'Sisters' Connect Through the Lens
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, Jan. 30, 2009
Arlington, it turns out, has "sister" cities. Who knew?
For the past couple of years it has been in a long-distance relationship (we're talking very long distance) with Reims, France. The relationship is closer to dating, really, as it's meant to foster "peaceful discourse, cultural exchange and economic collaboration," according to the Arlington Sister City Association. Sounds like a date to me.
Like a visual "Date Lab," the afterglow from one of those fix-ups is on view at the Ellipse Arts Center.
Called "Crossing Glances/Regards Croisés," the show is a series of his 'n' hers photographs. Half were shot in Reims, over the course of two weeks last spring, by Arlington photographer John Babineau. Half were shot in Arlington, during a concurrent month-long visit by his French counterpart, Cécile Bethléem, of Reims.
You were expecting, maybe, travelogue-style postcards from Babineau, and pictures of the Iwo Jima Memorial from Bethléem? The results may surprise you.
They did Babineau, who says he never expected to find that the two places -- one an American suburb of humble bungalows and high-rises, the other a centuries-old town famous for its Gothic cathedral, where kings were once crowned -- had so much in common. And what is one of the things they have in common?
Backhoes.
You'll see that piece of construction equipment, quite by accident, in both Babineau's and Bethléem's work. He immortalized one next to the cathedral, in a shot called "Contemporary Renewal." She caught another next to a building belonging to George Mason University. All of Bethléem's pictures come from a numbered series called, with a sense of anthropological detachment, "Topology Fragments."
"I was really surprised to see how much construction there was," says Babineau, who also shot the cathedral reflected in the sleek glass facade of a contemporary office building. Those familiar with Arlington may also notice that several of the buildings Bethléem shot, less than a year ago, have been torn down.
Even cities, it seems, don't stand still and smile for the camera.
But "Crossing Glances/Regards Croisés" is not a documentary project. Babineau and Bethléem are artists, not photojournalists. What they bring to their work isn't objectivity but attitude, opinions and, most important, atmosphere.
That's most apparent in Bethléem's work, which evokes a palpable melancholy. One of the first pictures she shot was taken from the window of the hotel she stayed in upon arriving in Arlington. It shows the front of an anonymous building, as seen through the out-of-focus filter of a hotel-room curtain. Through a interpreter, the artist says she can't remember where the hotel was. But as Ellipse curator Cynthia Connolly remarked on opening night, it looks distinctly . . . "Rosslyn-y." Connolly is dead right about that, too. If not geographically, at least aesthetically.
That is to say, the picture has a gray and austere flavor. It's filled with a sense of alienation, if not despair. But in a strangely beautiful way.
Bethléem says she was a little worried about the grayness when she got here. "Is this all that Arlington is?" she recalls thinking. It was only later that she would discover such architectural gems as Ballston's International House of Pancakes, with its distinctive blue roof, or the mid-century modernist charms of the Highlander Motor Inn, near the Virginia Square Metro. With her stranger's eyes, Bethléem caught something about Arlington. It's in the disappearing cottages, some dwarfed by concrete towers. Not just loss, but love.
Yet just as Babineau brought his skepticism about rampant development, along with his luggage, to France, Bethléem didn't just stumble on a hidden reservoir of estrangement and regret in Arlington. That gorgeous sense of something dear slipping away -- you feel it more than see it -- has always permeated her art, she admits.
"J'aime la tristesse," she says. I love sadness.
