https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Artists-with-disabilities-are-in-with-the-2697126.php
Artists with disabilities are in with the 'outsider' market. Leon Borensztein brings viewers inside their world.
Annie Nakao, Chronicle Staff Writer
Published 4:00 am PST, Monday, February 21, 2005
Regina Broussard
Photo: Leon Borensztein
One minute, Carl Hendrickson, 53, sits in repose, eyes closed, head resting on his right shoulder, a hand under his chin, the other tucked between the knees. Then the clock ticks, and Hendrickson, who has cerebral palsy, is a jumble of jagged motion.
"In the blink of an eye, the face can undergo countless transformations, from entirely painful and contorted to very relaxed, calm and joyful," notes Oakland photographer Leon Borensztein, who, in the past 15 years, has befriended and photographed Hendrickson and other artists who are physically, developmentally and mentally disabled at Oakland's Creative Growth Art Center. "Each and every expression represents a reality, a true rendition of a moment. When I capture the range of those emotions with my camera, the question arises: How do I decide which one to choose, which one to use?"
It is a question of great personal meaning for the 50something, Polish- born photographer. His 20-year-old daughter Sharon was born with multiple disabilities. Borensztein's recent photographic book, "One is Adam, One is Superman: The Outsider Artists of Creative Growth," is dedicated to her.
The Chronicle Books hardcover was recently published in conjunction with a current Yerba Buena Center for the Arts exhibition, "Leon Borensztein and His Friends: A Look at Creative Growth Artists and Their Work," which also features the artists' paintings, sculptures and woodwork.
In the fashionable world of "outsider art," or in Europe, art brut -- essentially the work of artists untrained in mainstream institutions of artistic learning -- the creations of artists with disabilities are highly sought-after, even though more often than not, the artists themselves remain marginalized in general society.
Not so in Borensztein's book, which presents not just the works -- some of which command six figures and hang in some of the most prestigious museums and galleries around the world -- but the sometimes-unsettling photographs of the artists who made them.
"Leon Borensztein's radical decision to present the portraits of the artists along with their works may offend some fainthearted individuals who would prefer to preserve the 'anonymity' of these creators, as though their physical presence is best concealed from view," observes San Francisco art historian John M. MacGregor in the book's preface. "Yet, even a casual glance at these vibrant portraits makes it more than evident that these artists are proud of their pictorial achievements, identifying with their works."
In Borensztein's photographs, subjects stare at the camera, their eyes sometimes unfocused, sometimes laserlike, with an expectant, even challenging, gaze. They stand, feet apart, as if to keep their hold on terra firma. Or, caught in the creative process, they wield artist implements with contorted fingers or teeth, or use rodlike extenders. Some smile shyly or laugh heartily, embracing friends. Others do not face the camera but instead offer poems or a faint scrawl as their mark on the world.
For Borensztein, whose images have appeared in such publications as Life, Time, Fortune and Vogue International, creating pictures of such subjects is an exquisitely arduous struggle between artistic aesthetic and his experience as a parent of a child with a disability.
"As a photographer, I want the strongest images I can find," he says. "But as a father of a disabled daughter, that wasn't the kind of picture I wanted. It's so easy to take advantage of the disabled and make them look terrible."
Borensztein, who is divorced, lives with his daughter in a tidy white house in Oakland's Glenview district. Of average height, with blue eyes, graying blond hair and strongly accented English, the Warsaw native bustles in his small kitchen recently, whipping up cappuccino. He admits to being a coffee hound -- it keeps him going as he takes care of Sharon during the day and tends to his work at night. Sharon isn't home that day but at a day program for adults with disabilities.
"She's beautiful, did I tell you that already?" he says, chuckling as he brought out photographs of his daughter as a flaxen-haired waif of perhaps 6 and more recent shots of a willowy young woman with long hair.
She has multiple disabilities, including blindness. It was in a 1996 essay in Life magazine that he first wrote about her birth in 1984 and the "frightful feelings" he had for her on learning she would forever be considered "special."
His struggles led him to the nonprofit art center, a remarkable oasis where, unlike in the outside world, people with disabilities -- youth and adults -- can unleash rich creative energies that, for some, had been buried by years of institutionalization.
At first, however, Borensztein found it difficult to be there, and often came home exhausted and depressed.
"It wasn't their problem, it was mine," he says.
He kept going back and eventually, something shifted as he watched the artists' extraordinary talent unfold.
"... how beautiful are the delicate lines emerging from under the stiff, inflexible, feeble, often distorted fingers!"
Admiration and friendship followed.
"It was here at the center I learned to stop feeling sorry for myself," he writes.
The challenges of photographing the artists also subsided, as Borensztein settled into being "positively objective, not hiding their disabilities but not accentuating them either."
Borensztein's images reflect the rich complexity of their worlds.
"Some of them are difficult to look at," says Tom di Maria, executive director of the center. "While there's vibrancy and people's tenacity to survive, there's sadness, too."