Last weekend while meandering around Newbury Street in Boston, I decided to check out the new Didier Massard show at the Robert Klein Gallery. Not being totally familiar with prior work, I went in expecting good things based on hearing the name in one class or another. Unfortunately, I walked into the gallery and was confronted by a picture of a silhouetted rhino. After wandering past this image and then staying at the gallery looking around at the rest for about twenty minutes, I was completely baffled by how and why these pictures were made.

I sat down at table in the center of the room and flipped through the book and forced myself through the artist’s statement at the beginning of the book. The pictures were not necessarily bad, but for the most part they were completely engaging. The only interesting part I could pull out of the photographs was the push and pull of the artificial and the real. All the photographs are completely constructed by the artist and are all made to be pushing the line of fantasy. Most of the time though, the photographs go way past that line and make things like a castle with a giant waterfall and a glow seem to be totally fake.

This brought me to my final thought about these photographs; why are these in a gallery and why should anyone be looking at them? It is not necessarily a thought that came to mind because of the distaste for the photographs, but it is a question everyone has to ask themselves and the work they are seeing at one point or another. The only reason I could come up with is that he is an artist that has created a name for himself and now can make anything that will go up in a gallery. That seems sort of harsh but I see this trend more and more in galleries and the way people collect art. If someone is selling a lot, than anything that comes after will be assumed to be great and automatically will sell. The book itself was also sequenced poorly. There are three pictures in a row that are all composed the same (lighthouse or castle in the center with a glow from behind) that are all accomplishing the same thing. My favorite photograph there was the one up above and it is the most realistic of the bunch which is probably why I like it more than the rest.

I am not going to say do not go see it; but I strongly suggest looking at the work before going.