Editorial of June 27, 2024

A New Perspective

Among the most, probably the most, unique, exciting, ambitious, innovative and eye-catching exhibitions here this summer is “Marc Hom: Re-Framed,” a show of many photographs of intrinsically interesting and fairly famous people, that opened at the beginning of the month at the Fenimore Art Museum and will run into September, entertaining us both inside, and outside, for many months.

The exhibition, in its first appearance before it begins some wide traveling, and to Denmark as well, is outstanding, both in its inside gallery, which is a traditional exhibition space, and in its outside space, not so traditional, overlooking beautiful Otsego Lake and far-off surrounding hillsides. Inside, the photographs are mounted in the style of most other photography shows: normally sized, with readable captions and in a somewhat organized sequence—all immaculately candid photographs of the people of our ever-changing times that tell intriguing stories.

But, as Hom himself is quoted as saying in Nathan Heller’s well-wrought foreword to the exhibition catalogue (“Marc Hom Re-Framed,” teNeues Publishing Group, 2024), there is no new exhibition style here. Indoors, in a traditional gallery, viewers, mostly adult, (ergo precious few children), very often spend little time. “People walk around,” he laments, “and say, ‘very nice,’ ‘great,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘we love it,’ ‘goodbye.’” Hom wanted something new. Something more creative, more artistic perhaps, more edgy, moving and reactive. He also wanted to entertain and educate all generations, including the young.

So, Hom’s exhibition becomes re-framed. Outside, on the ample green lawn bowing down to the lake, “Re-Framed” runs smack into the wildly uncontrolled ever-changing wilderness of a world subsumed in all its bigger-than-life elements, becoming a part of the landscape, but in an artistic variant, drawing in its hungry viewers, still mostly adult but with many more children and teenagers racing about. The photographs are a massive 12 feet tall and all startlingly, consciously black and white—they do not interfere with the vivid natural colors of the surrounding environment, the strong bright blues of the lake and sky and the rippling greens of the trees and ground. The images are ingeniously mounted on a base that neither reflects sunlight nor is reduced to rubble by rain and wind, and held together by a Masonite frame, light and strong, that can withstand the elements that even we sometimes have trouble withstanding. The frame is supported by a circular bearing system set in the ground that allows the frames to move, and spin, with the wind, and rain, creating a stimulating movement and inviting suspenseful surprise. A striking new way to look at photographs, even of famous people.

Marc Hom, whose father was also a photographer, and one who took his work seriously, creatively and intelligently, hails from Copenhagen. Upon finishing Danish photography school in the 1990s he moved to New York, becoming, as a start, a fashion photographer for a variety of publications and then moving out on his own. Recently he and his family have been living in Cooperstown as well, and it was through his connections here that this highly innovative and consequential exhibition and its novel design has come about.

“We had to do it,” says Marc Hom, “To prove to museums, and to prove to ourselves, that it was possible.”

Go see it.