Once Again, NEA Is Clouded By An Image Of Controversy

Merry Alpern didn't click the shutter of her camera with the intention of outraging Sen. Jesse Helms.

She did not expect to be the center of the next controversy at the perpetually beleaguered National Endowment for the Arts.

More cynical observers have suggested that her grant, approved by an NEA photography panel but overturned by the NEA's National Council on the Arts last month, might never have run into trouble if it weren't for the fact that a grant for photographer Andres Serrano was rejected at the same time. Serrano, you might remember, ignited the political crisis for the NEA about five years ago with his photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine.

Serrano, Alpern and a third photographer, Barbara DeGenevieve, were among the 30 selected from 1,700 applicants for the photography fellowships the NEA awards every other year. Their work is generally described as controversial and provocative: Alpern, for example, did a series of photographs through a window of an urban office building off Wall Street, where sex and drugs were being traded instead of stocks and bonds.

To arts watchers such as David Mendoza, who heads the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, it's clear that the three photography grants were overturned "for political reasons, despite the opinion of a federal judge that prohibits the NEA from determining grants based on decency."

Alpern, who recently visited friends in Seattle, passes her slides across the table. Taken through, and framed by, a window, most of the series are graphic pictures of men and women in compromising positions. The photos are disturbing, not only for their content but because of their unposed documentary nature - and because the subjects had no idea they were being photographed.

"I wasn't brought up to look in people's windows," Alpern says.

"I was visiting a friend who owned a store in the loft building where these acts took place, and I moved some boxes away from a window that hadn't been in use. It was complete serendipity. I knew I wanted to show this, as if I were a fly on the wall.

"Most photographers are voyeurs; it's a quality most of us possess. I was curious, fascinated; I wanted to make a set of pictures that I knew would be strong. Let people draw their own conclusions."

A former sociology major who says she is fascinated by aspects of human nature that we don't always see, Alpern confesses that just about everything she has produced in fine-art photography would upset Helms, a North Carolina Republican who is one of the most ardent opponents of the NEA.

Part of the reason photography is so often singled out for reviling might relate to primitive human fears that photographs can capture the soul - or at least an incontrovertible version of truth. Photographs are seen as compellingly real (despite increasing public awareness that they can be doctored to become completely fraudulent). They're more uncompromising than an artist's version of the same subject in another medium, which viewers can always dismiss as just the artist's view of the subject.

Is the NEA council right to overturn Alpern's grant recommendation because of the content of the photos? Absolutely not. This action takes the NEA right back to the worst days of the original fracas, when then-chairman John Frohnmayer found himself attacked by the religious right for heading the endowment, and by the free-speech and artists' advocates for overturning content-sensitive grant recommendations. Frohnmayer couldn't win - and neither can current chair Jane Alexander, if she finds herself pinned between an angry Congress and equally angry artists' defenders. Mendoza, for one, declares "this action (the overturning of the photography fellowships) may well lead to (the NEA's) demise."

As long as the U.S. government, like all the other governments of civilized nations, has a hand in arts support, it has to follow its own rules. In this country, the law is fairly clear regarding the NEA: Grants are not supposed to be awarded on the basis of whether photography subjects have their clothes on. Unless the work can be legally judged obscene, it is immune to restrictions about its content, as long as the review panels declare it to be of the high standard worthy of federal funding.

That doesn't mean all taxpayers have to like Alpern's work. She also pays taxes, and many of those dollars are going to purposes she doesn't like and can't justify. But Alpern vows to go ahead with photography her way, grant or no grant.

"I never expected to win when I applied for the NEA grant. I support myself as a commercial photographer. But I won't try to second-guess or self-censor for public funding. I'm not going to temper my work to suit the climate of the times."