News & Local Views:
Three Photographers
By coincidence, three photographers associated with the photo agency Magnum have just had shows. Besides their grounding in photojournalism and a preference for black and white, viewing the three shows points out other similarities. All three of these photographers are storytellers of the common people, compiling a personal photo album for the planet's news and local views. Their angle is neighborly with an urgency to herald the familiarity of the just seen. They point out what's worth remembering about your last half hour.They don't merely shoot events. They show the human reaction to situations both ordinary and extreme. We see the subjects of their photos being affected by what's going on around them: Moments of daily existence reveal the poetry, visionary and undisguised, rampant at those instants. The three photographers share a compassion for their subjects and a commitment to them that surpasses the act of making pretty pictures.
Josef Koudelka
International Center of Photography (May 6–July 10, 1988)
Josef Koudalka's black and white photos invade the deepest regions of our imaginations. His shots of the gypsies of Czechoslovakia and Romania transfix us to the practically archaic earthiness of peasant, village life. But they're not merely a record of an out-of-the-way locale, though on that level they're certainly informative as documents. He's not a tourist to these places. We feel his kinship with his subjects as he snaps scenes forbidden to the casual outsider: funeral blasts, dinner inside the mud-seamed cabin.Sometimes a slightly out-of-focus graininess accents these dramatic tone poems, his breathy statement softening the harshness of the scene. In sparse interiors the sitters are lit by the daylight that penetrates lace curtains to cast its gentle glow. There's just enough light to illustrate the common earth magic enchanting these nomads. They sit nobly, proud amidst their fleeting homesites. A child's gaze into the camera makes all humans equal.
Each glimpse is bursting with storybook qualities like a movie condensed to one image. The dailiness explodes past the edges of the frame and continues in time as well.
The same defiance his gypsies demonstrate against their harsh geography is transferred to the situation of invasion: Russian tanks streaming unopposed into Prague in August 1968. Bravely brandishing his camera, Koudelka matches the fierce intensity and risky defiance these people showed during that time—2 youths carrying the Czech flag through an empty, litter-strewn boulevard, one's face angry, the other's desperate and tender; a woman glances over her shoulder away from the tank passing before her; in others, pedestrians shout at the troops streaming in, confronting the impenetrable steel of the tanks with the emotions of their bodies.
Koudelka moves in close enough to show the fragile reactions of the Russian soldiers as they look out to the unwelcoming party, just a bunch of boys following orders. Again, these are not mere documents. The fury of the soul is plain.
Even a seagull, in a third room of miscellaneous other snaps, is portrayed as a defiant survivor, snapped mid-flight with an expression of strong will against its surroundings, the open sea and mist-shrouded hills rising up way in the distance. The moment is translatable in every human language.
These photos say the earth takes care of its own. Koudelka finds the instants when a character and its background conspire to glimpse past the seen. He reaches past the buzz of the known to the whispers of the unknown. His shots pull the secret and suppressed thoughts of all humans to the surface. Moments where existence is questioned and found to be worth pursuing in spite of the hardships and audacious invasions.
Eugene Richards
(Union Square Gallery, May 5–May 28, 1988)
Eugene Richards sets out in this project, "Below the Line: Living Poor in America," to point out the brutal face of poverty that exists around us in the places we try not to look. He follows the trail that leads to the bedridden, the dirty-fingernailed, the tear-stained cheek, the pill popper isolate in his car in the chilly tenement canyons of Harlem, the end of the line trailer park, the dimestore framed Jesus looking down on rotgut poured into a plastic cup held by an eager hand.
The shrieks and bowed heads and mothers comforting their tired children speak from the shadowland of this nation. The faces emerge to attest to survival. He illustrates the struggle to hang on while pointing out the unbelievable despair of the bodies heavy with dreary labor and the interiors where the plaster's fallen in. In one shot, a lone pickup drives into the ghost-like fury of a fading horizon, tempted by the hop of finding some morsel of hope further on down the line.
The joy has been stripped from these situations. What might in other contexts be a joyous scene, is here blatantly terrible: a young kerchiefed mom kissing the upraised foot of her naked baby whose little mouth screams out the bleakness of their tenement squalor—no mercy from the urban harshness.
The folks cling to each other at desperate moments. In a church basement, a group in their Sunday best-sweaters, coats and caps on, stand around amidst the folding chairs. Comfort is transient.
This photographer has traveled around the country and entered the shacks of the shantytowns to expose the prolonged siesta time behind the clapboard and plastic sheet insulation, where a dented Budweiser can and ever-present pack of Marlboros serve as accouterments. The male's face is settled, the woman's eyes search the perimeter for a way out.
The book from which these photos are culled, Below the Line: Living Poor in America (Consumer Reports Books), also contains transcriptions of the subjects talking about themselves. In simple narratives, their stories unfold and we become active witnesses. A farmer spells out how the weather and the banks have been more fate than he can handle as the land that his family's worked for generations slips from his control; a rancher expresses his sadness at leaving the land he's grown up on, forced by dwindling prices for his goods to relocate away from the sunsets on the butte.
These are folks we normally wouldn't get to know. Reading their stories and having the photos lay it out, we at least have more of a sense of what they're going through. These vulnerable lives are chronicled with no sentimentality. We bring our own reactions to these investigations. What the photographer has accomplished is to select for us and make us take a good look at the face of the ignored and to see that they are like us only run into uglier fates. Most deservedly, the book won the 1987 ICP Photojournalism Award.
Rene Burri
(Burden Gallery, May 5–June 11, 1988)
Having studied with a Bauhaus master (Hans Finsler), Burri starts from a strong sense of graphic design but his images stress the human elements dominating a strict design pull. There's always a glimpse of a detail that exposes the private reaction to a public situation. There's not one particular system that is typical of his work. Rather he ranges across a palette of dark tones and grainy surfaces to show the warmth of the human response across a formal or daily situation. There's always a glance that gives away the pretense: An old man's gaze out a crowded tram focuses in on the timelessness he's a sturdy observer of.The city is rough in Burri's vision. Its alienating qualities are calibrated yet, always, there's some touch of human tenderness that supplants the cement and glass facades. A young boy is seen in one shot through a cafe's front window cutting into his late dinner while an old woman hobbles into view on the sidewalk. The cafe's blatant light rescues the scene from the city sinking into sleep.
His moments—an embrace in a bistro, a lick of an ice cream cone, a woman or women walking past a group of businessmen or soldiers—identify traits and passions we're all familiar with. Though we're quick to recognize the scenarios, we're not accustomed to appreciating the reverberations and magnitude. His modern, open-eyed looking places the ordinary moment on stage so that we can focus our attention on the glimpse we might ordinarily walk past without a thought.
Burri points out for us the frailties and strengths rampant in an encounter's frozen instant. Even in a view of buildings he shows the modern structure, with its unrelenting geometric grid patterns, contrasted with the old, with its warmth of accomplished stonework and frilly embellishment.
Burri's obsession is with framing the soulful face against the sterility of the environment man's created. This playful contrast celebrates the persistence of those eternal qualities in humankind that will last longer than the cities.