Art Burn

KELLY HOFER Enlarge Image

Kelly Hofer’s The Building Photographer

Many of us only notice our Hutterite neighbours at their most uncharacteristically conspicuous.
   

Back at the colony, their plain attire — the women and girls’ distinctive head coverings and long dresses, the men and boys’ dark slacks and suspenders — denotes modesty and egalitarianism, but, seen in isolated clusters at, say, Walmart, it does nearly the opposite, becoming an eye-catching proclamation of difference and a seeming invitation to inquisitive gawking. Defined notably by its distance (geographic, economic, sartorial, linguistic, spiritual) from mainstream North-American society, we in the mainstream react by forming impressions of Hutterite identity on the basis of stolen looks, cut off from context and mostly uncoloured by meaningful interaction.
   

Kelly Hofer’s exhibition of photographs, Hutterite Life through a Hutterite’s Eye, which opened Dec. 2 at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery and runs until Jan. 21, purports to offer corrective glimpses at the daily experiences of Hutterite people, away from the raking gaze of curious outsiders. The work, comprising some five-dozen photographs spanning several distinct approaches to image-making, actually accomplishes more than this.
   

Subtly sentimental, National Geographic-al photojournalism is Hofer’s best-represented tack: the aggressively cute, gap-toothed children and farm equipment backlit by candy-coloured Prairie sunsets could handily sell a wall calendar, while his more clear-eyed images of sandbagging, farm labour, and women preparing wedding meals in the colony’s enormous, outbuildings satisfy ethnographic curiosity.
   

These, too, are the images that likely best represent Hutterite life as a Hutterite audience might wish to see it — a reasonable allowance, given the group’s uneasy and seemingly unresolved stance toward photography itself (individual colonies have sought exemption from mandatory photo-identification on religious grounds, while, even among more liberal groups and especially among colony elders, portraiture retains overtones of immodesty). With these, however, Hofer’s unerring jeweller’s eye for technique and composition should placate even viewers not unconditionally receptive to "pastoral" scenes.
   

Still, the "Hutterite’s eye" is a complex structure, the more so augmented by a camera, and Hofer’s most compelling pictures evidence a network of influences and an awareness of key precedents that hint at the emergence of singular artistic voice.
   

It bears mentioning that Hofer is 19 years old.
   

Two standout works delineate poles of Hofer’s exploration, each speaking more explicitly to issues of photography-qua-photography than of identity. Cartier-Bresson Meets Moses quotes the pioneering photojournalist’s now-canonical Behind the Gare St. Lazare from a position of aerial remove, linking Hofer’s practice to broader traditions of documentary photography while highlighting his keen interest in chance acts of focused looking (in turn reinforced by other images in which subjects point cameras back at us and architectural features mimic the viewfinder’s framing). In contrast, Teenage Friends, a deceptively candid-looking shot, shows a group of four girls huddled behind a pane of cracked, streaked glass, lit by multiple coloured strobes. The first revels in Cartier-Bresson’s "decisive moment" of documentary photography, while the other demonstrates a proportionate facility with the inherently artificial, constructed nature of all photographs.
   

Not content to simply document Hutterite life, it seems, Hofer tacitly acknowledges his role — as artist rather than observer — in creating it for his audience, and our experience is more rewarding and more nuanced for it.
   

Hutterite Life through a Hutterite’s Eye is on view at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery on the campus of Canadian Mennonite University until Jan.  21.
   

Steven Leyden Cochrane is an emerging visual artist, writer and educator from Tampa, Florida.