Not Quite Everything

(Nancy Hellebrand’s EVERYBODYBEAUTIFUL is currently showing at the Print Center through July 20, 2024.)

Body-shaming, ageism and youth-centric advertising may pervade the zeitgeist, but Nancy Hellebrand rejects these biases in her work on view at the Print Center. 

Her nuanced, warm-toned photogravures on paper and plaster are delicate and, frankly, precious in contrast to the stark realism she presents of sagging breasts, stretch marks and (mostly) flabby or obese flesh. All of her subjects here are women.  The pictures are sensitive and not the least exploitative.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is they aren’t affecting either.  It isn’t a question of trying to shed our prejudices, especially among those of us who are her subjects’ contemporaries; after all, we, too, have looked in the mirror more than a few times!!  The let down is that we have seen images like these before, by photographers and painters, and Hillebrand doesn’t show us anything new.

I find myself wanting to admire these images because they are well done, but they simply lack the angst and passion of, say, Lucien Freud, whose monumental nudes seem to literally burst out of the canvas and crowd the viewer’s space, or the torment of a Francesca Woodman, or the frank eroticism of Mapplethorpe.  I found myself thinking of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, unflinching, unflattering, honest,  and filled with a kind of sadness that aging can bring on.  Hellebrand’s sedate images, enhanced by their tonality and treatment, end up distancing the viewer, especially since the images are quite small, even though many of them are printed on large sheets.  (The ones printed on plaster appear to be more or less the same dimensions as the prints but without the surrounding empty space.)  The result is to literally diminish the stark, unflinching realism that Hellebrand wants to show us and render these images more like collectibles, beautifully printed, unprovocative and treasurable.

Hellebrand stops at showing any faces, a decision that no doubt took into account the subjects’ desire for anonymity. I can easily imagine someone who is willing to bare almost all on the walls of a public gallery but does not want to be identified.  One can only assume this deliberate anonymity trumpets the body positivity Hellebrand embraces, that all bodies possess beauty.  According to the small catalog that accompanies the exhibition, the lack of faces did indeed serve the photographer’s purpose:   “By photographing the women from the neck down, Hellebrand focuses the viewer’s attention solely on the landscape of the body.”  Fair enough…as far as it goes.

Age may confer a lot of things, but not necessarily beauty. If beauty is to be found in aging, it is almost always in the face.