August Sander
Almost as remarkable as the photos themselves is the fact that this is the first ever solo exhibit by August Sander in the United States (the revered German photographer died in 1964). And for this, my fellow Minnesotans, we must thank Mr. Weinstein--because, at least for a few weeks, you don't have to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a Sander print. You merely need to make your way to Weinstein Gallery on West 46th Street (there is always parking right in front) and push open the door. Most likely, you'll be alone in the space and surrounded by the paper-people who Sander, so many years ago, labored to see "as they are and not as they should or could be." You've got until April 12th friends. It's always free. Don't miss this one.
Citipages
We didn't, and we were alone. That makes it even more affecting. The most incredible thing was Sander's Christmas card from 1939, the centennial of photography.
Posted by Jeff at March 13, 2008 5:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Poverty Chic
Page from Children of the Poor (1892) via Google Book Search
What would it have been like to see the photograph called “I Scrubs” — Riis’s portrait of 9-year-old Katie, who kept house for her brothers and sisters — and know that she was living somewhere in the city, her life shrunken to little more than a sense of economic duty?
There is nothing that we in the 21st century can do for Katie except to wonder whether she was ever allowed to outgrow her premature elderliness. But to Riis’s audience, Katie was the living present, the very burden of their concern. What was she like? How did she sound? What could it mean to be 9 years old and so ancient already? These are questions it would have seemed natural to ask the photographer who had asked Katie to pose for him.
To us, of course, Riis’s showmanship would have seemed like intolerable distractions from the purity of the suffering his images convey. The last thing these photographs need, from the modern point of view, is an interlocutor, especially one who wants to tell moralizing anecdotes or characterize his subjects by race.
From the distance of 120 years, the mute testimony of Riis’s photographs seems eloquent enough. We stare at them and know that though times may have changed in Mulberry Bend, the camera does not have far to look to find suffering that is every bit as dire.
NYT Editorial
There is no mention of any sort of exigence for this odd editorial pronouncement. I find it particularly interesting because there are no illustrations for the article. The images are so pure (not re-engraved as book illustrations, nor hand-colored as website widgets as found here) that they are invisible to the general public. They only exist in the minds of the hyper-educated NYT reader who has of course seen this somewhat obscure image from Riis's second book that has been out of print since 1892, reprinted as an aesthetic museum piece. Of course the presence of the image as a component of an argument against poverty taints it as "mere rhetoric."
Posted by Jeff at February 12, 2008 11:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
How do you know?
Photograph by Eddie Adams, February 1, 1968Eddie Adams offers his thoughts about the image.
The Axis of Evel Knievel reminded me.
Posted by Jeff at February 1, 2008 5:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Festive
Happy holidays
Posted by Jeff at November 22, 2007 10:52 AM | Comments (1)
Grammar Cop?
[Suffragette posed in police uniform to illustrate woman police concept, Cincinnati, Ohio], LC-USZ62-101578Thanks is due to Cara F. for pointing out the George Grantham Bain Collection.
Posted by Jeff at September 3, 2007 12:35 PM
The Centenary of Photography
The Academy, invited to take part in this ceremony marking the centenary of a truly French invention, indeed one of the most admirable to emerge in the course of the nineteenth century, could not fail to pay its own respects tour great compatriots who hit on the principle of photography and were the first to fix an image of visible objects by employing the very light those objects reflect.
We, however, are a Society devoted particularly to the cult of Letters, which at first glance show no obvious affinity to photography, nor do they appear to be more affected by it in spirit or practice than by many other products of human ingenuity.
We all know that drawing, painting, and the imitative arts as a who were able to exploit this power of a sensitized plate to capture forms instantaneously. Directly the process of fixation made it possible to study, at one’s leisure, beings in motion, a great many errors of observation came to light: the renderings of certain artist, persuaded that they had caught a horse’s gallop or a bird’s flight, were proved, but this means, to be utterly fanciful. Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see, and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
Yet, this possession of the means of reproducing natural and living appearances through a simple transformation of physical energy seems to have had no certain effect on Letters nor to offer them any marked advantage.
Posted by Jeff at August 22, 2007 1:28 PM
Holgrave the Daguerreotypist on Historical Consciousness
“Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?” cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of the previous conversation. “It lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of an old dead giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle you what slaves we are to Death, if we give the matter the right word!”
“But I do not see it,” observed Phoebe.
Posted by Jeff at August 16, 2007 11:26 AM
Wall Street
The Wall Street Alley, Bakersfield, CA, c.1987
I was racking my brain trying to remember the name of the Californian photographer who Slim hired to do the cover for “Here Comes a Lily.” It was Ed Homich. Thanks to the Californian for digging through their file; they published several other images from that shoot. The Californian has done a remarkable job of printing facts rather than hearsay about Slim. The article by Robert Price will probably expire soon, so if you’re at all curious I’d read it now. It cuts through the melodrama to more tangible facts. It was a good memory jog. I forgot that Phil Lutrell gave Scott the name “Slim DeWayne”—I went to Foothill High with Phil, and later worked with him at Sun Stereo. Price implies that Phil was the source of the Hank Williams allusion. Not as I recall; that was Scott’s own modification of the gift, dropping the “DeWayne” in favor of “the Drifter.”
I didn’t know Ed Homich, but I remember that when he put his Leica M6 up for sale other photographers from the Californian warned me against buying it—“Ed just drags his cameras on the strap behind him.” It’s strange the things you remember; I couldn’t remember his name, but I’ve got a picture of him shooting pictures around here somewhere…
It’s also strange what you can find around here. I was looking at the Half-Price Books on Ford Parkway and ran across Bakersfield Picture Album compiled by Chris Brewer and Don Pipkin in 1986 from various sources. There were a few interesting shots there; including some of the infamous Wall Street Alley.
Posted by Jeff at June 27, 2007 11:41 AM | Comments (3)
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