Thomas Struth: Striving for the big picture

Review by Tim Connor

As a photography student at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1970s, Thomas Struth learned to create big, highly detailed pictures with his classmates – now photographic luminaries -- Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida Hofer. At the time their teachers, the legendary husband-wife team, Bernd and Hilla Becher, taught a technically rigorous system to “objectively” document disappearing German architecture. According to the Becher system, subjects must be captured serially with a large-format camera using black-and-white film under a cloudless sky. All subjects must be shot from uniform distances and heights, printed with medium contrast at a prescribed size and shown together to facilitate comparison.

In his current show at the Met we see Struth’s homage to this exacting style -- a wall-sized grid of black-and-white prints showing well-known New York City intersections in 1978. Older New Yorkers may treasure or rue these pictures as memories, but the more salient point is that, soon enough, nobody will be alive to remember them. Still, there is much to admire in the way the pictures treat, not only the streets and buildings , but everything -- every parked car, overloaded trash can and  random walking-through-the-shot human -- with exactly the same crisp, non-judgmental clarity.


"Crosby Street, Soho, 1978," Thomas Struth, All rights reserved
This is Struth’s first major project.  Afterward, his career moves on fast. Without abandoning the discipline and technique he has acquired from the Bechers, he begins to take on large ideas and issues. It is his willingness to do so that animates this show.

In the 80s Struth continues to shoot architecture and landscapes.  Like his schoolmate Gursky, he takes up color and begins to use photoshop to assemble from multiple viewpoints single images of large locations and structures. But, unlike Gursky, who over the years steadily creates more and more gigantic prints of larger and larger events, (the Chicago Board of Trade, the Olympics)  Struth’s big pictures seem uninterested in spectacle. Gursky wins worldwide acclaim by moving farther and farther away from what he photographs. Struth moves closer. His pictures, though still large and complex, become more and more about the people present or implied within the frame.  They radiate emotion that can be felt by anyone.

These qualities are best seen in the pictures the Met has collected from Struth’s three ongoing series – roughly titled, “Museum,” “Paradise” and “Technology.”

Struth’s “Museum” series comes from a simple idea. He photographs people looking at art and history in museums all over the world. Strictly realistic, rendered in sumptuous colors, these large, calm compositions at times resemble the Old Master paintings that appear in many of the prints. Yet the unrehearsed modern tourist crowds are always there too. Some museum-goers are reverent. Some are playing with their iphones and thinking about their lunch. They bring a  here-and-now immediacy to pictures meant to last. 

"Art Institute of Chicago,1990," Thomas Struth, All rights reserved

"Museo Del Prado 7, 2005," Thomas Struth, All rights reserved

The balance between large ideas – the present and the past, the material and the spiritual, for example – makes me wonder if Struth is aiming for the cusp between them? Or do his museum pictures – like many of the old religion-based paintings depicted within them –incline toward moral lessons? If so, the messages are hard to recognize, extremely subtle. Yet the question continues to rise.

Asked about the Museum series, Struth said “… the ineffable spills into the ordinary and the spiritual aspirations of our ancestors intersect with the needs of the present.” It’s clear that with these works Struth is gesturing toward something beyond their quotidian content. In fact – like every artist -- he is imbuing lifeless materials with human energy. Where does that energy come from?

We get to decide for ourselves.

One thing I think we know.  In the Museum series the goal of this energy is no longer the same as it is in the old paintings. Unlike the paintings, the energy of the photographs is not directed at individual salvation.  We might think of its heaven as salvation for all.

"Art Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples, Italy, 1988," Thomas Struth

I think this becomes clear in Struth’s Paradise series. Photographed at ground level in various rainforests in Japan, Australia and South America, all the images in the series are called “paradise” and numbered.  Only one, “Paradise 13, Yakushima, Japan 1999,” is included in the show.  Yet, from this picture and others I have seen elsewhere, “paradise” seems a very odd title for Struth to have chosen.
“Paradise 13,” for example, is shot deep inside a low, wet, dark forest strewn with fallen trees and moss-covered boulders. It is certainly no Eden. Struth is well-known as an ardent environmentalist, and it’s hard to imagine him resorting to cheap irony. Some of the other forest “interiors” in this series are tangles of dazzling green, flooded with transforming light. They are beautiful to look at and, as we know, vital to the health of our planet.  But – come to think of it – real rainforests are always unrestrained riots of hungry competitive life. They are always difficult for humans. Struth is making a difficult point. Our human instinct is to transform them to meet our needs. But the Earth too needs salvation.

"Paradise 13," Thomas Struth

 "Paradise 9," Thomas Struth, All rights reserved

With the “Technology” series, Struth asks: Does the human genius for technology threaten our species? Does technology also offer hope? These too are ultimately spiritual questions.

 Struth’s “Hot Rolling Mill, Thysen Krupp Steel, Duisburg, 2010,” takes us into the silent interior of a gigantic industrial machine. By choosing an old German steel mill and associating it with the name Krupp, Struth is deliberately evoking Hitler’s Third Reich and the murderous weapons with which Germany came close to conquering the world. And the picture itself -- a vast brutal wall of machinery in semi-darkness, grime-encrusted, its khaki greens punctuated with the faded, reds and oranges of catwalks and cables -- is indeed terrifying. Even worse, a thick chain is bolted to the steel-plate floor in the only area lit by a window. It took bravery to make this picture. Struth knows exactly what he is alluding to. 

"Hot Rolling Mill, Thysen Krupp Steel, Duisburg, 2010," Thomas Struth

If “Hot Rolling Mill” balances past and present, the most astonishing picture in the Technology series presents itself literally as a fulcrum between present and future.   Called “Figure 2, Charite, 2013,” the picture shows a woman strapped to a medical gurney suspended in mid air. Looping in from piled machines and monitors are dozens of wires, tubes and cables, all of which attach to her body. At first, we recoil from the image. It seems to be a Frankenstein-like experiment or perhaps some hideous torture. Then we notice that the room is spotless, the light is clear and the woman is young and blonde with beautiful skin.  We are confused. What are we looking at?

"Figure 2, Charite, 2013," Thomas Struth, All rights reserved

It’s an operating theater in Berlin, where this anaesthesized young woman is about to undergo surgery to remove a brain tumor. With the woman’s full permission, Struth has photographed the moment before the doctors and nurses enter to begin. We learn in a caption that the woman survived and, two years, later is living comfortably. Still, we wouldn’t know that if we hadn’t been told. Is Struth intentionally frightening us with scary technology that is actually built and used to save lives?

I don’t think so. I think he is making full use of his freedom to challenge us.  Some things that at first seem repellent are beautiful. Struth’s mentors, the Bechers, photographed water towers, silos and blast furnaces they judged beautiful – and safe to photograph – in a defeated, divided Germany after a vicious war.  Now, more than a half century later, Struth again finds beauty in our still dangerous and increasingly complicated – but perhaps freer – world.  He makes big pictures for the world.

This review appears in The New York Photo Review

Critical mass: Writing something a lot of people are thinking

"New York World's Fair, 1964," Garry Winogrand, All rights reserved

To conclude his review of the Garry Winogrand show at the Met (editor's note: Winogrand's images are mostly unplanned shots of strangers going about their lives, like the example above), New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz wrote the following:

"Something we’ve been missing also becomes evident here. The whole world is now filled with incredible images—especially on Instagram and other social networks—that owe something to Winogrand’s, documenting life, change, and all the rest. Yet the art world and museums are not. Instead they tend to show oversize, very still pictures or images that investigate formal properties and ideas of display and presentation. I love many of those pictures, but what’s happening online on social media deserves far more serious scrutiny than it’s getting. If the art world doesn’t admit more of this sort of deceptively casual-seeming work, the outside world will reject more so-called art photography than it already does. That’s a divide that we don’t need to reestablish and widen."

About time.

Garry Winogrand: Mundane mysteries, clearly stated

"Six" by Garry Winogrand at Pace McGill Gallery

Review by Tim Connor


"El Morocco, New York City, 1969" by Garry Winogrand

Pace McGill’s Garry Winogrand show, “Six,” might be thought of as a kind of Cliff Notes for the full-dress Winogrand career retrospective running this summer at the Met.  At Pace McGill, Winogrand’s well-known prints are large and crisp, and the crowds are minimal, but how much, after all, can one learn from an outline? 

Six images have been chosen for each of six categories  -- Animals, Public Relations, Street, Women, Central Park and Texas.  Aside from providing the title for the show, this 6 X 6 arrangement seems arbitrary and unimaginative for work that openly – even ferociously -- eschews any kind of shot-list mentality or after-the-fact categorization.  But perhaps curation is beside the point. These are Winogrands, and Pace McGill wants to sell them (11” x 14” print prices range from $5,000 to $65,000 – most are around $10,000).

To me, those prices don’t seem terribly high in this crazy art market. After all, John Szarkowski, the great photographic critic and kingmaker of the 1960s and 70s called Winogrand “…the central photographer of his generation.”  To be fair, this was by no means a universal assessment at the time – nor is it today. But I agree with Szarkowski, at least to the extent that Winogrand personified, more than any of his contemporaries, a major attitudinal shift toward photography that is still underway.

"New York City couple"  by Garry Winogrand

Winogrand’s career developed within and against the ideas of an earlier generation of documentary and photojournalistic photographers who believed the best of their work could accurately describe social and historical truth and sometimes even change it. From Lewis Hines through W. Eugene Smith (and continuing today) their theory goes: shine a bright, public light on injustice, and you begin to attack and eliminate it.  This theory was underpinned by optimism. We are all humans with shared needs, problems and joys. And great photography proves it. This was the message of “Family of Man,” the legendary exhibit curated by Edward Steichen, mounted at MOMA in 1955, and then shown around the world.

In fact, Steichen selected two of  Winogrand’s pictures for “Family of Man.” But, from the beginning of his career, it was clear Winogrand was not that kind of photographer. His passion was for the photograph itself -- not for what it represented or could do. He was interested in human stories, but his stories resisted moral judgments.  They could be ambiguous. It was as though he invited viewers to provide their own captions. 

He went out in the morning to make great pictures but had no idea what they’d be. By way of journalistic intention, he followed his interests and obsessions. He went to places and events that he thought would serve him, then, instead of “covering,” them, reacted to whatever caught his attention. He felt no imperative to ask permission before or take moral responsibility after taking a shot. His frames were always sliced from reality, but they took no credit for being reality. Szarkowski called Winogrand’s images “figments of the real world.” First and last, they were pictures.

"Kennedy Space Center, Florida, 1969" by Garry Winogrand

Winogrand is famous for saying, “I photograph to see what something looks like photographed.” And he meant it. The idea was not to take sides or advance an agenda but to discover what his camera had seen. 

An example. Winogrand was against the Vietnam War. Yet his best-known shot of the protests, “Peace Demonstration, Central Park, 1970,” displayed in the exhibit’s Central Park section, shows a dark, gloomy day on Manhattan’s Great Lawn. In the foreground is a spindly, leafless tree. Around it and stretching to a horizon of East side buildings, a vast crowd of anti-war demonstrators sits or lies huddled on the cold ground. The sky above the protesters is thick with newly-released balloons that read as black in the black-and-white print. Perhaps the real balloons were red, not black, against the darkening sky that day. Or perhaps – let’s fantasize -- they were bombs falling. We really don’t know from the picture, just as we don’t know why the crowd is so passive about the spectacle

"Peace demonstration, Central Park, 1970" by Garry Winogrand

As viewers 44 years later, the scene frankly looks sinister, almost apocalyptic. It goes firmly against our received idea of what an anti-Vietnam War demonstration is supposed to look like. Winogrand’s “historical” pictures are often different in that way. 

He was in fact a kind of anti-historian. In a 1971 picture, again from the show’s “Central Park” section – and again in cold but snowless weather -- a classic “straight” family of tourists (short-haired father in double-breasted trench coat; wife with hair tied in a scarf; two boys wearing cheap street-bought cowboy hats) stand gazing over five long-haired hippies (hatless, moustached, shades) lounging on the frozen grass. What is the family looking at? Perhaps we're at the outskirts of another demonstration. Why do the hippies so studiously ignore the family? Why do they – the cool insiders -- appear so rattled?   Could it be that, “Somethin’s happenin here but you don’t know what it is…”?  Could it be that Mr. and Mrs  Jones and the kids don’t care?

"Central Park, 1971" by Garry Winogrand

Winogrand shot without thinking too much – more frames, more rolls, than any of his contemporaries.  Then he edited , selecting what he considered to be the best pictures, not the ones he thought would please. For instance, the disturbing “Easter Sunday, Central Park, 1971” shows three young people obviously tripping, surrounded  by a curious, not necessarily sympathetic  crowd. 

One man is completely naked. His hands are raised, as though he’s invoking the heavens. The other two, a man and a woman, look agitated. There is no caption describing this scene, but the paranoid-ecstatic, staring eyes of all three trippers -- as though they are seeing god and the devil at the same time – tell the tale. 

“Easter Sunday, Central Park, 1971” by Garry Winogrand

Yes, but why are we looking at this picture? It’s not an anti-drug ad.  It’s also not, in any coherent historical sense, about the event that surrounds it.  In the end it’s just a fascinating “figment” -- at a time when fervently confused religious seekers in New York City might find Easter Sunday an auspicious time to drop acid and attend demonstrations. I guess that’s history too.

Supposedly, Garry Winogrand fell apart as a photographer after he moved to Los Angeles late in life. He continued to shoot but stopped editing, finally even stopped processing his film.  After his death, no less a personage than his old friend and mentor Szarkowski examined the massive take he had left behind – reportedly as many as 300,000 unedited images – and pronounced them unremarkable. Since then, experts at the Met have taken another look and are including some of the unseen shots in their retrospective.

What’s the verdict? Did he lose it? Was he great till the end? I hope so, but it doesn't really matter. Garry Winogrand’s  open-minded, follow-your-instincts, shoot-what’s-there aesthetic recorded the American 60s and 70s like no one else. His example has become the working mode of many thousands of today's shooters – both pros and amateurs -- worldwide. I think it’s safe to say that, working the way he did,  these photographers intuitively understand Winogrand’s  enigmatic dictum: “Nothing is more mysterious than a fact clearly stated.”

This review also appears in the current issue of New York Photo Review.

To read more of my reviews of photography, other visual arts, books and movies, click here.

Truppe Fledermaus and the Carnival at the End of the World

"Greenman," Kahn and Selesnick, All rights reserved

“Truppe Fledermaus & the Carnival at the End of the World,” at Yancey Richardson, might be described as a performance of the imagination. Concocted by two English-born, U.S. educated artists, Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick , the show creates just enough semi-plausible historical authenticity to soften up viewers for the artists’ outlandish – but not impossible – vision of the future.

Kahn and Selesnick have collaborated before – for the past 20 years in fact – creating fictitious histories from both the past and future (on both Earth and other planets) that combine impeccable pseudo-erudition with no-limits weirdness. I have to admit I’ve never seen anything quite like this work. The artists’ mastery of photography, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and creative writing is matched only by their showmen’s fervor to wow their audience. In fact, trying to think of comparisons, I could only come up with the Monty Python Flying Circus –likewise fervently theatrical, over-educated, British and willing to try anything.

These guys are having fun.

"Der Letztze Mann," Kahn and Selesnick, All rights reserved

The world conjured by this show is framed by an invented traveling theater of hustlers, freaks and spiritualists called “Truppe Fledermaus” (Bat Troupe). Next to the gallery entrance, an entire wall  is covered with posters and handbills advertising the Truppe’s strange offerings.  Stylistically, these ads -- with copy in German – refer to everything from German Expressionist cinema  -- “Ich bin Nosferatu” (I am the Vampyre) -- to fanciful medical charts – “Tod Frucht” (Death Fruit) – to a colorful, full-figured nude woman covered with roses that suggests P.T. Barnum via Manet  -- “Das Tatowierte Wunder” (The Tattooed Wonder).  

I’m not entirely sure why these ads are funny, but they made me laugh.  The artists’ decision to use the German language is part of it.  If you’re a linguistically unsophisticated American (like most of us) try booming out “Ich bin Nosferatu!” over and over in a small room and you’ll know why. This prejudice is unfortunate and probably worse than that (I remember my parents telling me about neighbors who refused to take Hitler seriously because his speeches on the radio made them laugh). But, here, as elsewhere in the show, Kahn and Selsenick seem determined to go with their guts. Funny is funny. I’m sure John Cleese would approve.

"Demon man," Kahn and Selesnick, All rights reserved

In the room with the prints are a few sculptures – created, we are told, from “…ceramic, wax, Styrofoam, paint, plaster, glass antlers and silicone caterpillars.” Like the posters, the sculptures suggest a new world in which genetic boundaries are exotically shifting. For instance, a bust of a top-hatted man mounted on a tripod is densely covered with pitch black feathers, as though he is morphing toward a new consciousness as a crow. By now,  it’s clear this theme will repeat throughout the show. Still, with the tangible three-dimensionality of the sculptures, the idea gains a special kind of fetishistic power.  I’m guessing many people wouldn’t want this Crow Man to spend the night in their bedroom.

The remainder of the show (five walls out of six) consists of photographs. Taken in both black and white and color with an 8 X 10 view camera, many of these are aesthetically superb (Kahn and Selesnick studied photography together at Washington University). Their technical control makes them wonderfully incongruous with the subject matter, which is primitive and truly bizarre.  It’s not clear if the Truppe Fledermausers themselves are taking part in the activities or simply witnessing them. “At the end of the world” I’m not sure it matters.

Human populations have collapsed. Individuals and small groups of humans make their way on foot, by hand-drawn primitive wagons and carts or in rough canoes, through a bleak, boggy, apparently drowning world of rampant vegetation and mutant creatures.  When they gather in groups it seems to be for the purpose of creating strange tableux or engaging in wild revels of unclear purpose.

Nearly everyone wears a mask. From Hieronymous Bosch alone, the artists have stolen bird beaked, owl-eared and wide-eyed grinning demon masks. Furry bat (fledermaus) masks are also popular and, in a pinch, simple Ku Klux Klan-style bags with cut-out eyeholes, pulled down over the face, will do.

It’s a wild, wild world.

Climate change and rising sea levels are clearly the subtext here, although the artists’ invented future has little in common with what we might expect from a real post-warming planet. Instead of huge ruins and the ubiquitous trash of billions (whether or not killed off by plagues) -- we get deserted swamps, bogs, mudflats, dunes, beaches, rocky outlooks and placid bodies of water.

Apparently, we are returning forward to a world of harsh threats and magical remedies. In this world even the most basic technologies of the past have been erased.  In response Nature Herself seems to be trying something new. Parts are somehow being swapped among humans, other mammals, birds, fish and plants to produce bizarre human-other and other-other hybrids. Among the shambling-bramble-plant-human mixes alone, for example,  we see Yew Man, Lichen Man, Seaweed Man and the more generic Greenman, who starred in an earlier Kahn and Selesnick show, “The Pavilion of the Greenman,” in 1997.

All this may not convince as dystopia, but it thoroughly seduces as pure imagination.

"Lady with antlers," Kahn and Selesnick, All rights reserved

I’ll end this review by describing two favorite pictures. Both represent what to me made this show so unusual  --  its willingness to go anywhere imagination might take it. We get jokes and parodies, horror and tragedy, winks and warnings, all blended into visual stories that range from dadaesque to heartwarming.

One: A young woman in Victorian dress is running away, across a drab, wintry field, holding up her petticoats.  From her piled-up hair two giant antlers rise against the sky. I can feel this woman’s distress. Suddenly, I realize it’s Jane Eyre fleeing in tears from Mr. Rochester.  I become a cynical English Lord in love. My legs are twitching to follow.  

"Leaf man painting Leaf man," Kahn and Selesnick, All rights reserved

Two:  Next to a curving river, Leaf Man, the artist, sights over his brush at the plein air portrait of his friend and subject, another Leaf Man. The two Leaf Men appear to be having a jolly chat. What a pleasant way to make art, they are saying.

Long live art! How do you say that in German?

This review also appears in The New York Photo Review.

"Capa in Color"

Reviewed by Tim Connor


"British soldiers on troopship," 1941, Robert Capa, All rights reserved

Some years ago I decided Robert Capa was overrated. This was an unusual point of view. He was everybody’s mythic macho war photographer. It was Capa who gave out hard-boiled advice (it felt like bullying to me): “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not getting close enough.” It was his famous picture – shot from just yards away – that showed a Spanish Civil War soldier at the instant a bullet killed him. It was Capa who had carried his cameras through the surf with the first Americans to hit Omaha Beach on D Day.

A brave man, certainly. A man determined to bear witness. But what else drove him? From the 1930s to his death from a Viet Minh land mine in 1954, Capa showed us little besides war. In a particularly violent time that worshipped male heroes, he photographed five wars. He was finally killed in the last one. Still, I had my doubts. Maybe what drove Capa wasn’t true idealism, I thought. Maybe it was closer to what drives a big game hunter. Maybe his pictures were more like trophies than acts of witness. I stopped looking at his work.

"D Day, Omaha Beach," 1944, Robert Capa, All rights reserved

I think I was wrong about Robert Capa. The pictures at ICP’s “Capa in Color” exhibit reveal a man more complex and sympathetic –and more talented as a photographer — than my imagined war zone daredevil. And it’s not just because of the color. Around 1940, when Capa first started using Kodachrome slide film, it was still experimental. Processing required a top-secret formula available in just two Kodak labs worldwide. Always a pragmatist, Capa continued to shoot his stories in black and white. But if there was time – and a possible market––he began to back them up with color.

For a 1941 story in The Saturday Evening Post about a British troopship crossing the Atlantic on its way to the war in North Africa, Capa shot everything in both color and black and white. He may have hoped the somber tones of the early Kodachrome would enliven the stripped-down colors of the ship and cargo, designed to avoid detection by enemy planes. He may have planned to isolate the pallid skin tones and brown uniforms in the elegant group portraits he made of the British troops. In any case Capa’s color does something important for the story. It suggests the held-back energy of the enterprise. In Capa’s color, the ship and its men, hunkered down in defensive readiness, seem ready to explode. Kodachrome’s primitive rendering of minimal colors against murky browns and blacks deepens the feeling of tension and dread.

Later, traveling with American troops in Tunisia, Capa used color in a style more familiar to modern viewers. One picture shows soldiers grouped around a captured German tank, draped with a large red and black swastika flag. For the first time we see the force of Kodachrome’s signature red. The bright flag anchors the picture, ironically imbuing it with the high-key colorful optimism we will later see in millions of post-war family snapshots (today the look is back in fashion, available via one-click antique filters for Instagram).

"American soldiers posing with captured German tank," 1941, Robert Capa, All rights reserved

I should make it clear that many of the “Capa in Color” pictures are being shown at ICP for the first time. They never made it into the magazines. There was a catching-up-to-color lag after the war, some of it due to technical and logistical issues, but much of it because editors and publishers insisted on doing things the way they had always done them. Capa’s letters to these eminences, included in the show, reveal a witty and persuasive writer endlessly pitching ambitious story ideas, and mostly, it seems, being turned down. One understands why Capa, along with fellow photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour, created the Magnum Photo agency in 1947 to advocate for their ideas.

But after the war, even Magnum had trouble bucking the tide of American self-satisfaction. The show quotes a 1948 letter to Capa from Magnum President Maria Eisner. “We have to face the fact that in general our stories are too big, too serious, and even too good [for the magazines].”

"Pablo Picasso and his son Claude," 1948, Robert Capa, All rights reservedSo Capa struck out in a new direction. With the advent of Holiday, billed as “…a peacetime publication catering to an ideal of post-war American prosperity,” he shot profiles, mostly in color, of old friends from Paris like Ernest Hemingway (Capa seems to have had trouble catching Papa without a drink in his hand) and Pablo Picasso (radiant in his old age, basking in the beauty of his young wife and new son). This is fine work, and, for the first time, we see it as essentially color work. Color is now more than a novelty.

"Longchamps raceway," 1950s, Robert Capa, All rights reserved

I must confess my favorite color images from this show come at the end, after color film had developed a ripe palette for Capa to employ in the European spas, resorts, party towns and film sets Holiday sent him to in the 1950s. In places like Deauville, Biarritz and Rome he chronicled the pleasures of the rich, the beautiful and the lucky with smooth professional enthusiasm. Some histories say Capa did this work for the cash to keep Magnum going – which I don’t doubt – but there’s no denying his appreciation of the good food and drink, the styles and, especially, the beautiful women. This is la dolce vita: Fellini parodied it; Capa reveled in it. It’s arguable that color spreads like the ones he made eventually turned into today’s moronic “celebrity news” in magazines and on the web, but Capa’s early 50s version of paradise is filled with undeniable sensual joy.

"Geraldine Brooks at fashion studio of Emilio Schuberth, Rome," 1951, Robert Capa, All rights reserved

Also appears in The New York Photo Review

The arc of war

"Marines, Korean War," David Duncan, All rights reserved

I remember the first war photograph that got to me. I must have been about 11. It was a picture by David Douglas Duncan in an old Life Magazine of two U.S. Marines, heads ducked down, rifles in their hands, running toward a battle in Korea. The first Marine wore his helmet at a rakish angle and sported a pencil-thin mustache like the young Ernest Hemingway. As he raced past the camera toward possible death, he managed a grim, tiny smile. I was smitten.

I think most, if not all, boys are drawn to fantasies of war. For me Duncan’s picture lit up visions of nonchalant courage and noble sacrifice that were already present in my adolescent consciousness. Later, I learned the photo was an honest depiction. Far from a propagandist, Duncan, an ex-Marine, had covered World War II, then the Korean War –always from the perspective of the troops in the field. Shooting in Vietnam, he had turned against the war and published two photo books — I Protest (1968) and War Without Heroes (1970).

Such attitudes – for or against war — are studiously avoided in “War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath” at the Brooklyn Museum. Sprawled across multiple panels, this large, ambitious collection presents over 400 pictures by 255 photographers from over a dozen nations. The curators declare their intention to explore “the general progression – the arc – of every war ” and divide the pictures into sections on “recruitment, training, embarkation, daily routine, battle, death and destruction, homecoming, and remembrance.” The exhibit covers an astonishing 166 years worth of wars — from the Mexican American War (1846-1848) to the recent conflicts associated with the Arab Spring (2010).

"Drill sergeant, Parris Island," Thomas Hoepker, All rights reserved

The curator’s scholarly approach is very good at putting to rest contentious myths about certain well-known photographs. For instance, was the World War II shot of American soldiers raising the flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima a spontaneous action or premeditated propaganda? It turns out it was a little of both. The flag-raising captured by Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photo was improvised as a way to signal to thousands of troops still fighting on the island below that the mountain had been taken. However, it wasn’t the first flag that had been raised that day. A smaller flag in a less visible spot had been hoisted (and photographed) a short time earlier. The one that became world-famous was a replacement, and, yes, homeland PR was a big part of the reason.

In fact, propaganda (sometimes just natural bias) can be found in pictures from all sides in this show. Famous American photographers like Margaret Bourke-White and Edward Steichen, for example, did their bit for the war effort in World War II by creating beautiful compositions of grand battleships in naval processions and sleek fighter planes taking off, accompanied by the cheers of onlooking troops. It’s hard to fault the photographers’ intentions. That was their job, after all, and, in time of war, they obviously wanted to make their country look good. It is only while looking at pictures of the pulverized landscapes and shattered human bodies these graceful machines can leave behind that one remembers their murderous purpose.

"Untitled," Wesley David Archer, All rights reserved

Easier to classify, if not to forgive, are the fabricators. Before small cameras, fast films and Photoshop, fakes were harder to create than today–– but they were also easier to get away with. In World War I, for instance, a man named Wesley David Archer produced a mesmerizing shot of a war plane in flames with its pilot falling below it through space. The plane’s wings bear the Iron Cross, which would make the pilot German. How marvelous! There was only one problem: Archer had created and photographed the whole scene in his studio as part of a money-making scam. Later, he went on to become a well-known model-maker in Hollywood.

"Valentine with her daughters, Amelie and Inez, Rwanda, 2006," Jonathan C Torgovnik, All rights reserved
Such dishonesty (certainly at the level of posing or on-scene cropping) will always exist in photography, but, to my mind, the most important pictures in this show represent a relentless visual boring at the truth about the real experience of war. This body of pictures has been building up since photographers like Robert Capa began carrying small, versatile cameras to the war zones of the 1930s. It continued through the appalling horror and mega death of World War II and Korea, but it wasn’t until the Vietnam War that truly disturbing images became widely available in the United States. With the publication of Eddie Adam’s photograph of South Vietnam’s National Chief of Police summarily executing a Viet Cong guerilla in 1968 and Nick Ut’s 1972 shot of napalmed Vietnamese children running in agony down a road, the floodgates finally opened. Included in the show are incomparable images by Don McCullin, Horst Faas, Larry Burrows and others, widely credited with helping to end the war.

"Assault with helicopters, Vietnam," Horst Faas, All rights reserved

Today many of us are privileged – and, if we read newspapers and use the internet, even compelled — to look at truly painful color photographs of both combatants and victims from the world’s far-flung conflicts. As this show demonstrates, a steady flow of war images by a loose multinational corps of male and female freelancers is now a given. Surprisingly free from allegiance to ideologies or nationalistic prejudices, most of these pictures honor and grieve both civilian and military suffering. At their most provocative they even open chinks of compassion for the others – the enemies who fight against and try to kill our loved ones.
"Viet Cong soldier, Vietnam," Don McCullin, All rights reserved

Let me give an example. A 10-foot-long full color image from Afghanistan by French photographer Luc Delahaye shows a very young man lying dead in a shallow, dusty pit. He is wearing a thin cotton shirt beneath an empty ammunition vest, baggy pajama-like pants and dusty black socks. His legs are neatly folded like a well-behaved boy. Indeed, if not for the small wound in his neck, he could almost be a gangly post-adolescent boy taking a nap. Then we notice something. He is wearing socks. But where are his boots? Stolen, we realize.Who is this abandoned and desecrated boy?

Delahaye tells us in a single word: “Taliban.”

If I had looked at this picture when I was 11, I would have turned away confused and upset. That’s good.

Brandon Stanton's "Humans of New York"

"Humans of New York," Brandon Stanton, All rights reserved

Just a week after its publication, Brandon Stanton’s photo book, Humans of New York, jumped to number one on the Times best-seller list. To make the book, Stanton walked all five boroughs (but mostly Manhattan) with his camera, approached people he found interesting, started up conversations and asked to take their pictures. Not only did the people agree, they opened up for surprisingly unguarded portraits; many also gave Stanton intimate quotes for attribution, as though he was a trusted friend.

Does this sound like a classic New York artist’s fairy tale? Well, it is. And here comes  its modern twist: Stanton was not discovered by a John Szarkowski-style prince of taste but by millions of viewers on the internet. To become the people’s choice Stanton began showing his pictures on photoblogs and social media in 2010.  The last time I visited his “Humans of New York” (HONY) page on Facebook, it had been “liked” by 1,772,196 visitors, and each of the page’s hundreds of pictures had themselves inspired hundreds or thousands of comments.

These are astonishing numbers. What makes the pictures so popular? Certainly, Stanton’s well-made color portraits are uniformly pleasing. Straightforward and unfussy, they fill out a New York City “gorgeous mosaic” of demographic diversity with an eye for individual style and a flair for tripping the shutter at the perfect moment. Perhaps Stanton’s real gift, in fact, is his ability to create that moment – to persuade strangers to feel good about him, his project and ultimately themselves.

In addition, Stanton is a sympathetic interviewer. As he shoots, he asks big questions, such as “What is your biggest struggle?” The answers range from ironic (often very funny) quips to true attempts at self-revelation.  Later, Stanton combines his subjects’ edited answers with their pictures to create funny, swoony or sad little stories.

"Humans of New York," Brandon Stanton, All rights reserved

On a rainy street, for instance, he asks a mysteriously smiling young woman, “What was the happiest moment of your life?” The woman replies: “There are two. The day my baby was born, and last night.” Responding to another question, an elegant old woman in a fur hat  looks proudly at the lens and says, “When my husband was dying, I said, ‘Moe, how am I supposed to live without you?’ He told me, ’Take the love and spread it around.’ “

I’m told this collection moves many viewers to tears.  I’m guessing most of these are what people call ‘happy’ tears. Most viewers – like most of the people photographed -- seem helpless against Stanton’s optimistic charm and genuine affection.  In this book, buoyed up by his eager energy, dancers dance, lovers kiss and old grumps laugh aloud.  For a moment this friendly young man seems able to create an experience of deeply-felt community. 

His style, it seems to me, embodies our cultural moment’s  ideal template for photographic portraiture. Everything is in the open. No pictures are taken without full permission. Editing and usage rights are theoretically collaborative. Recorded words are reliably accurate and respect the true context in which they were spoken. The final photographs represent a synergy of shooter and subject. Posted to the internet, they become a kind of collective. 

I’m guessing that most of Stanton’s subjects felt they were posing under just such an unwritten moral contract (legal realities may be different). No doubt they felt good about it. Stanton’s wide-open, democratic style is the flip side, after all, of the rampant insecurity and paranoia that curls more and more insistently through our high-tech society – and often surfaces around photography. “That man with the camera,” we fret.  “Is he pointing it at us? Is he the government, a stalker, a pervert? Is he looking at the kids?” Such fears may be extreme, but they’re not contemptible. There’s a reason for them to exist.

"Humans of New York," Brandon Stanton, All rights reserved

Nevertheless, as a critic, I’m concerned about this trend.  If photographers and their intentions are forced to endure such fear-driven vetting, will only feel-good, we-did-this-together projects like Stanton’s be able to thrive? I say this as a sincere fan of  “Humans of New York.” I admire its steady, non-judgmental acceptance of its subjects’ offerings. But I worry about photographers who use very different methods and mine very different veins.

"Lower East Side Children," Helen Levitt, All rights reserved

Take Helen Levitt, who died a few years ago. Regularly described as “shy and retiring,” she walked the streets of Harlem and the Lower East Side anonymously for 60 years, photographing and filming people -- most often, children – using cameras fitted with a right angle viewer, called a ‘Winkelsucher,’ that allowed Levitt to stand sideways to her actual subjects. In other words, she snuck shots in pursuit of what legendary author James Agee called “…a fleeting and half-secret world… most abundant in lyrical qualities.” 

"Girl at Window," Helen Levitt, All rights reserved

Levitt’s colleague and friend Walker Evans did something similar in his famous subway series, “Many Are Called.” With Levitt often sitting by his side, Evans rode the New York trains for weeks making exposures with a tiny camera through the buttonhole of his overcoat.  Riders among the daily mass migration rarely noticed, but there was nothing dishonest about the pictures. Looked at now, Evan’s pictures, like Levitt’s, are a triumph of humanist affirmation.

"Many Are Called," Walker Evans, All rights reserved

Does “Humans…” give us a truer look at New Yorkers than the street portraits of the past or today's by other photographers?  I’d say it gives us another kind of look – a familiar modern look, balanced on the tightrope between disguise and revelation. Call it a social media look.  My recommendation is: If you can’t afford the book, at least check out the website (humansofnewyork.com). It may be the first big mainstream collection that takes for granted the facebook selves – at once pleading and performative – that we willingly reveal to our linked-up world.

This review also appears in The New York Photo Review

Apocalypse in miniature: Lori Nix's 'More from The City'

"Subway," Lori Nix, All rights reserved

While never completely out of fashion, apocalyptic fantasy art was once the realm of disillusioned outsiders. No longer. Baying forth directly from the deep pockets of corporate high tech, today’s sleek, dystopian movies, TV, video games and other visual media now dominate our imaginative culture. At the same time apocalypse-themed fiction and nonfiction books and journalism drive much of our intellectual discourse. No civilization has ever been more thrilled by its own demise.

Photographer Lori Nix’s end-of-the-world show, “The City,” at Clampart covers this familiar territory but not without staking out its own brand of modesty and wit. A self-proclaimed “danger and disaster” artist, Nix admits to being “fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed, with the idea of the apocalypse.” Her show imagines a New York City in which all humans have been suddenly terminated, leaving behind only their objects and buildings. This “post-human” metropolis is depicted in large color prints of iconic public spaces — a library, a shoe store, a Chinese take-out restaurant, etc.

Nix’s works are first constructed as scaled-down dioramas (about five-feet-long) and then photographed with an 8 X 10 view camera and printed from the negatives. To create, assemble and record each diorama takes Nix and her partner, Kathleen about seven months. In the process the two women meticulously build and paint an astonishing variety of miniature objects – from pool tables to encyclopedias to laundromat washing machines. 

The verisimilitude of the little worlds is remarkable. But Nix’s miniature power tools are, after all, not CGI and her old-school archival color printing is not Photoshop. Her interiors are sometimes flawed. Not often, and not by much, but enough so a close viewer will notice. For instance, the show’s advertising shot, a cunningly realistic B subway train, forever stalled and filling up with sand at the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge, looks across a sand-locked East River to a rudimentary stage-set drawing of the Manhattan skyline. Why not make the skyline look as real as everything else?


"Chinese Take-Out," Lori Nix, All rights reserved

I’m guessing Nix wants her pictures to inspire awe and unease at a distance and then––as the viewer takes a closer, more leisurely view––provide pleasure and a few chuckles. Her “Chinese Take-Out” picture, for example, brilliantly conjures the formulaic elements of such places – basic store front décor, a picture of ancient temple from the old country, standard OSHA “First aid for choking” poster and two sets of what-you-see-you-get food photos of General Tso’s Chicken, Vegetable Lo Mein and other dishes, identified in Mandarin and English. The fabricators have taken great pains to “distress” the interior with dirt and grime and to strew around red-stamp-labeled take-out containers and authentic-looking pages from a tiny New York Times. But when Nix places a blue delivery scooter right at the front of the room, it’s impossible to miss that it’s a child’s toy. And, look, what’s that sneaking through the open kitchen door? It’s a stuffed red fox. Should I be surprised when a quick Google search reveals that – according to Chinese tradition — the fox is a signal from the spirits of the dead?


"Casino," Lori Nix, All rights reserved

I don’t think so. After scheming and tinkering for over half a year on these pint-sized replicas, I imagine very little – if anything – has been missed. What’s more, the playfulness turns up in the other pictures, too. For instance, in “Space Center,” imagined as a once proud, now desolate museum of human flight, two hawks are busily nesting in what’s left of a Mars Rover. In “Casino,” the ceiling is torn open like a tomb to reveal cheesy replicas of dynastic Egyptian guardian statues standing against walls covered with hieroglyphics. The floor is filled with rusting slot machines that bear names like “Strike It Rich.” One of them is called “Doomsday.”

I’m glad that Lori Nix is making pictures of disaster we can really look at. With its low-tech craft and slow-dawning gags her work feels personal – to her and to us. We are invited into a very still, and sad — and undeniably ridiculous — made-up world. It occurs to me this may be a better place to contemplate human folly than shoulder to shoulder with a movie star as he mows down zombies.

Originally published in The New York Photo Review

Martin Parr -- "Life's a Beach." A review

"Knotte, Belgium," Martin Parr, All rights reserved

First, an admission.  Before I looked at  his show, “Life’s a Beach,” at Aperture Gallery, I had convinced myself that Martin Parr’s hyper-bright, in-your-face ironies were mostly an exercise in hype -- a sort of art brand on the make. But I left the show thoroughly charmed.

How did that happen?  Before this, I had only seen Parr’s work sized small, online or in magazines, and had gotten the idea his pictures were supposed to be jokes.  In fact, I enjoy jokes, but Parr’s images had seemed to me detached and over-calculated, like a comedian’s punch lines with choreographed pauses for laughter. Looking in the context of this show’s large prints, I saw that his work is much more complicated than that.

Is Parr’s work funny? Yes, often. Does he shoot as an outsider? Yes, of course.  Parr could never manage his pictures if he was also participating in the dramas swirling around in the frame. On the other hand, he could never get the shots at all if he didn’t have a participant’s instinctive knowledge of what’s going on.


"Art," Martin Parr, All rights reserved

I imagine Parr as a participant-observer, a sort of photo primatologist among his peers.  Put simply, he understands  that – released from workaday discipline by holidays or special events – ordinary people behave like the complicated primates we actually are. We gossip, flirt, eat, play games, make jokes, dress up in uniforms and costumes, dance, drink, bask, show off, analyze each other’s status, display awful – if exuberant – taste and so on.  In these settings Parr seems to have found  his gift in another primate ritual. He takes pictures.

In Parr’s career he has showed us ourselves abundantly -- through 50 books and over 80 major exhibitions of photographs, four movies, numerous TV documentaries, membership in Magnum, a co-written scholarly history of photo albums, an extensive post card collection and more.

The man loves pictures.

"Think of England," Martin Parr, All rights reserved

In “Life’s a Beach” Parr has for the first time assembled his best work from a 30-year obsession with photographing beaches around the world. The prints push-pinned to Aperture’s  walls include work from Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Latvia, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Thailand and the United Kingdom. For Parr, beaches are “…that rare public space in which general absurdities and local quirks seamlessly fuse together.”

Some of the images are indeed evocative of every culture. Parr’s iconic 1997 shot of a sunbathing older woman, for instance, delivers a maximal satiric jolt by cropping out everything but her glistening, sunburned face and arms. Even in the savage heat of the mid-day beach, the woman wears all her gold jewelry.  Her thin, freshly-lipsticked mouth is pursed grimly, and -- where her eyes ought to be -- surreal bright blue protective eye-cups seem to pop with otherworldly rage.


"Sunbathing lady," Martin Parr, All rights reserved

Who is this terrifying woman? Why is she so angry? Parr leaves it to our imagination. Every culture has agreed-upon types to refer to. The picture was taken  in Benidorm, Spain -- perhaps the woman is a fierce duenna, strictly chaperoning a family’s sulky adolescent daughter. Maybe the correct title should be dowager –she’s  an updated British version of Wilde’s Lady Bracknell.  Other tribes will assign their own special roles.

"American speedo," Martin Parr, All rights reserved


"Rio beach boy," Martin Parr, All rights reserved

Parr’s pictures also nail specific cultures. A garish stars-and-stripes-themed speedo droops off the sagging ass of a middle-aged man from Miami; a godlike, gleaming black beach boy from Rio sizes us up through designer sunglasses; in places like New Brighton and Eastbourne,  beachgoers in robes and sensible shoes sit in folding chairs and read headlines like “I Want to Hang Them” or “Fergie’s Final Boob;” in Miyazaki, Japan, hundreds of revelers frolic happily in artificial surf under fluorescent lights in a place called Ocean Dome.

"The Sun," Martin Parr, All rights reserved

Other pictures move across the sticky divide between cultures. For example, on a beach in Goa, India, a young Western couple encamped with flip flops and towels are disconcerted by a large white sacred cow, which gazes at them mournfully as two fully dressed Indian men stride purposefully by.

It’s interesting that so few of these cross-cultural shots cause the viewer any real discomfort. The only picture in the show that is at all disturbing depicts a big beefy Western man lounging under a palm tree, simultaneously getting a manicure and a pedicure from two tiny Balinese.  The picture has a slightly seedy, obscene feeling. But it’s hardly gut-wrenching.

"Miyazaki, Japan," Martin Parr, All rights reserved

I wonder  -- not for the first time – why Parr chooses to take the viewer to the point of laughing out loud but never to the verge of outrage.  And then I wonder, why am I even thinking about chastising Parr for not making me angry? By the end of the show I decide to appreciate his gentleness. As a shooter, he has the chutzpah to walk up to strangers and fire off his ring-flash from closeup range, but the resulting photographs – though bold and arresting --  are the opposite of harsh. In fact, I’d call them deeply sympathetic, even rather  fond.

Parr is a skilled satirist, but from the evidence, not an angry one.  To my eye he seems at least as interested in entertaining viewers as in changing their mind. Enjoy him.

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