Howard Greenberg Gallery-Phillip Salmo

Of all the works that I observed when visiting the gallery on Wednesday, the one that by far had the greatest emotional impact on me was Craig Tuffin’s Stolen. The $12,000.00 work is very new, having been completed in 2016, and measures 8 x 10 inches. The work was made using the Daguerreotype technique, which was the first publicly announced photographic process, and employed an iodine-sensitized silver plate and mercury vapor to order to capture the image. The subject of Stolen depicts a mother separated from her baby and watches from the other side of a high fence as another woman takes her child. I appreciated this photograph the most out of all the works in the gallery because of its instant emotional impact upon first view and its commentary on an important issue in American society.

The main topic of this photograph depicts a mother forcibly separated from her child by a form of a barrier in the middle of the desert. The barrier in this case is a large fence, and on the other side of the fence is a nicely dressed white woman with a baby in a carriage. One can assume that the child with the white woman is the baby of the other woman’s, because of her breakdown at the sight of her child with another mother-figure. One can tell from the details of the mother’s hair and skin tone that she is a Latin immigrant, presumably Mexican based on the image of the fence in the middle in the desert. The two women are juxtaposed, with one having light skin and blond hair and the other having tan skin and black hair. Tuffin draws a clear parallel between the economic status of the two different women based on the way that they are dressed, with the white woman appearing to have on more expensive clothes. The white woman appears to be very apathetic to the understable pain that the Mexican mother is going through by being separated from her child. To me, the photo seems to be a very clear commentary on the nature of illegal immigration in this country. While many in the United States, especially politicians, often focus on immigration within a broad political and economic context, the personal impact that immigration can have on families is not as often talked about. The artist succeeds at personalizing the issue through his art. The image of a mother separated from her child, presumably after being deported, has great emotional weight. Overall, the imagery of the photograph is very surreal, as the nicely dressed white woman on the other side of the fence would not normally be in the middle of the scorching desert. The fence stands as a metaphor for the breakdown of the family unit because of the great difficulties in attempting to have a better life in another country. I find very interesting the fact that the technique used to render the photograph is the oldest recognized technique for photography, yet the issue expressed in the work is as current as any issue in the United States can be right now.