Members Only 
These photographs are of interior spaces that define themselves as membership clubs.  
I started the Club series in 2003 in Australia, during an artist-in-residency at the Australian National University in Canberra. Meanwhile, I photographed private clubs in all over the world.

My interest in clubs was sparked by the attitude of Australians towards these entities – many of the citizens belong to at least one, but more commonly to several clubs. After my 4 months stay in Canberra I belonged to 4 clubs. Clubs appeared to be institutions of great significance within the social landscape. I never have been a big enthusiast of organized “togetherness”, which I always contributed to my upbringing in former East Germany, where a schedule of memberships was awaiting since the day one was born.

Thinking about the notions the concept club has to offer has been fascinating and extremely intriguing to me To me, Clubs are the nexus of homogeny and heterogeny. It is that space where “like” comes together and “unlike” stays apart. The club manifests the accomplishment of a unified “taste” a harmony, a bringing together of certain personal elements, which could, quite possibly otherwise have been kept apart. However, what remains apart is just as important as what comes together to constitute the club. That is, it is not only due to the nature of union that the club is defined and takes on a meaning but also due to the nature of exclusion. Exclusion becomes a main attribute of a club but more importantly it is what it excludes that becomes the defining characteristic of the club in question. All these notions have visual manifestations, which became the focus of this body of work.
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Members' Only - America by Madeline Yale Preston
Social space – how we sculpt it, utilize it, and interrelate within it – is the subject of artist Beatrix Reinhardt’s work. While conducting a residency in Australia, Reinhardt took an interest in the world of private clubs, sites where social networking occurred. The East Germany-born artist was struck by how common it was for many Australians to embrace these institutions, often belonging to several clubs at once. Within the club environs are physical remnants of events past: trophies, carpet worn in a particular fashion marking the flow of human traffic, stacked metal chairs, team posters. The physicality of such spaces suggests the importance of “togetherness” – social landscapes where commonalities such as values, hobbies, ethnicities, and heritage unite individuals in celebration.

Reinhardt’s project on view takes a new focus: American clubs. Now a resident of the United States, Reinhardt creates medium-format images of club interiors around the country which are devoid of people yet replete with human engagement. Decorative expressions of personality and organization reveal information about the people who interact within these spaces. In some cases, the objects in her landscapes suggest a nostalgic yearning for moments of historical significance.

Private social clubs in the United States are disappearing. The waning of American communal activities where individuals gather together for fun, camaraderie and recreation may best be summarized by “bowling alone”, a phrase popularized in 2000 by Robert Putnam in his namesake book. The decline of this kind of civic engagement likely reflects our increasingly chaotic social structure in which competition for individuals’ leisure time is at an all-time high. While Reinhardt’s work may point to a waning phenomenon, it coincides with the increased popularity of online communities. A relatively new permutation of the social club, online social networks bring forth new norms for civic engagement and are defined by very a different kind of physical space: one that is in large part, virtual.
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All photography works in the spaces between our mind’s eye and embodied social reality.  But as photography has become more self-aware, recognizing that it is situated within both art and documentation, it has learned to handle old chores in new ways.

           For those with a social conscience this repositioning is a problem because we no longer see merely through the photograph into the thing itself.  We also realize the photo is a framed entrance to such issues as absence, history, memory, even a melancholy yearning in equal proportions to the thing seen. Decisiveness is certainly not abandoned but it is no longer sufficient in a social world now understood globally through local conditions and without the easy solutions that marked past modernist assumptions.

           Beatrix Reinhardt speaks of a “purposeful displacement” in reference to her work. Certainly her biography—born in Russia, raised in East Germany, then moving to the USA—qualifies her as a global nomad, whose geographical site of identity is located in no particular place. Much of globalism argues that meaning and identity emerge from motion rather than location.  True perhaps, in part, but such claims can appear too disembodied, too removed for those, like Reinhardt, who focus on the local human condition. Hers is not the position of a global tourist stationed on the outside wistfully looking in, but rather is an extension of her attempts to participate within communities.

           Her photographs record the physical meeting places of social clubs in which she frequently or variously resides or participates for a period of time.  Visitor? Perhaps. But a club is a group of people who have diverse interests yet agree or need to come together occasionally to share common fragments of desire. No one pretends that momentary social interactions construct the wholeness of life, but they do construct valuable parts—and these are the heart of Reinhardt’s photo journey.  The photographic correlation to these realizations is the action shot, but Reinhardt chooses the documentary precisely to raise the question of photography’s relation to its own genres.

               Her works look vacant, static, and powerfully formal in their point of view, like those of a portrait photographer who showed up late to the gathering. But look again. Formalism is used to signify, not represent, the scenes which are moments after something has happened. On a primary level she assumes we are attentive observers able to locate evidence of presence; traces remain.   The lights are still on, ashtrays remain unemptied, dirty footprints from use mar prior clean environments.   Yes, you did just miss it, but it was there.

           Time is layered, and reality unstacked as we, like her, pull it back through the details, our embodied eyes slowly moving through the room.  These shots and scenes don’t contain the seamlessness of a document, although at first view they seem to.  Therein lay the tension.  There is an apparent self-conscious struggle contained under the strongly posed certitude in order to theorize the concept of a document.  The social resonance creates a purposeful tension against the constraints imposed by the strong frontality, formalism, and purposeful lack of people.

           As John Berger, the British critic, famously argued, what is important in a photograph is not in a photograph.  The formalism and Reinhardt’s concentration on objects tells us she negotiates the various realms of modernism, social connections and postmodern theory. It’s not objectivity the documents are after, but rather a document of presence through absence.  What at first seem like vacant settings are testimonies to the inadequacy of photographs as documents to claim the capture of reality. No system of representation, as the social documentarian Martha Rosler argued, can adequately represent what is real. Indeed, the very nature of the real has come into question and reformulation due to realizations over the imperfections within ourselves, at work in opposition to our very strong drive to construct a totality. It’s not our lives that are at question here; it is how we conceive our social life, in whole or in part, and photography’s relation to it.  The apparent transparency of a photograph as document—its function as a delivery system into reality—is not recoverable. Other pathways are needed.

Richard Leslie 

Richard Leslie is an independent art historian, critic, and curator specializing in contemporary art, theory, criticism, and photography. He is a visiting assistant professor in art history at the State University of New York at Stoneybrook.