close your eye

cartier-bresson: seeking inner silence

2010-05-07T12:09:00.004-04:00

Henri Cartier-Bresson, New York City 1946. The Museum of Modern Art. Magnum Photos, courtesy Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson

World War II is coming to an end. A mother and a son reuniting? As they embrace in the crowded port of New York, their faces are barely visible. But we can clearly see expressions of others waiting for their beloved ones: tense, hesitant, impatient, cautiously joyful. “New York 1946” states the caption. Cartier-Bresson felt nothing more elaborate was needed.

He got his first camera feeling he needed „a quicker instrument than a brush.” It was in 1931, during a trip to Ivory Coast, where he went to digest Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and get over unhappy love affair, that he started photographing. Years later he would say that this new piece of hardware felt to him „like a big warm kiss, a shot from a revolver, and like the psychoanalyst’s couch.” Next year he got his first Leica.

„It became the extension of my eye and I have never been separated from it since I found it” he will say later. „I prowled the streets all day, feeling strung up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life – to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”

Meanwhile, these were worldly events which were to unroll before his eyes – the wrenching challenges of what W.H. Auden called „ shallow, dishonest decade.”

Following Nazi invasion of France, Cartier-Bresson was captured and sent into a German labour camp. "For a young bourgeois with Surrealist ideas, breaking stone and working in a cement factory was a very good lesson" he remembered years later in an interview with the New York Times. Following two unsuccessful attempts, he managed to escape in 1943. Only to learn that Museum of Modern Art in New York, not knowing of his whereabouts, started preparing a post-humous exhibition of his photographs from the 1930s. He happily embraced the idea (it opened in 1947) but had no intention of going back to the pre-war era of playful, beguiling images.

“Being a photojournalist didn’t mean being just a photographer” writes Galassi in The Modern Century. “It meant being a student, a diplomat, a traveller, an investigator, a reporter, a historian. To Cartier-Bresson it meant engaging the whole of the world.”

Georgia, 1972: sombre Russian family enjoys a roadside picnic, their new car visible against silhouette of an old Orthodox monastery and cows grazing next to it; Sumatra, 1950: a turbaned woman walks past an elegant pattern of rice paddies, shaded by palms; New York, 1947 a self-confident man in a double-breasted suit, enjoys a cigar on the steps of a monumental building at Foley Square its columns elegantly converging with the stairs; Mende, France,1968: two farmers engage in a heated argument. Panoply of human experience. Each of those photographs -- elegant, sparse, carefully composed -- contains a universe.

Divided into 13 sections, (of which only the first one – presenting his early images and titled „Prologue” – is chronological) MoMA exhibit may seem overwhelming. Old Worlds – East and West, are juxtaposed with the New Ones; China’s Leap Forward (Mao’s program of forced industrialization) is followed by inner workings of a New York bank.

Perhaps most powerful are portraits that Cartier-Bresson kept making throughout his far-flung travels and that include an impressive roaster of 20th century personalities, mostly artists and writers (he avoided actors, believing they are too professional and start posing right away). From Jean-Paul Sartre, Coco Chanel, Madame Lanvin, to Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Louis Kahn, Irene and Frederic Joliot Curie, he would try to photograph them in their natural settings, engaging in a tete a tete dialogue.

When asked how much time a portrait session would take, he liked to tell his sitters it would be longer than the dentist, but shorter than the psychoanalyst. „Above all I look for an inner silence. I seek to translate the personality and not an expression.”

Arguably the same thing can be said not just about portraits, but almost all images he took. He calmly and elegantly registered what mattered and swept away everything else.

He once explained that he tries to approach his subjects on tiptoe, with a velvet hand and hawk’s eye and almost every single image presented in MoMA attests that this indeed was his method. He photographed society, culture, civilization – that is history – through distinctive, individual moments; freezing the rapidly changing world in beautiful simplicity and clarity.

He hardly ever edited his images believing a photographer’s job was complete once he released the shutter. Focusing on his decisive moment, interested in just a fraction of a second, he would leave it to others to worry about how his photographs are sequenced or presented, cropped or altered (he and other Magnum photographers have insisted they should not be „mutilated”). As a result, impressive collection of his images he left – so poignant, so carefully composed, balanced and elegant – does not amount to a ready or complete account that can easily be absorbed.

Unresolved, idiosyncratic and perplexing at times, his photographs challenge the viewer. Cartier Bresson provides his audience with the most beautiful raw material that he collected across the globe. Now they need to search inside, find their own decisive moments. Set out on their own journey.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, April 11-June 28, 2010. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

cartier-bresson: it's through living that we discover ourselves

2010-05-05T12:14:00.014-04:00

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hyeres, France, 1932. The Museum of Modern Art; Magnum Photos, courtesy Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Truman Capote described him as a “frantic dragonfly ... Leica glued to his eye ... doing his clickety clicks with a joyous intensity and religious fervour that filled his whole being.”

How long has he been waiting to snap the image of a cyclist in Hyeres?

Speeding past the intricate staircase – twisting and turning, uncoiling down to the street – the biker leans forward, with a clear sense of purpose.

Beautiful, complete.

Cartier-Bresson just understood that a photograph can fix eternity in a an instant.

The ability to do so – it came to be eponymouse with the decisive moment – became his trademark. Even though he coined the term himself – it first appeared in the seminal album of his photographs published simultaneously in Paris and New York in 1952 – he was not entirely happy with the label. Perhaps the French version, Images a la sauvette, was closer to what he meant: images on the go, fleeting and ephemeral. The French use the expression “a la sauvette” to refer to vendors who sell on the street, without a licence. There is something rascal, dragonfly-like about the whole process.

In 1932, he found himself behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, in Paris, without a licence but with a Leica glued to his eye. He must have been peeking through the fence, as some repairs around the train station were carried on. A few pieces of metal are scattered on the ground; a man – blurry silhouette –is leaping over a large puddle. His heel will never touch its water reflection. Everything is still except for this vital piece of action.

„Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever,” Cartier-Bresson said in an interview in 1957. By then, this snap-shot had become an icon that no self-respecting history of photography dared to omit. He claimed he was not interested in photography but life. “It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us,” he wrote. Frantic dragonfly, patient and alert, he was an artist without a licence, but with isatiable appetite.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, April 11-June 28, 2010. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

cartier-bresson: his beat was the world

2010-05-04T11:01:00.004-04:00

Maps by Adrian Kitzinger, Henri-Cartier Bresson The Modern Century, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

He once said that in order to do a worthwhile job one must let things grow inside. When portraying people he looked for inner silence. His beat was the world – grand theater of global affairs and small, fleeting moments of everyday life. He disliked flying, “a silly way of travelling, most unintelligent if not unsafe,” and claimed that he does not know how to travel.

Yet these are huge, impressive maps that open The Modern Century – first post-humous retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson currently on view in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Colourful arcs, bullets and dashes mark tangled itineraries that criss-cross Asia, Europe, Africa, both Americas. Perhaps no other photographer epitomizes that modern century – spanning from the pre-industrial era to the age of ceaseless technological change – better than him, master of the decisive moment.

Upon his death in 2004, Cartier Bresson left behind 14,000 rolls of film, more than half a million images. Some 300 photographs presented in MoMA – many never printed or shown in public before – provide a unique testimony: a chronicle of fast changing times, captured with clarity and elegance.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, April 11-June 28, 2010. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

cartier-bresson is coming to MoMA

2010-03-25T11:46:00.004-04:00

Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 2009. Photo by Louise LeGresley

"In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry."

Henri Cartier-Bresson

His retrospective opens in New York MoMA on April 11th.

hetherington at sundance

2010-02-04T14:02:00.004-05:00

Tim Hetherington won the top prize at the Sundance Film Festival this week for his Afghan documentary Restrepo.

The title comes from the name of an outpost in the remote Korengal Valley, where he had been embeded with the US army, and where he collaborated with a Vanity Fair writer, Sebastian Junger.

Hetherington, about whom I wrote on on this blog, and in the Polish media magazine Press, considers himself a multi-media story teller. For his work in Afghanistan (where he used both still and video cameras), he had already received several awards, including World Press Photo of the Year 2007.

He says he is mainly interested in showing complex human emotions, the intimate side of warfare.

Sleeping soldiers - his multi-media installation, also from Restrepo - earned a lot of acclaim during last year New York Photo Festival.

This is what he had to say about the project, when we talked in the fall:

I went to Afghanistan as an embed. A lot of people criticize the whole system and say that by doing this you are compromising yourself or you are telling an army lie. My take on it is slightly different –I was trying to show conflict from a different perspective. I think the sleeping soldiers images were subverting the embed system. I was trying to show certain emotions that the soldiers experience, how vulnerable they are.

(...)

A lot of war images that appear in the mainstream media these days focus on the civilian cost of war. It is very hard to move anyone today with such images. We expect to see a grieving mother, or a wounded child. As a result, a lot of images of war do not surprise us any more. These days, they are often used in the media as illustrations. But very few of them contain any kind of information that challenges or educates people. And this is what I would like to do.

small window

2010-01-27T11:48:00.019-05:00

"Why does it matter? We all know there was an earthquake" - writes Kenneth Jarecke, American photojournalist, on his blog "Mostly True."

We do. Inhabitants of the global village in the age of twits and flicks, we get to know within minutes. We are made to think that we can be anywhere and everywhere, all at the same time. And that the whole world is at our fingertips.

My six-year-old daughter saw me reaching for a remote last night, just as I wanted to turn on PBS Newshour. "Mom, please! No more Haiti. It's too sad."

I know of many adults who feel the same way. How many photographs did they see? How many feeds and stories did they watch on TV and You Tube? They now find themselves overwhelmed and powerless. Perhaps they sent some money, perhaps they said a prayer. What else can they do? There comes a point, when most people feel they need to tune out. They no longer want to know.

Jarecke predicts that in a week or so, Haiti will be off the radar screen, where it had been for the last two decades. He writes about responsibilities that the media face (he actually writes about photographers, but being a writer, I can't help but think about words, as well as images). That's why it is so important to get it right when you can, he believes:

As photographers we've got a small window to get a little bit of great work published out of Haiti. We have, maybe two weeks to add another chapter to the permanent record of the ongoing human nightmare that is Haiti.

This is also why poor photography, published poorly is so damaging. People are only going to look so many times. Once their quota on the subject is filled, they'll stop looking.

emmet gowin collective portrait

2009-12-22T10:27:00.002-05:00

Emmet Gowin, a long-time dean of the photography department at the Princeton University, is retiring this year and to mark the occasion PU Art Museum is presenting an exhibition of photographs: his and his students.

Master and his followers, side by side. Very diverse styles and subjects. A beautiful way to honor his career as a photographer and a teacher.

I was moved by short notes that some of his students included with the photographs.

Says Christopher Dawson, who has been documenting "the backdrop to our twenty-four hour news cycle" and who presents a recent shot of Britney Spears in Los Angeles:

"By his work and his example, Emmet fostered a desire to approach things with imagination and empathy, qualities that do not characterize today's news media. Perhaps what draws me to this subject matter s the chance to stand amid pandemonium, thumb on the cable release, waiting with patience for a moment worthy of it."

Thomas Carabasi, whose photograph of Jamez Mountains in New Mexico appears next, speaks of "photographic randezvous" with Emmet Gowin and his family:

"The idea of nature as sanctuary and inspiration was something I heard Emmet speak of many times, and it connected with my feelings immediately. Sharing the ritual of venturing into nature and documenting its charms and mysteries was an integral part of my development."

Carla Williams, remembers that as a young photographer she was narrowly focused on portraiture and self-portraiture, but later came to feel she was missing out on a full understanding of photography by neglecting other genres. "Emmet was always an influence on me despite the great difference in our concerns" she says, adding that he greatly helped her "to move beyond my comfort zone."

By now, most of his students are well-established artists. Their images, as one of the notes, are a "form of thanks to Emmet." Cannot think of a nicer way to honor a retiring professor.

platon: give me your soul

2009-12-02T12:08:00.010-05:00

„Give me your soul, love” he said to the brand-new first lady and immediatelly bit his tongue. It’s not exactly how you are supposed to address presidential wife during her first photo session in the White House. But apparently she did not mind.

British photographer Platon, who portrays the famous and the powerful, is notorious for his direct style and ability to approach seemingly unapproachable subjects.

I met Platon last month during a New Yorker Festival workshop. Showing his most successful portraits, he said that operating his camera (and his famous wide-angle lens that distorts people’s faces and hands) accounts for about 3% of what he does. His work is about winning his subjects’ souls, penetrating their minds.

Michelle Obama apparently obliged. And so did scores of politicians, movie stars, artists, sportsmen, musicians, fashion models, whose portraits you can see on Platon’s website.

From Vladimir Putin who, after having him searched for an hour at gunpoint, confessed to being a fan of the Beatles (Yesterday is his favorite) and gave him a hug, to John McCain with whom he danced to the tunes of Abba (Dancing Queen), just after he announced he would run for presidency.

He had been warned that Dustin Hoffman is terribly aloof and difficult, only to find out he sent Platon’s mother in Great Britain a bouqet of roses. Donald Trump let him touch his hair (Platon couldn’t believe it is real), George Bush Sr. got talked into making a peace sign. Pamela Anderson, pregnant, posed wrapped in the American flag, which at the very last minute Platon run to buy in a nearby convenience store (rather than use one of the haute-coture dresses prepared for the session).

„There is no room for two egos in my studio – if I go in humble, it allows me to fill my space with the person I am photographing” said Platon, who sported a funny bowler hat and a pair of bright orange corduroys during the New Yorker workshop.

When photographing Karl Rove, he asked him what to do to become successful. „If you are photographing me, you already are” he heard. Obnoxious Richard Serra got him mad. He probably regretted it when he later saw the portrait that Platon made (have a look at his website).

Platon who last year became a staff photographer of the New Yorker joked that his editors give him too much homework – he has to read a lot!

Apparently, it pays off. He has an impressive portfolio of world leaders in the current issue.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez, Bejamin Nethanyahu, Muammar Qaddafi - one by one, were all lured into his improvised studio in the United Nations during General Assembly session last September.

During short, impromptu shoots, he discussed success and failure with Ban Ki Moon; he fell under a spell of Rupiah Banda, president of Zambia, whose face appeared to be carved out of stone ("There is much information in this picture. He does not have to do anyting. All those muscles, all those crevices and hightlight – they are just beautiful”).

Silvio Berlusconi just glided into his studio and did not need any instructions. („Incredible. He gave me that cheeky-naughty kind of smile. He was loving every second of it.”). Platon even made Ahmadinejad giggle. („He is a very child-like man. Shorter than me. I wanted to show this irony that there is innocence about his eyes.”)

He woudl grab them. Pull them over. Five minutes, thrirty seconds, three frames ("the shortest shoot I have ever had” – with Hugo Chavez). And they would give him their magic.

robert frank en route again

2009-11-12T23:29:00.016-05:00

© Robert Frank, from The Americans

He had to get out of his Ford Coupe. For some strange reason, I always thought it was early in the morning; just after dawn.

US 90 en route to del Rio Texas, may well be the most lonesome photograph in The Americans wrote Charlie LeDouff in Vanity Fair.

The Americans which are currently being shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (many thanks for their persmission to post this photograph here) was Frank's attempt to understand his new homeland.

The exhibit which marks 50th anniversary of the album publication is poignantly titled: "Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans."

The Swiss immigrant, who set out to crisscross the country, keenly observed, looked and peeked in.

As an outsider, he sought to scratch beyond the surface and reveal truths that most Americans at the time were not ready to notice or willing to accept.

But this photographs - the last in the series of 83 - is Frank's attempt to look at himself.

The photographer chose to travel on his own because, as he explained, what he aspired to do required solitude.

It was a brief moment during his one-year long journey, when he was joined by his wife and son, Mary and Pablo.

What did he see looking-in this time? What were his thoughts?

"When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read of a poem twice."

I wrote about The Americans on this blog and in Tygodnik Powszechny, yet feel the need to revisit this particular photograph.

It has always been my favorite (I know it amounts to a sacrilege - the series is meant to be viewed as a whole and its power lies in the way individual photographs talk to each other; yet sometimes we repeat words or sentences in a poem, just because a line sounds great).

I have found this photograph to be very beautiful and moving, even though it always seemed a little sad. It turns out it was in fact much sadder than I thought.

"Black and white is the vision of Hope and despair. This is what I want in my photographs," wrote Frank in 1957. They are there, side by side.

sleeping soldiers and the intimate side of war

2009-11-05T13:07:00.003-05:00

Soldier, portrait, UN, disarmament, ammunition, fabric, rocket, fighters, tenderness, couple –
one by one, like in a telegram short keywords link diverse projects that British photographer, Tim Hetherington, has worked on for the past 15 years, covering wars and natural disasters from Africa to Asia.

What ties them together is Hetherington's sensitivity and a desire to humanize such tragedies, to show daily life and emotions of people who experience them.

Sleeping soldiers is a recent project that came as a result of several stints in Afghanistan.

Hetherington, who had been embeded with the with a platoon of US soldiers in a remote outpost in the Korengal Valley, received several major awards for his work there, including 2007 World Press Photo Picture of the Year (for a dark, almost monochromatic image of an exhausted and distressed soldier, after someone from his platoon was injured).

If you happen to know Polish, please read an interview I conducted with Hetherington shortly afterwards. Or an excellent profile in PDN "This man is not a photojournalist").

Sleeping soldiers, a multi-media installation which was presented last May during New York Photo Festival, is yet another attempt to focus on emotions of those engaged in a war.

While working recently on a story about hidden costs of war (traumas and emotional problems faced by soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan), I immediately remembered Hetherington's photographs.

He agreed to share several images and they run in the current issue of Tygodnik Powszechny as part of our Torn by War series.

I spoke to him about this project:

Sleeping soldiers – it’s a pretty unusual take on war. How did you come up with the idea?

I was in Afghanistan on several occasions and I would always stay with the same platoon. I lived with these men, inevitably, very closely. I was coming and going out of the outpost. When I got home I would look at the photographs. It gives me some time for reflection. I often discover then that a particular picture does something to me, makes me understand something. That’s what happened here. I had one or two images of these soldiers asleep, I came back and I discovered that they were very powerful. So I went back to make more.

Do you remember the first one?

It was Luke Nevalla. He was in his uniform. Later on, as my intimacy with them deepened, having them unclothed was a very powerful statement as well.

What was you goal? What did you want to accomplish with this project?

I find it interesting to show an intimate side of warfare. Get people to think. It’s a more successful strategy – in the current state and time . I went to Afghanistan as an embed. A lot of people criticize the whole system and say that by doing this you are compromising yourself or you are telling an army lie. My take on it is slightly different –I was trying to show conflict from a different perspective. I think the sleeping soldiers images were subverting the embed system. I was trying to show certain emotions that the soldiers experience, how vulnerable they are. A lot of war images that appear in the mainstream media these days focus on the civilian cost of war. I have worked covering conflicts for a number of years, so I learned that it is very hard to move anyone today with such images.

Because of oversaturation?

Yes. We expect to see a grieving mother, or a wounded child. As a result, a lot of images of war do not surprise us any more. These days, they are often used in the media. But very few of them contain any kind of information that challenges or educates people. And this is what I would like to do. How can I reach my viewers? My audience is American. Ultimately people are tribal. So it seemed that the most appropriate strategy is to reach them with something they can easily identify with. Vulnerability of the young American soldiers is more likely to move tehm than tears of an Afghan mother. I did not even have access to Afghani mothers. So I was trying to photograph what I could and while doing that, to show a conflict, how it affects people.

one year later

2009-11-03T09:31:00.075-05:00

Photographs by John Dill, November 4, 2008

Yes! It's hard to believe but it has been one year since that memorable Tuesday.

John Dill and I took a class together at the International Center of Photography last fall. Shortly after the election - he spent many hours wandering around Manhattan with his camera on that day - he shared these photographs with us.

He did a great job, I believe, when it comes to capturing the incredible mood in the city - and probably across the US - on that day. It's palpable.

People in line to cast their vote:

And everybody has something to say:

or think about:

And then, the madness on Union Square, late at night, when it became obvious:

I remembered these photographs a few days ago. In fact they were the first that came to my mind, when I thought about Obama's elections and that amazing day.

John, who is a graphic designer, kindly agreed to share them on this blog, for which I am very grateful. You can view entire project and many more on his website: John Dill Photography.

Stay tuned. I have more good things to come in the next few days. And those who need to, please remember to vote tonight!

world in a small room

2009-10-23T13:05:00.032-04:00

Fishmongers and butchers; sellers of cheese and baloons; char women and icemen; washers, scrubers, cleaners, furniture movers and carpenters; street photographers, bohemian poets; even a vehicle watcher– one after another would climb along a narrow staircase of a house at rue Vaguirard to find themselves in this improvised attic studio of Irving Penn.

It was May 1950 and the famed fashion photographer just started what was to become one of his most interesting projects: a series of portraits of those who work around Paris (later also London and New York) performing a variety of jobs – small trades – that often remain unnoticed or unappreciated. “They are proud because they have their petit metier," Penn would say "because they have fingers, and hands and nothing else.”

Petit Metiers or Small Trades - 252 photographs - are currently on view at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (I extend warm thanks to the Getty Trust for allowing me to use the photograph above).

Unlike his predecessors – including August Sander or Eugene Atget, whom Penn greatly admired – he chose not to photograph his traders on the streets of Paris, among the daily hustle and bustle:

I found pictures trying to show people in their natural circumstances generally disappointing. At least I knew that to accomplish such a result convincingly was beyond my strength and capabilities.

Instead, his assistants – among them were then little known photographer Robert Doisneau and a poet who knew Paris inside out – would scout the allies of le Mouff (ie. le Mouffetard neighbohood) looking for the right subjects, trying to scoop “the unexpecteds.” They would offer them a small payment and bring them to Penn's studio. In their work clothes, often with dirty faces or hands, clutching their tools.

Penn said that he came “to enjoy and feel secure in the artificial circumstances of the studio.” Lit by his favorite northern light, without any props or elaborate backgrounds, the attic at rue Vaguirard became his favorite place to work – a functional workshop of a craftsman (Penn regarded himself just that); sparse and circumscribed, but at the same time offering infinite possiblities:

I preferred the limited task of dealing only with the person himself, away from accidentals of his daily life, simply in his own clothes and adornments, isolated in my studio. From himself alone I would distill the image I wanted and the cold light of day would put it onto film.

I was working on a story about Small Trades, when he died. An obituary that I ended up writing instead appears in Tygodnik Powszechny this week, with several of Penn’s photographs, including the wonderful Milkman.

An image of his empty studio – I find this photograph very moving – seems like the most appropriate farewell. Small room and the world which he managed to contain in it. With penetrating clarity. Focused. Beautiful.

penn's penetrating clarity

2009-10-08T12:45:00.032-04:00

I wrote about Irving Penn's Flowers yesterday. Only to find his obituary on the front page of The New York Times today. And a Parting Glance on their blog Lens.

Penn died yesterday at the age of 92.

He was on my mind a lot recently. I spent a very nice day last week browsing his albums and essays in the MOMA research library (for anyone interested in photography it's akin to being in paradise!).

Here are some notes I took:

I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clairty that even a simple object lying by chance in such light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness. This cold north light has a quality which painters have always admired, and whieh the early studio photographers made the fullest use of. It is this light that makes some of these early studio portraits sing with an intensity not bettered by later photographers with more sophisticated means at hand. Electric lights are a convenience, but they are used, I believe at the expense of that simple three-dimensional clarity, that absolute existence that a subject has standing before a camera in a north-light studio.

That's Penn himself. And here comes John Szarkowski, a long-time friend and collaborator (curator) on what made Penn's portraits so powerful:

One might consider why there are so many moving portraits of Abraham Lincoln and so few, or none, of his contemporary Napoleon III, who apparently spent much of his career as Emperor being photographed. Perhaps it is because Lincoln had so deep a curiosity about other men that he did more than half the work, and brought even ordinary photographers to a state of alert participation and confidence that made them, for a time, equal collaborators.

Wherever he is now, I hope Penn found light of "penetrating clarity." Yet again.

on flowers desire patience and luck

2009-10-07T13:06:00.035-04:00

Irving Penn's Flowers arrived yesterday. Poppies and peonies. Orchids. They made me happy.

I badly wanted to have this album. For a long time. It almost became an obsession. An object of desire.

I kept looking in the Strand, which boasts to have 8 miles of books (it's many, many more in fact; some claim that there is no book you won't be able to find there sooner or later; supposedly it's just a matter of patience).

But the album was published in 1980 and has been long out of print. Which is often the case with photography books. If you like something, you'd better grab it right away, before it becomes rare and outrageously expensive. (I gave away my copy of Salgado's Migrations which I'd bought in London for about 30 pounds in 2002. And guess what? You can't get it for less than $350 now, and even that is difficult. Talk about appreciation....).

Anyway, last summer I found Penn's Flowers, by coincidence, in a tiny bookstore in Hudson, NY. Only to see the prize tag: $500. I hesitated. If only my reasonable husband had not been around (and if only I had had $500 in my pocket...). Luckily, no credit cards came handy. Penn stayed in Hudson, like an abandoned lover, while I had to go.

But I kept thinking of these flowers! And two weeks ago... they found me! Amazon market place had the very same album. "Gently used, with the original dust jacket." $20 plus $3.49 for the shipping!! I couldn't believe my eyes.

It arrived yesterday! Beautifully packaged, in perfect condition. First edition.

Why am I so excited? So many people photograph flowers these days. Most of us are tired looking at them. (I did have an instructor at the ICP though, who was a noble exception).

Flowers seem easy to photograph – they do not move, do not have moods; you can't hurt their feelings. In fact they usually evoke nice feelings in you. Soft and easy, like a piece of baroque music that does not demand too much.

As artists or photographers, we feel tempted to create something beautiful and it often seems there is no better way than to reproduce what nature has already put in front of us. But contrary to what most people think, flowers are damn difficult to photograph.

One only has to look at Irving Penn's work to understand why.

Pure and elegant lilies and orchids. Sumptuous roses and peonies. Quirky tulips, crazy begonias. And gloriously red poppies - my favorites. You hold your breath and can’t stop thinking how much time and love and hard work and meticulous effort went into every single image.

Penn says in the brief introduction to the album, that he is drawn to “flowers considerably after they have passed that point of perfection, when they have already begun spotting and browning and twisting on their way back to earth."

Going back to earth. Spotting and browning and twisting… It’s never just about flowers.

I can’t stop looking at this album.

It rained a lot last night, but morning rose bright and beautiful. October sun. Wet leaves, which are just beginning to turn color, glitter on the sidewalk getting ready to go back to earth. I like the smell.

Should I grab my camera? No, not today. Penn is a little intimidating...

PS. The person who got Salgado from me deserves to have this album far more than I do. No regrets. I would still do it, even if it was $10,000. Or maybe even slightly more :>

deep blacks and a kind of quality

2009-10-02T12:52:00.008-04:00

Did I mention that I am not a great fan of Robert Frank's sloppy, grainy style, yet I find his photographs very powerful?

Well, here comes Elliott Erwitt:

"Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy - the tone range isn't right and things like that - but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention."

photographer with a shaky hand

2009-09-27T10:18:00.115-04:00

"The crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral – that’s what Robert Frank captured," said Jack Kerouack in the introduction to The Americans. Exactly fifty years ago. "A sad poem sucked out of America onto film."

The exhibit commemorating publication of what was to become, arguably, one of the most important albums in the history of contemporary photography, just opened at the Met in New York.

If you happen to know Polish, you might want to read a story I wrote for Tygodnik Powszechny last spring, when the exhibit opened at the National Gallery in Washington DC. If not, have a look at the review that The New York Times had a few days ago, or a longer piece in the New Yorker.

By all means visit the exhibit.

I had a chance to see the famously reclusive photographer (he still lives on Bleecker Street in New York, but hardly ever appears in public) last spring at the National Gallery, where he took part in a conversation with Sarah Greenough, exhibit curator and a long-time friend.

Yes, his hands still shake (so did mine, when I took this photo). He is still his old self – a little rough, contrarian, full of humor and irony.

I am not a great fan of his style – in fact, I find many of his grainy, sloppy, shaky photographs a little annoying. Yet, I find them very inspiring.

Frank spent about nine months travelling across 30 states. Mostly on his own, because, as he explained, what he intended to do, required solitude. He came back to New York with 276 rolls of films, some 27,000 images. It took him more than a year to prepare an album containing just 83 photographs.

He wanted to create a narrative "that would stand up to Life magazine picture stories with heir goddamn beginning, middle and the end, but not be like them."

He did. It really is the editing – his way of juxtaposing images, using irony, contradictions paradox – that makes The Americans so powerful.

A Jewish immigrant (he came to the States from Switzerland shortly after World War II), Frank was accused of being an enemy within – an ungrateful foreigner, who is full of hatred and contempt for his new homeland. Yes, he was critical. His is a sad poem sucked out of America onto film – images of bleak cities, devil-like factories, alienated people.

Yet there is something huntingly beautiful in these shaky, grainy images. They are a work of difficult love – mature enough to accept, and perhaps even celebrate, contradictions. Painful, yet tender; brutal and delicate at the same time.