the American Academy. He has exhibited paintings , drawings and photographs in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe and Latin America and is represented in numerous private and public collections. He currently is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

LAWRENCE LEISSNER received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He teaches photography at San Antonio College and the University of Texas at San Antonio. Lawrece is an artist/photographer exhibiting national and internationally.