Two-fers: At the Addison Gallery, pairs populate the pictures

While two shots aren’t uncommon in photography, they’re nowhere near as common as portraits or still lifes or landscapes

By Mark Feeney Globe Staff,Updated April 2, 2025, 6:47 a.m.

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John Goodman, "Tremont St. #4 / Combat Zone," 1978.Addison

ANDOVER — In the movies, it’s called a “two shot.” That’s when a pair of people share the screen. They might be talking or fighting or kissing or even ignoring each other (possibly the most revealing activity of all). In terms of camera grammar, what matters isn’t what they’re doing but that there are two of them doing it.

“Dynamic Duos” is all about two shots. It runs through July 31 at the Addison Gallery of American Art. So do “On and Off Stage: Performance and Persona” and “Playing to Our Strengths: Highlights from the Permanent Collection. “Duos” was curated by Addison director Allison Kemmerer.

While two shots aren’t uncommon in photography, they’re nowhere near as common as, say, portraits or still lifes or landscapes. Street photography, which is the medium at its most distinctive — and maybe distinctively photographic — might just as well be called crowd photography. As it happens, among those with work in the show is the king of street photographers, Garry Winogrand. That’s an instance of how often, and happily, “Dynamic Duos” defeats expectations. Other notable names include Weegee (as you might expect, there’s criminality involved), Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and Diane Arbus. Her famous image of identical twins is in the show. It inspired those ghostly sisters in “The Shining,” speaking of movie two shots.

There’s also the most consequential photographic name of all: Anonymous. A display case contains a selection of nearly 100 snapshots and postcards They’re a show unto themselves: black-and-white and color; most posed, but not all. There are photo-booth shots, a heart-shaped picture, another with the face of the woman in it torn out. (Absence does not make the two shot grow fonder.) A few are even pretty high concept, such as Richard and Pat Nixon being seen on a television screen.

Populating “Dynamic Duos” are siblings, parents, parent and child, perfect strangers — imperfect strangers, too — and couples. Some of those, like the Nixons, are husband and wife. The body language in Hans Namuth’s joint portrait of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner doesn’t exactly need a marriage counselor to interpret it. (Talk about people in a two shot ignoring each other!) The then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman don’t seem all that much more simpatico in Jonathan Becker’s shot of them at the 2000 Vanity Fair Oscar party.

A wall text quotes Louisa May Alcott: “It takes two flints to make a fire.” Or make a fight, as when Neil Leifer captured one of the most electric images of the 20th century. Since the dominant figure in it is one of the century’s most electric personalities, Muhammad Ali (or, as he then was, Cassius Clay), it’s easy to overlook that it’s a two shot. The reason Ali stands exultant in triumph is that Sonny Liston lies on the canvas before him, the embodiment of anti-triumph.

Ali dominates that image. With others, both people do. In Stephen Shames’s “Eldridge Cleaver Speaks at Berkeley Campus Rally,” the Black Panther leader’s face, and that of his wife, Kathleen, standing behind him, fill so much of the frame the upper portion of his head and the lower portion of hers are cut off. Sometimes there are no faces at all, as in John Goodman’s “Tremont St. #4/Combat Zone,” from 1978. Or there’s Nicholas Nixon’s untitled photograph from 1986, showing his own bare chest and a baby fist.

Sometimes a photograph requires a second look to realize it has two people in it. The viewer is meant to barely notice the woman and man in Julius Shulman’s “Case Study House #21 (Hifi), Los Angeles, CA.” It’s the space and décor that matter. The people are just flesh-and-blood furnishings. The photograph’s inclusion here turns its visual priorities, if not inside out — we’re still within the house, after all — then definitely upside down.

“Dynamic Duos” offers an unusual, frequently surprising, and often fun way to look at photographs. One form the fun takes is that the figures within the frame aren’t always people. Grouped in a side gallery are photographs of person and animal — who knew that Iggy Pop owned a dog? — or animal and animal. Back in the main gallery, one creaturely pair doesn’t consist of animals, human or otherwise. Alec Soth’s “Two Towels” is enchanting as its deadpan title would never indicate. Arranged on a Niagara Falls motel bed, the towels have been folded to look like swans — and the space between them resembles the shape of a heart.

“On and Off Stage,” which the Addison’s Rachel Vogel curated, is a sort of duo show, too. Half is devoted to representations of performers. That’s the “performance” part of the subtitle. Half is devoted to the sort of performing we all do in daily life, whether consciously or not, or artists aping that performing. That’s the “persona” part of the subtitle.

“On” comprises photographs, prints, drawings, and paintings — of dancers, acrobats, tumblers, and circus performers, as in George Bellows’s 1912 canvas “The Circus.” A wall of photographs of dancers by Barbara Morgan, Philippe Halsman, and George Platt Lynes is (with apologies to Sonny Liston) a real knockout.

“Off” is mostly photographs, with some vintage postcards and a couple of videos. There is both performing as practiced by civilians (as it were), such as the two girls with dolls in Sally Mann’s “New Mothers”; and artists being performative as part of their aesthetic enterprise. The most striking example would be 15 Cindy Sherman photographs from her “Murder Mystery People” series, with Sherman as all of the people. She began the project in 1976, just out of college. It’s like an out-of-town tryout for her epic “Untitled Film Stills.”

“Playing to Our Strengths” is the first in a planned series highlighting the Addison’s holdings. The museum’s Gordon Wilkins curated. As a title, “Our Strengths” may sound a bit braggy. Actually, it’s simple statement of fact. One of the three galleries the show takes up is all Eakinses and Homers. The next focuses on Modernist painters from the interwar years: Davis, Dove, Hartley, Hopper, O’Keeffe, Sheeler, you know, names like that. The final gallery has work from Color Field painters and abstractionists: Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons.

Like “Strengths,” “Dynamic Duos” and “On and Off Stage” are drawn from the Addison’s permanent collection. The excellence of all three shows, as one might infer, testifies to the quality of that collection. Even if it charged admission, which it doesn’t, the Addison would be as good a museumgoing bargain as there is in New England. And that’s not even counting the traveling June Leaf retrospective, which is also up through July 31. As Spencer Tracy says in “Pat and Mike” (a movie with lots of two shots), “what’s there is cherce.”

DYNAMIC DUOS

ON AND OFF STAGE: Performance and Persona

PLAYING TO OUR STRENGTHS: Highlights from the Permanent Collection

At Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 3 Chapel Ave., Andover, through July 31. 978-749-4015, addison.andover.edu

Drawn from the Addison Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition explores the dynamics of two beings sharing space. Whether they be romantic partners, family members, close friends, rivals, strangers, or interspecies companions, the joining of two creates an inevitable charge. This spark can manifest in many forms: a shared laugh between friends, the electric tension of rivals, the sudden eruption of violence among antagonists, a wary glance exchanged by strangers, or even the mysterious interpersonal interactions generated by staged scenarios. Each encounter is laden with unspoken narratives, as body language, facial expressions, and subtle social and psychological cues convey a world of emotions, thoughts, and stories.

Photographs of these paired encounters—these instants of intersection—serve as powerful windows into narratives of shared experiences. Captured in a flash, they freeze time and encapsulate the essence of that conjoined moment. Each image invites viewers to delve deeper into the stories behind the expressions—legible and illegible, ingenuous and masked—prompting questions about the relationship, the context of the encounter, and the emotions at play. They remind us that behind every interaction—whether planned and momentous or seemingly random and negligible—lie myriad stories waiting to be explored, ultimately weaving a larger narrative of connection that transcends any single interaction of two bodies.