A Few Shots at the Bar

Go to a bar for an art show? Sounds weird, but I think it's a great idea.

Let's face it, I've seen a lot of stuff in shows that would be easier to take if you were looped a bit. (In fact, I've seen stuff at, say, the Bemis Underground that wouldn't have been palatable on anything short of a full-on bender.)

And why settle for sipping vin du carton at the typical gallery opening, when instead you could be knocking back hard stuff mixed by professionals?

So it made perfect sense to me that Thursday evening I was heading for the Nomad Lounge to check out photographs by Tony Bonacci, an Omaha-based shooter who specializes in photos of musicians. (Don't get too excited by the link to his website, by the way – a lot of the dynamic stuff doesn't seem to work yet, and most of the rest is still "coming soon." But you can see some examples on his MySpace page.)

Even though it seems to be a pretty artsy joint, I've never been the Nomad type; it bills itself as an "ultra lounge," and my tastes in lounging run more toward infra than ultra. In fact, the only thing that's ever tempted me to visit until now was the fact that The Fabulous Kelly O'Donnell used to be a cocktail waitress there.

And I've got to admit that the pix on Bonacci's invitation weren't exactly an inducement. Taxonomically speaking, photographs of local rock bands seem to fall into a narrowly-defined phenotype, which is BS-ese for "any one of 'em looks a lot like any other."

I mean, you gather your aspiring young artistes of rock, have them put on their weirdest thrift-store clothes, find a funkily decayed building for a backdrop, stick a wide-angle lens on your camera so everything looks like it's falling over backward, and then have the subjects glare angstfully while you snap away. So does everybody. I hear next year Samsung is going to come out with a phone cam that's programmed to do all that automatically.

But once I actually got to the Nomad – and got over my lingering regret that The F. K. O'D. isn't there anymore – I took a look at the actual show, and guess what? I liked it.

The refreshing thing about Bonacci is that when it comes to the time-honored, Ansel Adams-inspired craft of fine photography, he basically doesn't seem to give a crap. He pushes the envelope. His prints have a garish, bleached-out, acid-dipped tonal range that looks as if they had been shot through a hangover filter.

This up-yours approach to technique doesn't do much for the few black-and-white images in the show: they just look muddy.

But most of the prints are in color, and their raw energy is exhilarating. And while it would be easy to push the I-don't-care schtick too far and just start spewing out garbage, Bonacci seems to have a finely calibrated sense of when enough is enough: he knows how to run right up to the redline without blowing the motor.

Bonacci's also pleasingly non-obvious about what he puts into his images. Yeah, the show includes a few of the standard-band-photo-cliché shots I slammed earlier, but most of it is 'way better. If his website's @#$% online portfolio worked, I'd link a few here.

Since it doesn't, just take my word for it: at his best (his portrait of porno-entrepreneur Doctor John holding a valentine box and grinning cherubically, for example) Bonacci's content has an impish sense of humor that plays off perfectly against his sicko color palette and edgy imaging style.

If you like contemporary photography at all – and even more if you dislike most of the tedious, joyless dreck that populates contemporary photography – it'll be worth your while to belly up to the Nomad and knock back a few of these shots.