Photographer Gay Block loves stories.
Many of her projects involve interviewing, videotaping, photographing and coming to know her subject's stories. But the stories Block tells are not neat with all the threads in place - they are messy; like life.
In the show "Bertha Alyce: A Photographic Biography by Gay Block," now at the UNM Art Museum, she tells the story of her painful relationship with her mother and documents how her understanding of that relationship changed after her mother's death.
Although Block began to photograph her mother, Bertha Alyce, in 1973, she only exhibited two of the photographs before her mother's death in 1991.
"I was hoping for transformation, but it didn't really come while she was alive," Block said. "Because the pictures looked angry to me, I didn't exhibit them."
After her mother's death, Block read the courtship letters written by her parents during the 1930s and her harsh view of their lives began to soften. Block realized she loved and missed her mother and was ready to tell this story. The project took years to accomplish and Block's view of her mother continued to change.
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Block first told this story as a video. She edited photographs and videotapes of family members, friends and servants. "Bertha Alyce: a Video by Gay Block" takes viewers into a closed world of southern Jewish wealth and privilege, and into the relationship between two people unable to communicate clearly.
In her editing, Block allows viewers to see how she used her camera to create a confrontational relationship with her self-involved mother.
"She suffered with me as much as a daughter as I suffered with her as a mother," Block said. "I think the working title for the book in the second or third year I was doing it was, Forgive Her/Forgive Me: An Autobiography of my Mother."
Now titled Bertha Alyce: Mother Exposed, Block's book was recently published by UNM Press. The book format gives Block space to use old family photographs in addition to her original work to build a complex and unresolved story. Captions point out love in her mother's face that the artist didn't see until after her mother's death.
The work asks a lot of viewers. Most readers are accustomed to resolution and crave a decisive ending to emotionally driven work. Block does not tie things up neatly - she tells the story as she sees it.
"I think that the book - the whole work - is a lot of questions and few answers," Block said. "There's a lot of 'this is true, but this is also true,' just like life."
The first image visitors to the museum see cuts right to the heart of the narrative. Captions on a still from the video record a conversation between mother and daughter.
"It must have been very hard for you to have a daughter who didn't like you," Block says.
"It was," Alyce answers. "It was crushing. It was heartbreaking,"
Unflinchingly, Block reveals as much about herself as she reveals about her mother - and she reveals a lot about her mother. We see Alyce's bruises after a facelift, her struggle to accept her daughter's lesbianism and her confusion after a stroke.
It is hard to fully understand the photographs or the artist's intention without knowing the story. Rather than filling the walls with text, the museum has installed small monitors that show clips from the video if a viewer presses a button.
Curator Kathleen Stewart Howe's office opens into the exhibition space and she has found that visitors are eager to talk about their reactions to this show.
"People tell incredible stories about their mothers," Howe said. "One woman came back with a different daughter three times."
Tonight at 5:30 p.m. the museum will host a screening of the video and a panel discussion. The panel will consist of Gay Block; Diane Karp, director of the Santa Fe Art Institute; and Dora Wang of the UNM Department of Psychiatry. Howe will serve as moderator.
The exhibit will remain at the UNM Art Museum until Sept. 21. Admission is free.
