The Light Inside: Wendy Snyder MacNeil, Photographs and Films RYERSON IMAGE CENTRE TORONTO JANUARY 20-APRIL 10, 2016 Two figures pose against an old building; one sticks out its tongue, an aged hand reaching up to hold a devilish mask over its unseen face. This photograph, Williamsville, Vermont (1972), from the portfolio Unitarian Universalist Church, Williamsville VT (1967-72) by Wendy Snyder MacNeil, is a self-portrait with the artist's grandmother. But at first glance, their diminutive presence against the abstracted geometry of the weatherboard reminded me of someone else: the careful composition and playful use of masking as a refusal to meet the gaze of her own camera brought to mind the childhood work of Francesca Woodman--one of Snyder MacNeil's most famous students. Up until now, it is perhaps as an influential educator that this pioneer of experimental photographic portraiture is best known. Her teaching at Abbot Academy, Wellesley College, and later at Rhode Island School of Design had a profound impact not only on the development of individuals such as Woodman, Natalia Almada, Wendy Ewald, and Sylvia Wolf--but also the broader artistic direction of the institutions themselves. This is, then, a timely exhibition bringing renewed attention to Snyder MacNeil's own work. Drawn from the archive acquired by Toronto's Ryerson Image Centre and curated by her brother, Donald Snyder, it presents an overview of the artist's career from early documentary series through to the films she began to produce in the early 1990s. Her well-known document of Boston's open-air Haymarket (1968-70) is here, in its original exhibition format: unglazed, unframed, and mounted on Masonite, alongside the Irish Tinkers taken in County Galway between 1968 and 1969. Focusing on the human subjects that made up these very different tribes, both series recorded lifestyles and livelihoods on the brink of disappearance, the fragility of their existence echoed in their blurred shadows. This emphasis on the familial camaraderie of working life contrasts with the isolation of the lesser-known portraits in the unpublished series Special Children in a Special School, Massachusetts (c. 1975). In one example, Untitled [Boy at Special School], the young subject does not look out, but down, creating a distance and a frustrating lack of resolution. In another, the child's profile against a blank background cannot help but recall the role of photography in the nineteenth century's visual construction of both mental and physiological disorder. With its deliberately unfinished composition, the series' taped corners and fragmented layout seem designed to disrupt both sentimentality and easy aesthetic consumption. It is not comfortable viewing. More celebratory of photography's contribution to identity formation is Snyder MacNeil's enduring exploration of family--in particular the ways in which lineage is sometimes only brought to light through the photograph's tracing of genealogical similarities and echoes of resemblance. …