Photography - Our Man in Boston

The Coffee Table • Power to the Peaceful

Having studied with Gary Winogrand and been critically well-regarded (by Susan Sontag, among others), photographer Mitch Epstein early eschewed the artsy conceit of black-and-white photography to experiment with and perfect his use of color. This concentration is first in evidence in his early works and books created from his travels in Vietnam and India. His latest tome, American Power (Steidl), completes the personal trilogy he began in the mid-’90s with The City and then followed in 1999 with the second volume, Family Business. From 2003 through 2008, spurred by the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and Hurricane Katrina, Epstein traveled around the United States to sites producing all types of energy—fossil fuel, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar. The purpose of this “energy tourism” was to exhibit some nexus between electrical and political power. The 64 color plates in this monograph are his eloquent portrayal of 21st-century America: a culture at a critical crossroads.

A New York Times reviewof an exhibit of the photos included in this book offers this:

What is interesting, beyond the haunting, complicated beauty and precision of these images, is Mr. Epstein’s ability to merge what have long been considered opposing terms: photo-conceptualism and so-called documentary photography. He utilizes the supersize scale and saturated color of conceptualism… [These] images [also have] a look that is at once real and unreal—or, as people who witness a catastrophe say, “surreal.”

By now it should go without saying that this Steidl photo book is well published and includes an essay by Epstein, who ponders the role of the artist in a crucial time. And it should be noted that while the photos are well reproduced, the originals measure 70x92—quite an eyeful. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 23, 2009

» View images from American Power.

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The Coffee Table • Eyes Have It

The Scott Dadich-designed Periodical Photographs (Aperture) by award-winning editorial photographer Dan Winters collects and features 90 full-color images (some of which have appeared in New York, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine), including such diverse subjects as Gwyneth Paltrow, Denzel Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono, Eminem, Willie Nelson, Joyce Carol Oates, Heath Ledger, the Dalai Lama, Fred Rogers (and separately, his trademark red cardigan), Barack Obama, Tom Waits, an American eagle, and some startling miscellaneous images.

In her concise preface, Lynn Hirschberg points out that “photographers like Winters are a dying breed: One of the current problems with celebrity portraiture is the tendency to turn the photograph into a brand-oriented fashion picture”—a development she lays at the feet of Tina Brown (of her Vanity Fair incarnation) and by extension, celebrity celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Hirschberg goes on to claim that “this sort of fashion/celebrity photography may help the bottom line but it has been largely detrimental for portraiture.”

Winters, who moved to Driftwood, Texas (pop. 27) in 1993 after his son Dylan was born, clearly eschews the unfortunate commercial drift mentioned above, as Hirschberg concludes:

…he seems like a small town guy with a multitude of interests. If you look at the photo of his desktop [which faces the text of this essay], a still life that he changes and curates regularly, you get a sense of his fascination with the last 60 years of America. The photographs in this book have the same historical resonance: They are true evocations of people and things that define their time. The power of these photos is their ability to trigger emotion, identification, and finally a sort of collective memory.

—Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 9, 2009

» View images from Periodical Photographs.

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The Coffee Table • It’ll Last Longer

Photography has changed dramatically in the past 20 years—beyond the mutations caused by digital technology. In the ’80s, advertising led by fashion and lifestyle products began to look for a more editorial feel and impact, and so portraiture broke out of a formalist straightjacket. This was also true of fashion photography, and to complement this transformation there were all kinds of hip and exciting magazines that showcased emerging photographic talent: Interview (when Marc Balet was the art director), Big, L.A. Style—hell, I even published such a magazine in Boston (Stuff). Brigitte Lacombe’s career roughly parallels that boom. Though she did both commercial and fashion editorial work, it was through her chance encounter with Dustin Hoffman and Donald Sutherland at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival that led to career-long devotion to her first love: portraiture (seen here and here).

Thus she has worked on countless film sets with renowned directors such as Martin Scorsese, Alan Pakula, Mike Nichols, Sam Mendes, David Mamet, Spike Jonze, Stephen Daldry, Anthony Minghella, and Steven Spielberg. Brigitte Lacombe: Anima / Persona (Steidldangin) is a 420-page retrospective monograph of 192 photos that includes portraits—many in black and white—of Barack Obama, Viggo Mortensen, Nicole Kidman, Francois Truffaut, Brice Marden, Joan Didion, Kate Winslet, Jack Nicholson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Miuccia Prada, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi (under house arrest in Myanmar), Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. Like most Steidl titles, Anima / Persona is beautifully reproduced and elegantly designed—it does cause me to speculate how long publishers will continue to make such marvelous and to-be-treasured books. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 26, 2009

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Current Reads • The Artist Accused

Photographer Philippe Halsman snapped some of the planet’s most famous faces—Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Bob Hope, and countless others—and his portraits adorned more than 100 Life covers, when the magazine was a weekly publication and a real media force. Drawing on his experiences shooting a gaggle of NBC comedians—including Milton Berle, Ed Wynn, Sid Caesar, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, and Red Skelton—Halsman famously began asking some of his “serious” subjects (the Ford Family, Richard Nixon) to jump during their photo sessions. For according to Halsman: “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.”

Austin Ratner’s novel The Jump Artist (Bellvue Literary Press) is based on little-recalled events that took place earlier in Halsman’s life, when his father died on a hiking trip through Austria and, in an unbelievable miscarriage of justice, Halsman was accused and convicted of the crime. In what was called “The Austrian Dreyfus Affair,” influential intellectuals (including Einstein) were able to overcome the virulently hostile anti-Semitism of that time and place to secure Halsman’s freedom and exoneration. Ratner’s rendition vividly depicts his character’s ordeal and amazing recovery from the trauma of the event.

Charles Baxter, whose praise should go a long way to helping readers take up this tome, effuses: “This is a book about joy and despair, anti-Semitism and assimilation, and like a great photograph, it seems to miss nothing, and to catch its subject in all his complexity.” —Robert Birnbaum, May. 27, 2009

» Read an excerpt from The Jump Artist

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Reading • Nicaragua

There is an open question on what character flaw or personality disorder causes me to lord over people who don’t know anything about Nicaragua or at least where it is located. No doubt it will be given ample consideration in my memoir (current working title: Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words). To be fair, I had only the faintest idea myself until sometime in the late ‘80s, when I read a William Greider piece in Rolling Stone set in Managua, in which photojournalist Susan Meiselas informed him there were only two working elevators in the whole country. (By the way, Chester Bowles, a Kennedy-era diplomat reportedly quipped that Managua, Nicaragua, looked/sounded like a typographical error.)

Now comes a republication of Meiselas’s classic monograph, Nicaragua, shot in the waning days of the cruel, corrupt—and U.S.-sponsored—Somoza regime and in the glory days of the Sandanista revolution. This new edition includes Pictures From a Revolution, a DVD in which Meiselas returns to the scenes she originally photographed and searches out and talks with the subjects of the photographs. Additionally, there is a lucid interview with Meiselas about this project. And last but certainly not least, the International Center of Photography in Manhattan honors the MacArthur fellow, Magnum photographer Meiselas with an exhibition. —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 8, 2008

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Reading • André Kertész: On Reading

The ubiquity of digital cameras and the avalanche of images whose lives are wholly lived on hard drives, as well as other aspects of 21st-century visual aesthetics, make black-and-white photography seem like some arcane ritual practiced in far-off time by god-artists named Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and André Kertész. In his day, Kertész was a key participant in making the then-new highly portable 35mm rangefinders an indispensable instrument in the liberation of photography from fixed, large-format pachyderms. In fact, Cartier-Bresson once said of himself and fellow photographers Robert Capa and Brassaï: “Whatever we have done, Kertész did first.”

In his career, which spanned from 1920 to 1970, Kertész collected photographs in Hungary, France, and the United States of scenes depicting reading. First published in 1971 and long out of print, On Reading brings new life to those 65 photographs in a handsome, reformatted new edition curated by Robert Gurbo. An exhibit of the photos recently departed Chicago and is now on its way to Portland, Maine, and points beyond:

Aug. 30 to Nov. 16, 2008: Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Maine)
Jan. 23 to March 22, 2009: Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids Mich.)
Sept. 12 to Dec. 31, 2009: Cornell Fine Arts Center (Winter Park, Fla.)
Feb. 20 to April 18, 2010: Cannon Art Gallery (Carlsbad, Calif.)
Oct. 23 to Dec. 19, 2010: Fresno Metropolitan Museum (Fresno, Calif.)

—Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 19, 2008

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About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Saturday, March 20, 2010