Pedro Meyer's "Truths and Fictions"
Written for the Utne Reader, August, 1995
Reviewed by Scot Hacker
Truths and Fictions by Pedro MeyerVoyager CD ROM for Macintosh
Voyager: http://www.voyagerco.com/
1-800-446-2001
There was a time when the photograph challenged the painting as the final arbiter of visual truth. That stranglehold on representation has long since been challenged by alternative darkroom processes, but Mexican photographer / digital imagist Pedro Meyer may be initiating the logical next step by employing digital tools to create the "perfect" photograph. Where most digital artists use their tools to create the impossible, the results of Meyer’s painstaking photocollages are often so technically perfect as to look like unretouched originals. Only after close examination of the source images which comprise the final composites does the viewer realize that Meyer is not trying to create a different reality, but to enhance the one we’ve got, to bend it closer to his political, philosophical, and aesthetic ideals.
A saint stalls in levitation above a sidewalk, almost but not quite real. An American tourist is sole audience to a band of tiny ceramic mariachis. A boy climbing a greased pole becomes a figure of the messiah, the viewer uncertain whether he is being raised toward heaven or taken down, supported by the feet or clawed at by passersby. "Truths and Fictions" takes the viewer through a swath of highly charged, delightful, and painful perspectives on Mexican sociology via his uniquely believable photographic surrealism. In addition to deconstructions of the montages, the CD contains curatorial explications, quotations from Meyer’s correspondence with other artists, and less finely detailed analyses of pieces from Meyer’s larger body of work.
Meyer is not married to his digital tools -- when an original photo captures what needs to be said, it is left as is. Listening to his personal account of each image’s creation, it becomes clear that Meyer is almost obsessed with his subjects, and with the question of whether he has the right to be doing what he is doing at all. One gazes with sincere empathy upon the old man in the pool, missing half an arm and half a leg. When it is revealed that Meyer has seamlessly removed the leg himself (half an arm was already gone), the viewer is shocked into the realization that she has been duped, that the emotional impact of the photo was artificially manipulated. Meyer confesses that he has pushed himself into territory with which he’s not entirely comfortable, and thrown into question many notions of photographic legitimacy. Most viewers will walk away from this CD with more questions than answers, and therein lies its value.
[Writers] [Birdhouse]