Shooting the Exact: Some Photography Shows
Photography shows opened this season on a scale that seems unprecedented. The audience is obviously growing steadily and perhaps the form might be attaining the public acceptance and appreciation it's always deserved. With major shows by Andre Kertesz at ICP-Midtown, Henri Cartier-Bresson at MOMA, and Edward Weston at the Met, some signal should be going out that photography has earned the recognition of the culture czars.
Should Kertesz devotees feel slighted that his show is off the Museum Mile? Well, yes. With 25 incredible books and a body of work that spans the century defining the essence of everything he aimed his lens at—from bucolic Hungarian peasant life, to soldiers leaving for and at the front, Paris's street and park charms, playful nude distortions, to NY's quiet moments—this giant of measured stillness should be receiving the plaudits, media attention, and museum backing awarded artists in more accepted fields. The important point is, though, that this is a major show and a good opportunity, also, to see the hospitable gallery space ICP-Midtown has transformed the ground floor of a large office tower into. (Check out their serious lecture and workshop schedule.)
Among the nearly 50 photography shows in Manhattan galleries, museums, Ys and alternative spaces listed in this week's NY Times, the following reviews of three of the best attempt to give a taste of the variety and pleasures waiting.
John Kennard
O.K. Harris, Sept. 19–Oct. 10, 1987)
You don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy these epic shots that take us for a tour around America via its ballparks—from the local sandlot, Little League and high school fields to the minor league parks to the big time pro stadiums, from bush league to Busch stadium. How more accurate to get a true sampling of the American character than to visit its ballparks shooting portraits of the fans and the intense action on the fields. It's not merely a variety of characters he brings back but a precise definition of the make-up of the American people and its landscape.
Kennard has a startling ability to relax his subjects so their poses show them off to their natural best. Every individual molecule of personality is there on the surface, drawn out by his lens. The eyes looking into that lens are not so confrontational but accepting of the photographer's effort to portray them in a setting almost as comfortable as their own homes. It's truly remarkable that he consistently has been able to do that in these shots—from the cross-section of hometown fans to gruff, barely civil college umpires to the yearning minor leaguers to seasoned lifers right up to one of the game's greatest players, Boston's Wade Boggs, posed easily, leaning on his formidable bat in an eerily empty Fenway Park outfield, hours before a game. In another shot, the batting instructor for a Mets farm team, Tommy Holmes, is posed with his white hair showing beneath his cap but still demonstrating the perfect batting stance.
Kennard's wide lens is perfectly gauged for his shots from right behind home plate with the perspective lines drawn to the left and right field foul poles and that vista of a field spread out before us. What can be more inviting than the site of an empty ball field, say one in Duanesburg, NY, with the lawn nicely cut, the infield smooth, the outfield fences looking very reachable, the American flag blowing taut in the wind right dab in centerfield, and the tree-blanketed landscape stretching out to the horizon's rolling hills. Soft, white puff clouds float in the vast open sky overhead touched with gray at the bottom but there's really no chance of rain. The hand-lettered billboards flush against the centerfield fence, promoting very local business, are like some folk-art treasure found in a roadside junk shop off any highway lined with trees. In another shot, the cardboard signs on the table announce a 7th inning raffle and a big weekend bus trip to see the hometown Utica Blue Sox versus rival Niagara Falls—only 44 seats. The provincial loyalties fly in this compilation of local snaps.
It's unavoidable getting swept up in the sentiment that this show ties together once you realize how deep these scenes reach into you and how integral baseball is to our make-up. Kennard's vision is right on target, precisely accurate because he's not bringing an attitude along, he's not shooting with any preconceived prejudice. He doesn't have a grudge against the world and doesn't try to make people look stupid.
That clear-eyed peanut vendor in her sparkling clean uniform with the bow tie perfect, probably glad to be away from her schoolwork, is posed like an innocent version of a Frans Hals barmaid offering up the goods. Who's that sitting alone in the vastness of some gabled bleachers with his two cups of coffee, intent on a scoreboard?
In Fans, Geneva, NY 1983, four senior guys dressed in plaid pants and 30-year-old shirts and sweaters still in good shape, a walking cane hanging from the iron railing right at home, sit together comfortably in a local grandstand ready for the afternoon's game with time enough to entertain the photographer with their natural look. We see hardware store, gardener, machine operator written all over these gents.
This is contrasted nicely with Fans, Pawtucket, RI, 1983, hung directly below, which is a similar arrangement of four 11- or 12-year-old boys sitting politely for the shot in some arena's ocean-vast layering of white wooden seats.
His stunning portraits zero in on their subjects contrasting them simply and powerfully against the background space like Manet's fife player or a 19th-century portrait of an Indian. There's just the right balance of negative space. He's able to bring out the sad, sweet charm in the Irish faces of the two ushers shot during batting practice at Shea or the gentle, innocent gangliness of a teenage pretzel vendor outside Gate 4 of Yankee Stadium or the pinnacle essence of a young boy displaying an autographed hardball. These subjects fill the frame's rectangle with a firm grace as the rhythms of their solid forms leading up to the crescendo of their great eye contact and the soft background fills in around them like waves rolling into shore.
What's dad doing pitching in a kid's game on a Pt. Pleasant, NJ field with short fences? Well, showing his kid, standing stoically beside him at the pitcher's mound, how to be doing it with men on 1st and 3rd, the four outfielders playing shallow against a small no-batter and another active dad coaching at first. In another action shot, at Shea Stadium, some blur of a player is sliding safely into 3rd beating the shortstop's relay throw as another blur charges into home safely, standing up. The centerfielder's over in left center still frozen in the last gesture of his throwing the ball in. Studying the action in these shots is like being a kid again playing with little toy men.
In another diorama shot, the menacing, bothersome shadows of St. Louis's Busch Stadium coat the pool-table-like Astroturf field with a ring of obloid patches where the sun shines through the outline of the beautiful stadium's circle of crowning arches. A long-haired Keith Hernandez (#37) is standing hat to heart right on 1st base as territorial as a lion with its kill, not paying very close attention to the national anthem warbling through the empty stadium.
These shots also document a reaching into the past as old-time America persists into the present in some of the old structures shown here: the rickety hometown ball parks with their wobbly broadcast booths and bleacher seats, too unique and cherished to have suffered the fate of the rest of the neighborhood's ramshackle structures. The black and white with its really tremendous variety of shadings, shadows and passing light connects us back to the mythology of similar scenes played back in times past with butt-cigar smoking bleacher bums and Mel Allen or Red Barber calling the plays.
These people take this game so seriously that the 10-year-old batboy stands crouched more intent than even the umpire about to make the call of a very close play at home. Home plate, the magic base, the holy grail, the flattened piece of rubber all the most heightened focus of these athletes and fans is geared to. When your team's player reaches home, it's like the release of everything ever pent up inside you. In one shot, the catcher's off line a bit. He's not blocking the plate. It'll cost his team a run in Elmire, NY.
Though these shots aren't indexing with as much variety, they are one of the most penetrating collections of portraits of the American scene and its people since Robert Frank's The Americans of the 1950s.
Helen Levitt
(Laurence Miller, Sept. 29–Nov. 8, 1987)
Helen Levitt's photos define the criteria for a classic look from the recent past. Her sparkling street snaps draw us into the poorer neighborhoods she obviously feels comfortable in and place us among the stoop dwellers, shopkeepers and, especially, kids running carefree. She's not merely documenting the working class locales of the fedora-clad 1940s, though her way of printing these gelatin silver prints to soft tones immediately signals decades past. Rather, without exploiting her subjects, she shows their psychologies and most simple, but also most eternal, surface pleasures. They stare right into our souls. Her achievement is that she doesn't impose an artifice on these scenes but, and this is exactly what very few artists can achieve, she shows the art already there. Her eye is so developed she consistently penetrates into the mystery of the casual perception.
Some of the shots could have been taken yesterday (many are recent), with Latin lovers cuddled in a subway car beneath the sprawled graffiti: "voice of the ghetto," or a sidewalk vendor collapsed napping on the hood of the open-windowed car parked beside his banana stand, or a kid riding his bike past the vacant, garbage-strewn lot of his barrio.
Levitt has the rare gift of making a composition from the passing moment with a quick shutter. Fact is, along with Walker Evans and Ben Shahn, she should be more acknowledged as one of the pioneers and most successful artists in the mode. Her shots freeze the precise instant that defines the magic of what's happening. She captures the squeals of the kids battling in the rubble or the tremendous sidewalk action of a group of kids examining a broken window while the shops behind them bustle with adult activity and leisurely hanging out. It seems almost miraculous she was able to be present for these breathless instances—just a part of the natural sequence of events but a peak instant. They are startling because they get so intimate with their subjects and are so revealing in showing them in their candid response or in a friendly confronting of the lens.
A group of eight color shots retains her brilliant sense of the form necessary to contain the reckless activity going on in these streets. It is hoped that this splendid show will introduce Ms. Levitt to a new audience and fortify her position in photography as one of the key figures of street shooting.
Sally Mann
(Marcuse Pfeifer, Fall 1987)
Though this show is called "Family Pictures" and the subjects for all the shots are the artist's three kids, these are not the sort of images you'll find in most albums. Taken with an 8x10 view camera, these large black and white prints radiate the contrasts between the blacks, shades and silvery lights. I'm strongly reminded of the work of Emmet Gowin who, too, shoots his kids and family lying around the house and backyard and also takes pleasure in revealing the erotic sensuality of their sprawling, nude bodies cushioned in the plush lawns, living room couches and dark shadows of the embracing family shelter. But often, Mann's moods are darker, even a bit grotesque for she uses photography at times to bridge the gap between her responsibilities as a mother and her passion for making art. Taking shots of one of her kids bloodied from a nosebleed or another with swollen eye and dirty face from rough-housing, or another's chicken pox-infected bare back, is a way for her to step between the pressure of her obligations as nurse-mom and her sanity as a creative human. She's not being irresponsible, the kids'll be all right, that's evident. Meanwhile, she's made alarming but sweet portraits that reveal all her kids' longing and need for attention or, more simply, the intimacy between a kid and parent.
Another brand of gruesomeness, at the same time whimsical, is shown in a shot of her little daughter primping in a glittering, frilly ballerina costume, her body twisted in a shy gesture that still shows off her thrill at being made up. She stands beside the rear of a truck from which a slaughtered deer is laid out, its young antlered head dangling towards the stone driveway, its throat cut open and a bucket filled with its blood placed nearby. The shot is both charming and grotesque.
Kids can only really look cranky and bored for a parent as a photo of two of them points out. They're shown sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, resigned to their fate, on a visit to see grandpa or whoever it is laid up in the background with the sunlight ghoulishly bleaching out his features.
It's the majesty of the kids in their realm that's shown, captured by only someone trusted enough to get close enough to be ignored or tolerated, as they romp in the plush landscape or stretch out for the remarkable nudes that show off their dormant sexuality, the stuff of myths.
She snaps the quiet moments, too: one kid at a moment of graceful abandon suspended on a tire hung from a tree in their lush yard, or the look of sophistication on her daughter's young face gazing off to the side, as if from a box at the ballet, as her torso is streaked with paint and a feather boa slinks across her belly, her arm embracing that of an older person cut off in the picture frame.
(Cover, November 1987)