Close Readings

Sun Bathers

2010-03-10T02:47:22Z

Miroslav Tichy, "Untitled."More from ICP this week: going to see the Atgets (below) and the surrealist visions of Paris, which were the star attractions there, I stumbled on this work by Miroslav Tichy. The Czechoslovakian Tichy, who is mostly unknown here in the U.S., has been photographing his small village for decades and produces striking, seemingly "artless" images like the one here. Of course there is "art" all over it, as the proximity of the surrealist work makes especially clear. But Tichy is an original too. Using handmade cameras and documenting his own community, he finds his own inspirations, from girls in bathing suits to couples on park benches. His surreptitious style means we see many retreating figures, and few people meet our gaze or his. If he implicates us in his voyeurism he does so gently.

Tichy's world is small and self-contained. There are no broad vistas, no long shots. He uses found materials like cardboard and pieces of plastic, reinforcing the impression of eccentric "outsider" art. Many of his photographs are manipulated by hand: he draws on the prints or creates elaborate painted frames for them. This one is as haunting for the scratches and smears on the negative as for the ghostly figures. Like this one, the works seem spontaneous, intimate, and natural. But they also seem to refer to Man Ray's sun prints and Matisse's bathers. Are these women floating in science-fictional space or figures dancing on an Etruscan vase?

Atget's Ancien Regime

2010-02-27T18:59:02Z

"Hôtel de Marquis de Chantosme, 6 rue de Tournon," 1900 (Printed 1900-1927), International Center for Photography.You may recognize this elegant photograph as one of Eugene Atget's portraits of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Paris. Atget specialized in these still, pristine, balanced compositions of windows and doors, storefronts and cobblestones. Few people live in his Paris, though there is every sign of human civilization. An exhibit at the International Center for Photography, entitled "Atget: Archivist of Paris" gets at this quality: his documentation of lonely urban landscapes at a particular turning point in history. On display until May 9, it puts Atget's clear, dispassionate eye on view.

What I like about this image, taken in 1900, is its strange perspective, where the courtyard doesn't square up and the corners aren't quite symmetrical. Atget positioned himself so far off center that the near wall seems squeezed unnaturally into the frame. As a demonstration of three-dimensionality it may fail: the left side of the image is much flatter than the right side. But it succeeds beautifully as a haunting shadow of a long-gone world, now preserved in shades of brown.

Opening Doors

2010-02-22T15:06:25Z

Browsing photograph archives in search of an image for this week, this early print struck me. Or rather, itsWilliam Henry Fox Talbot, "The Footman," 1840 caption struck me: "The Footman. The earliest photograph of a human figure on paper by William Henry Fox Talbot." Though Fox Talbot is known for his pioneer photographs of his home, Lacock Abbey, and solar prints of flowers and leaves, it is curious that his first known attempt at a portrait was of a servant. Here the man is almost an accessory to the carriage, which is centered in the frame. But the footman does return our gaze and cooperatively performs his role, holding open the door for us, his masters. For that is what this photograph seems to reveal to me (apart from the interior of the carriage). It seems to start a tradition, now well precedented, of power relations between photographer and subject. This image seems to document a certain conversation: "Stand still for me. I will tell you what to do. I will place you next to other symbols of my wealth and status." Dressed in his working-class identity, patiently holding the door open, the nameless footman waits on us. Fox Talbot was an upper-class landowner and his photographs fall into an established artistic tradition of documenting the property and collectibles of the wealthy. But photography has maintained some of that loaded interaction between portraitist and subject: even now it whispers, "stand still. I will make you into a miniature object to be pasted into an album. I will immortalize you, but you will always be at my mercy...."

If there is a "punctum" (as Roland Barthes described) in this photograph it is that open door, which exposes the reality of the photograph in perspectival vision. The gaze retreating into the two-dimensional paper guarantees the verisimilitude, the life-likeness of the image. Interestingly, Fox Talbot later made another photograph called "The Open Door," which he included in his pioneer photography collection The Pencil of Nature (1844). It is the door opening to a new way of seeing, a new kind of art.

Rock of Ages

2010-02-12T23:19:34Z

I've made this photograph as large as possible on purpose: to approximate its impact. And also, perhaps, to play again with scale, which the photographer Edward Burtynsky manipulates here too. This is one of his "manufactured landscapes," to quote the title of Jennifer Baichwal's documentary about his work. Burtynsky is best known for documenting the human impact on nature, at oil rigs, cement pits, mines, and, here, a marble quarry in Italy. Despite the apparent social critique, the photograph remains beautiful. The red stripe of rubble running down the slope, the valleys and cliffs of the monumental stone, the abstract composition in gray, green, and pink are all lovely to look at. Though we know it is rock, the marble has a kind of flow that is reminiscent of a wave and Burtynsky makes use of that in this vertical slice of mountain. Of course this is an ugly industry and of course this force of nature is ravaged, but the quarry also creates beauty: the beauty of a statue by Michelangelo and the beauty of a photography by Burtynsky.

Eyeless

2010-02-10T02:59:05Z

We've been looking at iconic female photographers (Arbus, Sherman) in class and it seems time to turn to Sally Mann. Yet I feel tired of the standard questions about her family photographs. That's their business. Browsing, however, I came across this self-portrait that astonished me. I am familiar with Mann's wet collodion work, images she prints on large glass plates using the same early photographic techniques as Julia Margaret Cameron. But here was a photograph both like and unlike Cameron's work: characteristically blurry and close-up, but also more obviously eerie and stark than Cameron's portraits, despite the deep black backgrounds. The face is carved by light and looks up as if to the heavens. The eyes, though, are blank: white space where the self should be. That absence seems critical: where is the photographer's eye here? Where is her private self? She displays her face as mask, her hand on the glass. The self-portrait would seem to be an egoist's genre, but Mann avoids giving much away besides form and shadow. It is image as revelation, a new way to see and be seen.

Moon Memory

2010-02-02T20:51:02Z

Vik Muniz, "Memory Rendering of Man on the Moon," (1990)In class this week we're looking at originals and copies. Today we listened to songs that my students suggested alongside their cover versions. One student said that one difference between the two versions was always one's own associations with each. That is, memories can get in the way of a "pure" experience.

Here, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz interrogates the original and the copy from the opposite direction. What if we made art from what we remembered instead of treating the memory as an aside or a distraction from the "real thing"? In this series Muniz drew what he remembered of iconic images (here, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon) without reference to the original photograph. He then photographed his drawing and printed it as a halftone (as newspapers do). The result is a highly mediated image that makes us question each stage of its artistic process: mind, hand, film, print. Where is Neil Armstrong in this? In our collective memory, from which Muniz retrieves him in a uniquely personal way. This memory is both a shared tradition and Muniz's own vision. His art then connects the two.

But what intrigues me most about this image is its formal reversals. The white shape on the black background is already commenting on our assumption that we make art by putting marks on a white background or blank canvas. Instead of the black print on white screen you are looking at now, Muniz gives us white-on-black and an abstract, faceless rendering of the artist/human. It's alien in the best sense.

Fifty Years Ago

2010-01-26T01:05:27Z

William Claxton, from Jazzlife (1960)In 1960 photographer William Claxton accompanied German musicologist Joachim Berendt on a tour of the jazz hotspots of America. The result was their collaboration on Jazzlife, an illustrated catalogue of known and unknown jazz musicians in their own homes and clubs and streets, playing and picnicking. Many of the images, like this one, convey the mood of jazz as much as its people and places. Jazz juxtaposes symmetry and asymmetry, complexity and simplicity. Here the photograph is centered on the fake musicians on the billboard who pretend to perform for us. Yet the white car rushes by, without pause. Claxton, not yet famous for his portraits of Chet Baker and other stars, makes us see the ironies in the layered image, but gently. Maybe there's some metaphor here about rural America, its contradictory representations, and the importance of paying attention to them, but that's less important than the constants we see everywhere: a few straight white lines, a flat land, and a road going somewhere. This image is still, soundless, and deceptively simple. That billboard may still be there; that blurred car is still in motion, fifty years later.

Central Pastoral

2010-01-19T00:55:45Z

Bruce Davidson, Central Park, 1992.The pastoral is an underappreciated genre. I love this photograph by Bruce Davidson, one of a series he made of Central Park. In text and image the pastoral relies on harmony and balance. Here the reflecting lake provides a natural reason for that balance. It fills the center of the composition and it creates symmetry through mirroring, particularly of the bridge. Look at the reflected buildings: the line of symmetry divides the photograph roughly in half horizontally. But in the meantime there is that overarching tree in the foreground...and those two towers interrupting the horizon in the background. The textures are artful too, combining delicate foliage, glassy surface, and the solid constructions that signal the city is near. And then there is the play of light and dark that culminates in the dark tree at one pole and the pale bridge on the other.

Balance, then, is key, especially here in this idyll in the center of a busy city. You can envision a movie camera pulling back from above, until the park is a tiny dot in the middle of an abstract canvas -- much like the mysterious, dark, still boat adrift in this lake, which is the only hint here of a story.

Baby/Face

2010-01-11T23:59:38Z

As I was prepping for my spring semester teaching film students I read an article by Judith Butler on the Diane Arbus retrospective, "Revelations," that toured the country in 2005. I was impressed by Butler's ability to shift between describing the images and advancing an idea about them (not an easy task, as my students could tell you). This image was included as an example of one of many Arbus shot of subjects with their eyes closed. It stuck with me.

The photograph is all Arbus: the mingling of human and inhuman, the lack of sentimentality.... But the image is also surprisingly formal, emphasizing the curves of nose and lips. The pallor of the face bleeds into the background (or is it vice versa?) This sameness shows off difference: the subtle texture of the cloth under the chin and the strange pose that pushes the baby's face back and away from us. Yet the face still fills the frame, pushing against it, round against square. Butler argues that Arbus's subjects resist the camera: "the figures present an obdurate surface, one that cannot be entered or known." The push and pull in this baby's presentation demonstrate that quality of Arbus's work: the invitation and the recoil.

Then the really weird part, that Arbus could never have foreseen: according to a website that quotes Patricia Bosworth's biography of Arbus, this baby is Anderson Cooper.

The Whiteness of the Snow

2010-01-02T23:35:10Z

Ray Atkeson, Timberline Lodge, 1945Back from Portland, where it snowed, to Brooklyn, where it is snowing. As the snow comes down it is light and lovely. It rests gently on the ground and muffles the city streets. It is briefly magical -- until the traffic starts up again. In Portland it was treacherous from the start, as cars slid across streets in front of us, and wheels churned on hills. Ray Atkeson's 1945 photograph of Mount Hood reflects both of these qualities. The whiteness of the snow is soft and clean and inviting, but those looming trees hover like gargoyles over the scene. The shadows are long and the sky is darkening. Suddenly winter is the season of nightmarish fairytales, and the historic Timberline lodge, pictured here in the background, is an ominous gingerbread house. No surprise that it was used for the external shots of the lodge in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. This is a landscape at once alluring and terrifying.