Life And Times of a Fabled Polymath: Anthropologist of Life

From nuclear fallout shelters to dead flowers, the photographs in Archives and Archetypes, on display through this Sunday, at first seem like the work of nine different artists. But in fact, they are all by Barbara Norfleet, whose work defies a single style o simple subject.

The retrospective presents examples from nine separate projects worked on, often simultaneously, by Norfleet between 1974 and 1994. The photographs range from black and white architecture to 20x24 Polaroids of manipulated Kewpie dolls in garish colors. But what brings these images together is the photographer's astutely anthropological eye, which uses the camera to both dissect and direct human and animal categorization.

The pictures in "All the Right People" document the lives of the upper class, taking us from southern plantations to fancy department stores. Norfleet sometimes presents the "right people" in isolation and other times juxtaposed with servants and sales clerks.

In "Deck: at the Edgartown Yacht Club," a crowd of upper-crust men and women schmooze on a boat. Men in sunglasses drink and chat and look vacant. Women sit clustered around a table in the foreground; their circle, like their lifestyle, is closed.

We are excluded from the lavish world that Norfleet has put on display. Two women's backs block the foreground. All we catch is the smoke of their cigarettes trailing up into the sky. One woman, her skin as taught as plastic surgery might allow, stares virtually through us. Her sunglasses shade her from the sun and the world as the viewer knows it.

As in all the photographs in this series, and many of her series, Norfleet takes great care to carefully record, subject, name, date and location--as if she were doing an objective study of class relations. Yet somehow these photographs seem staged. Everyone is in place in this world captured by Norfleet; expressions, clothing and martini glasses are all just so. But is she revealing her subjects to us, or has she created her own class of sorts?

It is not surprising that Norfleet's photographs come across as ethnographies (whether staged or not). Norfleet herself discovered photography only after decades of work as a social anthropologist. A fixture at Harvard for more than 25 years, she began as an anthropologist and eventually migrated over to the visual arts. As a Senior Lecturer and Curator of Photography, she has taught extensively in the VES department and founded the Archive of American Social History in 1975, bringing together more than 40,000 American photographs.

Norfleet's anthropological eye shows through in her penchant for natural, as well as human classifications. In her "Manscapes with Beasts" series, Norfleet inverts the idea of the traditional landscape and documents animals in various more-or-less human environments (or "Manscapes").

In "Raccoon with Wrecked Car," the human and the natural virtually collide. A raccoon peers through the shattered remains of a car window, against a night-time forested background. The raccoon looms large and we look at its startled expression from the inside of the car (the human domain), littered with remnants of its absent owners. The natural world of the raccoon and the forest are framed twice over by the red metallic frames of the car windows.

"Raccoon with Wrecked Car" and all the photographs in the Manscapes series, are taken at dusk or dawn using an unconcealed flash, giving the animals a startled quality and imparting the images with surreal color. The contrasts created between colors emphasizes the contrasts between the animal and human worlds.

In the "Insects" project, Norfleet brings together the natural and social typologies of her earlier work. Norfleet uses bugs from entomological supply shops, ranging from ants to dragonflies to stag beetles. She poses them in scenes with various props and elaborate (terrarium-like) backdrops to create photographs of fantastic encounters in fantastic colors.

The ironic titles in this series act out, and mock, the social structures she depicts in her more straight-forward anthropological work. Some deal with romance and male-female relationships, such as "Am I Pretty?" an arrangement of seven stag beetles on pebble-wall. One beetle holds a yellow star-shape bead meant to represent a crown. The human cult the beauty pageant is played out by Norfleet's arthropod actors.

Other photographs deal with the human political sphere. "Color Bar" broaches the issue of race, as group of black beetles and a group of green beetle face off atop a pile of old bones. Although technical dead, each group seems alive in its moment of confrontation. The sky in the background is dark and menacing. As in Norfleet's other work, the contrasts run deep, as anthropology is simultaneously charted and created.