THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

CAMERAS CAN CARE EXHIBIT AT BC SPACE SENSITIVELY PROBES MINDS OUT OF FOCUS Friday, May 27, 1988 LAURA J. TUCHMAN:THE REGISTER Most of us tiptoe around mental illness. We glance at it from the corners of our eyes and then look away, avoiding even the briefest of halfway encounters. The camera is so much cooler. A dispassionate machine, it can capture straight-on shots of freaks on the street or shorn heads of institutionalized catatonics. But a camera in the hands of a sensitive photographer can make a world of difference. "Inside Out," a three-part show at BC Space in Laguna Beach, brings together Lonny Shavelson's portraits of and interviews with former mental patients, Mary Ellen Mark's photographs of patients in the Oregon State Hospital, and hand-colored photographs by Susan Smith, an Orange County artist who committed suicide last year. The show is marred now and again by some all-too-conventional portraits, but it offers, particularly in the work of Shavelson and Smith, a troubling vision of how the disturbed see themselves so much more clearly than they are seen by the therapists and friends who try to help them.

Mark, winner of the 1987 Photographer of the Year Award from the San Francisco-based Friends of Photography, spent more than a month living and photographing in a woman's ward of the Oregon State Hospital. She photographed self-mutilators, raging patients, a woman standing dispassionately in the shower in a bathing suit and life jacket. In one portrait, a woman kisses a photograph; in another, a patient is shackled to her bed. Now more than a decade old, Mark's photographs edge on the freakish. They seem to have lost some of the sensitive poignancy they might have had when first exhibited at the Castelli Uptown gallery in New York in 1978. By comparison, Shavelson's work seems entirely more human. And what helps, of course, is that Shavelson lets his subjects speak. The photographer, an emergency room physician who lives in Berkeley, spent three years interviewing people who had been in and out of mental institutions. He became friends with them and they trusted him. Some wrote him letters. One called him on the phone. Only after transcribing and editing the interviews -- in collaboration with his subjects -- did Shavelson click his camera. His resulting book, "I'm Not Crazy, I Just Lost My Glasses," takes its title from an interview with Joyce Kasinsky, a woman who one morning began running around her apartment screaming because she misplaced her spectacles. Shavelson photographed his subjects in a straightforward black-and-white manner: in their homes, lounging on their beds, sitting in a chair, standing against bare walls. For the most part, the voices, heard on an accompanying cassette tape, have a dull or inordinately quiet edge to them. Often the speakers throw in bits of psychobabble, presumably picked up from their time "inside." There's Darwin Dias, who discovered Freud and his own mind, "which never happened in the state hospital with the behavioralist nerds." And there's Sally Zimmerman, who survived beatings and confinement in a cellar and then paved the way for her former doctor to be stripped of his license. She now works for the Network Against Psychiatric Assault. Who, then, is crazier, the confined or the confiners? As Dias says, "The whole world is a madness machine." Crowning the exhibit is the work of Susan Smith, an artist and writer who lived in Corona del Mar until her suicide in November. Smith's images are rife with hints of death, gravestones and mausoleums and the problems of not fitting in. Family and friends say they should have seen the warning signs. "It was everywhere, but she was an artist and the edge was indistinct," her sister says in a statement that accompanies the exhibit. But Smith's most compelling image comes from the good times. "Red Blossoms -- Poland" is a joyful, pastoral vision of a gentle blue sky and blooming trees adorned with Smith's hand-applied squiggles of gold paint. The photo was made in 1987, the same year as Smith's death. Juxtaposed with the work of Shavelson and Mark, Smith represents the universally ignored individual, the one whose cries go unheard. In the end, Smith lived out the wish expressed by the title of one of her photographs: "I Want to Be the Ghost of All Your Dreams." It's a wish that suicide easily fulfills. What: "Inside Out," photographic work by Lonny Shavelson, Mary Ellen Mark and Susan Smith. Where: BC Space Gallery, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach. Continues: Through June 25. How much: Free admission. Call: 497-1880.

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