Dolls, family heirlooms and another man’s trash turn into ‘Constructions’ by photographer Michael Becotte at the Michener Museum.
By: Jillian Kalonick
In a decrepit dollhouse, standing out amid the warped floors and peeling paint, there is one lone resident a giant paper doll that dwarfs the ancient abode, who is visible only from the waist down but seems to be defiantly rising out of her surroundings.
The image, a large-scale iris print photograph, is one in Michael Becotte’s series Constructions, on view at the Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pa., through March 18. The 14 staged photographs incorporate found objects and materials, as well as family heirlooms, to create scenes that suggest memories of family and childhood that Mr. Becotte says explore his own personal history.
Mr. Becotte’s scenes are inhabited by paper and three-dimensional dolls, along with other toys; representations of nature, such as synthetic flowers, bird figurines and robins’ eggs; and rustic materials like bricks, cardboard, stained fabrics, mesh and tulle.
"It’s kind of a constant process," says Mr. Becotte. "I gather things from any source on the street, sometimes in dumpsters. Frequently I’ll go to flea markets, but I’m not looking for things that have any known history, or identifiable antiques. Often I’m looking for things that are overlooked… I make it a point to vary the source of materials. My daughter just brought me a big clown sign painted on a piece of wood. Usually they are things I don’t know I have a purpose for, but they seem like they work."
For more than 10 years, Mr. Becotte has been continuously collecting materials, and since one doll "actor" or other object may be used in more than one photograph, he keeps them lined up on shelves in his studio. There are thousands of objects stored there not a vast workspace, but a 450-square-foot structure that Mr. Becotte built himself outside his Ambler, Pa., home. He’s had to scale down since moving from a 1,800-square-foot studio in Philadelphia, which was located in a flood plain, but Mr. Becotte says he’s very well-organized.
The process he goes through evolved gradually from more traditional on-site photography, says Mr. Becotte. "I had been going out and observing situations and photographing them in color," he says. "Then I started finding sites and arranging things, then I began bringing things back with me, then bringing them to my studio and manipulating them, and I liked that process."
Since then, the photographs have become more elaborate, with entire worlds created in a confined space. In one Constructions photograph, a worn doll, posed on a cylindrical wooden toy pedestal, wears only a low-cut wrap made of paper densely lined with pins. She is surrounded by stacks of corrugated cardboard, and beside her sits a framed piece of glass that reflects a ghostly, human image. Other photographs feature what looks like artwork-in-progress, family photographs and scattered objects from discarded games.
In putting together a scene, Mr. Becotte starts from scratch, then juxtaposes props in a process that might take a day or a week. After adding theatrical lighting, accomplished by using hot lights, Mr. Becotte photographs the set-up using a large format camera, then processes the image to a large format digital print. After manipulating the color and contrast using Photoshop, the images are printed on soft printmaking paper with an iris printer.
Mr. Becotte, a self-described "control freak," makes his own frames. "I come from a family of woodworkers not that I was a woodworker myself, but my father and uncle were woodworkers, and they both died," he says. "It was traumatic, and I thought that (woodworking) would be a good project to work on." After inheriting his family’s equipment, he began making his own frames, and restoring Arts and Crafts period furniture.
Mr. Becotte studied fine art photography in the 1960s, and was influenced by photographers such as Minor White, Edward Weston and Robert Frank. After studying with Aaron Siskind, he focused on both abstract and landscape photography and street photography before concentrating on constructed scenes. He has taught at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, where he is a professor of photography, since 1973, and his work is included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He also is the former owner of Becotte and Gershwin Offset Lithography, a high-profile Philadelphia printing firm.
Brian Peterson, senior curator at the Michener and curator of Constructions, says one theme in the exhibition is the concept of beauty. "It’s the idea of taking objects most of us would think of as not beautiful, things we throw out, or that are junk, or are treated that way," he says. "He finds them in junkyards, yard sales and dumpsters and here’s this distinguished art professor rooting through dumpsters… There’s a sense about our culture that we tend to think of beauty in a certain narrowly defined way, but if you think of it as not so much surface loveliness, but in a deeper sense, it can be something that has meaning and is imbued with strong feeling."
The photographs, which are untitled but identified as part of the Constructions series, are part of a whole, but they all have their own narrative, says Mr. Peterson. "Each picture represents a moment of creativity, but a moment happening in the production of a larger body of work, which he’s been working on for years," he says. "The same kind of themes, ideas and feelings keep re-emerging in different ways, and sometimes the same objects. It’s a fun thing about the series you’ll see a rather decayed looking doll in one picture, then there it is again in a different picture, with a slightly different meaning."
Mr. Becotte prefers to leave interpretations open to the viewer.
"I don’t like to try to talk about the pictures, especially I like to set up things that are suggestive to the viewer. I don’t like to direct that too much. It’s more of an open-ended question that allows viewers to come in and experience it on their own."
Constructions: Photographs by Michael Becotte is on view at the Michener Museum,
138 S. Pine St., Doylestown, Pa., through March 18. Hours: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4:30
p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. noon-5 p.m. Admission costs $6.50, $6 seniors,
$4 students, under 6 free. For information, call (215) 340-9800. On the Web: www.michenermuseum.org

