LAURA WEXLER

May 10. 2007

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing this reference for photographer Martine Barrat with great pleasure and also with something of a sense of urgency, for I believe it is high time that the work of this superb and important photographer became much more widely known. There is a great array of images, from black and white to color photographs to films, and Barrat needs some significant support and assistance with them at this point. I am hoping that your organization will be able to help provide this assistance, either in financial terms or as a venue or with help for publication, or all of the above. It would really be tragic if her pictures fail to reach the broader public. Barrat has been photographing in Harlem and in the South Bronx for about forty years. Much has changed in these locations during that time span, but Barrat's presence has been constant, as has been her unique perspective on the people who live there, with whom she has shared large and small joys, travails and triumphs. Barrat loves people. do know that I am supposed to be too sophisticated to say something like that; it is perhaps not a stylish position to hold and we all know too much about psychological and social intricacies to sense such a stance as other than credulous. Nonetheless, a crystal clear and undefended empathy and love for her fellow human beings is the driving force behind this whole body of work and it is absolutely persuasive. Cross culture, cross race, cross class, cross town - Barrat is quite well aware of all these crosses and yet she has persisted in materializing a humanistic vision of some of the most god-forsaken landscapes of New York that puts the lie to the idea that we cannot see one another whole. I do not know of any other body of work that is quite like this. It has taken great courage over the long years to stay committed to making a record of individuals and communities ravaged by gang violence, by urban renewal, by racism, by gentrification, by HIV/AIDS, even by more natural processes of maturation and generational change. The pictures are sweet but they are not sentimental. They are penetrating but they are not voyeuristic. They are analytical but they are not impersonal. Rather, they are sui generis: powerful, unique, compelling, wise, and a vitally important memorial to New York in the twentieth century. In fact, in the aggregate Barrat's pictures comprise an extraordinary collective historical record. They remind me most of the photographs of the Photo League in the 1940's, whose very distinguished members (among them Jerome Liebling, Aaron Siskind, and Helen Levitt) also took on the neighborhoods of New York as their project. But they differ from those images in being somehow less scripted and more emotional in a certain way, sort of as if one had added Cartier Bresson and Lartique to the city grit and air. That is perhaps not totally surprising, since Barrat has remained French for all her love of New York, and this adds the gift of cultural layering to the work and makes it a richer encounter to study it, at least as much as it has been for Barrat in making it. My colleague, Professor Charles Musser of the Department of Film Studies at Yale, and I co-teach a graduate seminar on American Documentary Film and Photography in which we show Barrat's films about Vicky and about a gang fight. The images from these films are permanently imprinted in my mind. They are unforgettable because the situations of the people with whom Barrat is so intimately engaged are so impossible and yet she has shown them to be so vulnerably beautiful in their efforts to survive and flourish. Barrat's oeuvre is a genuine thrust against alienation. It is, I would argue, a vision of which we are currently greatly in need.