Defining Power

A review of John Zeuli's "Women of Power"
By Allison Bennett

John Zeuli’s new photography exhibit “Women of Power” attempts to harness and explain the power behind the woman in each portrait. Though his work is technically proficient, there is nothing overly compelling to draw the viewer in.
Zeuli is somewhat a formulaic photographer. You can expect his photographs to be in black and white, and to be portraits of people that are supposed to inspire and tug at the heart strings of the viewer. It works the first time or two you see images from his exhibit. But after that, the wonder of his style of photography has worn off considerably.
The women featured in “Women of Power” could also be the women featured in “Keepers of the Spirit” or “Relay for Life.” There is no specific thing in their portraits telling of what makes them powerful, other than that they’re female and most are looking directly at the camera.
Zeuli props his subjects in front of a black background, but I do not see a story there. If you’re going to strip out the background to provide some context of who your subjects are, then your portraits better be really good. And for me, they’re just not quite there. The poses sometimes seem awkward, while the rest just seem safe and bland. He uses a similar lighting set-up for most of the portraits as well, making it seem more like he just switched out subjects rather than he’s trying to tell stories.
In his press release, he describes his “compelling” portraits of “diverse” women to feature “women of extremely varied life experience, accomplishments, careers and age.” True, by looking at the portraits I can see who is young and who is old, who is black and who is white, who is handicapped and who probably has a good job with a decent income. But that does nothing to tell me why they are powerful, why they should inspire me.
On his Web site (www.johnzeuliphotography.com), Zeuli includes quotes about power from the subjects. However, he doesn’t link them up to each portrait, so while I can learn what they collectively think about power, it still doesn’t define why each woman is powerful for me. He also strips each woman of her name, which is bothersome. He notes that he includes “women [who] society considers extremely powerful,” but I have a hard time recognizing any of them without their names displayed.
John Zeuli is good at what he does, and he does have a lot of admirers. And while I’m likely to flip through his images when he sends them to the newspaper, I’m not likely to study each portrait or visit his Web site to find out the backstory for the exhibit. I’m just not that interested.

John Zeuli’s black and white portraits in “Women of Power” are on view through the end of May at the Starfish Café, 719 E. Broad St.