Ron Jude has selected a common but highly charged subject, the white American male businessman, as the focal point of his new installation Executive Model. The exhibition consists of thirty large-scale color photographs culled from a series taken on the streets of the financial districts of Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco from 1992 to 1994. Unlike other photographic projects such as Chauncey Hare's This Was Corporate America (1984), a biting, documentary investigation into the working life of the managerial class, Jude's critical interest is not in the world of business per se. Rather, he is looking at the corporate executive as a representative type, as a locus of many of our unspoken assumptions about masculinity, social privilege, race, and power. Although Jude's work is implicitly concerned with questions of personal and social identity, his concomitant goal is to reassess cultural representation itself, especially photography's slippery ability to construct, reify, or dismantle the myths by which status and authority have long been held in place.
Executive Model derives, in part, from the traditions of the so-called street aesthetic, to which Jude has conscripted the strategic and conceptual concerns of postmodern practice. Specifically, this is evident in his adoption of a quasi-scientific typology of image-making allied, in a superficial sense, to the earlier precedent of the German photographer August Sander but more strongly related to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Ruff, and others who have chosen to systematically research or archive the possible variations of a single, given theme. Jude also relies on a premeditated, controlled ordering and presentation of his subjects (similar things being photographed in nearly the same way and then physically juxtaposed and compared). Here, the collective grouping acts as a kind of equivalent, to evoke the nature of the lateral, contingent, and short-or-long-term connections that exist between these businessmen and to suggest how such societal roles and relations are organized and reinforced. At the same time, Jude consciously exploits a range of expressive effects that seem to contravene the formal and conceptual rigor of his empirical working method. His use of emphatic scale, boldly stylized form, radical framing, and connotative color gives an edgy psychological torque to his imagery, which stands in contradistinction to the deadpan neutrality and crisply rendered detail evident in other photographic indices. By bringing these more subjective and dissimulative elements to the foreground, Jude implies that there are inherent limits to the typological inquiry and its ability to reduce particularity to a common denominator.
In the majority of images in Executive Model, the men are seen from the back, their hulking forms filling nearly two-thirds of the frame. In other works, Jude depicts fragmented close-ups of turned heads or gesturing hands. Throughout, the photographer finds a formal correlative to express the most obviously shared traits these men as a type seem to represent-anonymous, hegemonic and impenetrable power. We search to detect some trace of individuation, to find what Jude calls "half-steps of recognizable difference" among these men, particularly in certain details that punctuate the surface of the pictures: a hearing aid discernable under the brim of a hat, the coiled fleshiness of a neck barely contained by a pin-striped suit, or the glint of light reflecting off a silver signet ring. Ultimately, such efforts to claim distinctiveness remain tenuous at best. Jude may allow us to briefly recognize the individual life and presence of these men, but we must do so without the need to transgress boundaries by demanding intimacy and revelation.
Ron Jude brings to Executive Model a self-conscious awareness of the cultural myths and symbols that have accrued to the representation of the white businessman through the agency of photography, particularly within popular culture and the mass media. Inevitably, a tense ambivalence resides within the work, which the artist deliberately compounds by offering no clear or single reading. How are we meant to apprehend the male subjects that Jude so forcefully presents? Are they to be regarded as anomalous and vulnerable, lumbering on the verge of extinction in a post-capitalist world of shifting modalities and values? Or are they to be viewed as totems of power as starkly impressive and obdurate in their authority as the relentlessly reductivist corporate towers that surround them? The artist purposefully leaves interpretation open-ended and equivocal, refusing either to viciously indict his subjects or to reduce them to a reassuring truism. In the end, it becomes our own possible relationships and responses to these men (as transversed by issues of race, class, and gender) rather than the men themselves that constitute the real subject that Jude addresses in this gutsy, timely, and provocative body of work.
Ellen Dugan, Curator of Photography, High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Executive Model
1992-1995
Ron Jude: Executive Model by Ellen Dugan
