ANTHONY GLASSMAN

eveningsout Normal bodies, extraordinary artifacts

40 years of Herb Ascherman's work

Cleveland-"Photographs are artifacts," says Herbert Ascherman Jr., one of Cleveland's best-known and most noteworthy photographers. "They're real, and have a contextual value."

He is walking through his studio in

ing children's games, breaching the line of what we have been told is wrong is playing naked.

The exhibit is comprised of three main groups of photographs: BD/SM, much it posed; studies, like his series of photos of Tom and Susana Evert and the SAFMOD dance troupes; and pictures of random people

he has met around the world.

In one photo, he pays homage to Spencer Tunick, famous for his displays of hundreds or thousands of naked people. Ascherman has, however, one named woman curled up on the ground, the cityscape spreading out past her. It's Tunick at a far more

intimate level, a far more elegant level.

In other pictures, he has taken the artistry past the

November 23,

2007

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Herbert Ascherman, Jr.

Beachwood, pointing out his view camera, a seemingly antiquated contraption with a chamber surrounded by accordion-folded material between the lens and the film. It is the type of camera seen in old movies, the photographer hiding his head under a black cloth while holding the flash powder above his head.

This is a camera that takes serious photographs, and it is used by a serious photographer.

Ascherman's work, spanning his fourdecade career, will be the focus of "Bodies: 1967-2007," opening November 30 at the Corcoran Fine Arts Gallery on Shaker Square and running through February 15.

It is the first single-artist show of this magnitude in Cleveland, according to Ascherman, and he has selected his work accordingly, ranging from the erotic to the romantic to the playful.

That playful element is, to a great extent, what his work is about. He deals with a lot of nudes, but not in a way that would necessarily have them construed as "naughty."

Children, he notes, are born naked, and it's their natural state. When clothed, babies often try to remove their clothing. It is only as people grow up and are socialized that they are taught nudity is wrong.

Keeping that in mind, Ascherman views much of his work as displaying adults play-

Michael Medcalf,

by Herbert Ascherman

actual surface of the photograph, using gold leaf to accent the image. In one of his shots of Michael Medcalf, founder and former artistic director of the Cleveland Contemporary Dance Theater, Medcalf, standing with palms facing upwards becomes a scene of the dancer casting bits of light upward, Prometheus spreading his fire to the world.

Medcalf and Tom Evert are two of the luckier males Ascherman has photographed. According to the photographer, 95 percent of the men in his photographs have died of Continued on page 10

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