Really?

The cover of this month's Photography magazine features this photograph by Jocelyn Lee:


(Margie in Chelsea Hotel, 2009).

There's an exhibit of Lee's recent work at fancy-pants Pace/MacGill Gallery this month.

Here's what art critic Lyle Rexer writes about Lee's work generally, invoking photograph's etymology as "light writing":

When photography's inventors were looking for a name for the new medium, they proposed many versions. The most evocative was the first: heliography, sun writing, writing with light. It suggested ancient myths and modern technology, promethean desire and some unprecedented new power, harnessed for the first time. If, in the photographs of Jocelyn Lee, light seems to take precedence over her subjects, it is because she has identified (and identified with) something primordial about the medium. In her portraits especially, it is as if the photographs—directing and deploying light—had somehow given birth to the subjects themselves. No matter what age her people are—they range from infants to the aged—and no matter what their state, even at the edge of death, they appear new born, emerging into the light.

And here's what Rexer says about this photograph in particular:

When she captured Margie at the Chelsea Hotel, the image on the cover, her camera seems to have orchestrated a moment of unusual self-sufficiency. Margie is indisputably there, in the light. Characteristically, Margie does not acknowledge Lee's camera, and yet it seems to have ratified her, unveiled her in a pale light that is the source and end of being.

I've only encountered Rexer's writing a few times in the past. And each time, I find him either incomprehensible or simply way off-the-mark.

It's the latter this time. I see none of what Rexer claims to see. Is Margie really "unveiled [] in a pale light that is the source and end of being," a light that "ratifie[s] her"? And does this "photograph[] ... give[] birth to" to Margie?

(And why, by the way, do both the photographer and the critic insist on using the identifying label "... at the Chelsea Hotel" when describing this picture? Does this add something to the picture that's ... not there?)

It's a perfectly fine, handsome photograph. It's taken in natural indoor light, of an attractive somewhat-older woman whose complexion complements (or is complemented by) the background color. She sits upright and looks away from the camera. If I read anything of her expression and posture, it's that she's engaged in the "portraiture act": She's aware that a "modern artistic portrait" is being made of her by a photo-artist, and she consciously poses in a manner consistent with the expectations of that genre.

I do not mean to criticize Jocelyn Lee's work, since I am unfamiliar with it apart from this photograph. And I try not have an opinion about someone's work until I've seen at least 20 to 50 of their pictures.

It's Rexer's hyperbole that's the problem.