Word: tina
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Janet Mendelsohn's part of the exhibit concentrates on a description of Tina Donnelly, who lives in a different working section of Birmingham. Tina cranes money by soliciting. Several of her friends are also "on the game." They are part of a prevailing pattern in the neighborhood in which a white girl will live with and support her "colored" pimp. In England, "colored" refers to immigrants from the Commonwealth countries notably Pakistan, India, the West Indies and Jamaica...
Miss Mendelsohn's photographs are powerful. The viewer feels an intimacy for Tina and Hanif which is rarely accomplished with photographs. Part of this success rests with the quality of the photographs. An important part, however, rests with just what Miss Mendelsohn is describing. She shows us Tina and Tina's friends. She gives quotations by the friends about each other. The collection of photographs becomes more than just descriptions of several people. It becomes a family of interrelated people and images, each adding to and explaining the other...
There is a further distinction between the treatment of Tina and the treatment of Frank. Tina talks of her friends, and Frank talks of abstract things like class structure and values. The curious reset is that although one might expect them to be more mundane, the things Tina says are more powerful. When you talk about society or life in general, you often make generalizations and simplifications. When talking honestly about things closer to yourself, however, you reveal the internal contradictions and conflicts that are in everyone. I suppose that is the moral of this review that in the details...