Familiar, yet foreign

For five years in a row, beginning in 1992, I traveled to Madagascar. The first visit was for a brief three weeks, with each successive journey longer. The last time I stayed more than four months. My trips were funded primarily through grants and fellowships, with the time provided by an academic schedule peppered with summer breaks and a sabbatical leave.

I had been drawn to the island for its beauty, its isolation, the quality of light that, owing to the red-clay earth, is always warm and saturated, and the people who, despite their desperate poverty, are animated and open.

When I left Madagascar in 1996, I had no idea when -- or even if -- I would return.

Distance, both physical and emotional, from something once familiar but never really owned provides an interesting perspective from which to work. "Out of Place" comes from that region of intellect. It is a reflection of my own examination of what it is like to return to a place that I so thoroughly explored and yet remained so totally foreign to me.

"Out of Place" is the feeling of being both insider and outsider at the same time, and living the uneasy excitement that results from that tenuous state. In it, reality flip-flops; inanimate objects appear full of life and personality, and sometimes humor; figure-ground relationships distort; and cultural markers become parody.

Thanks to a second sabbatical leave, I returned to Madagascar in 2001. I found a country now besieged by an aesthetic sensibility heavily influence by a newly emerging global economy. The obvious "Cabbage Patch" kids poster (reproduced in China without regard to copyright laws) being hawked on the streets of Antananarivo is one example.

For me, the Madagascar I returned to in 2001 was full of visual anomalies that were either not there or not evident to me in previous voyages. The color photographs I was taking were completely different from the more traditional black-and-white documentary images I had made previously. Yet, I couldn't stop myself from making them. And so I didn't. The 40 slides presented here are only a part of the entire body of work produced during that time.

I spent six months in Madagascar in 2001. As time progressed, I noticed that everything, even the most culturally typical Malagasy scenes, began to look "out of place." The odd pile of isolated bricks, a rather common sight in Madagascar, became a rarified tableau. The pile of animal skins set to dry by a river became like the floating hamburger restaurant mural, somehow related in form and content. Taking a certain liberty with my interpretation of the culture, particularly by recognizing and acknowledging the irony and humor, would not have been possible without my earlier experiences in Madagascar.

In my experience, atypical representations of the developing world are rare and refreshing. This is one of the reasons I feel this work is worthy of publication. In addition to showing more viewers a Madagascar that they might not have imagined, a universal element to the objects found in "Out of Place" transcends geographic locales. Perhaps by examining the world I propose to present, these new observers will be inspired to re-examine their own immediate surroundings.

Janice Levy