Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [143]
Bourke-White, “At the Time of the Louisville Flood,” 1937, collection of the George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University, NY. Bourke-White’s broad, poster like style shows the unemployed on a breadline during the Depression, ironically revealing the gap between the American dream and reality.
“At the peak of her distinguished career,” she “was willing and eager as any beginner on a first assignment. She would get up at daybreak to photograph a bread crumb, if necessary.” “Sometimes I could murder someone who gets in my way when I’m taking a picture,” Bourke-White said. “I become irrational. There is only one moment when a picture is there, and an instant later it is gone — gone forever.”
In World War II and the Korean War, Bourke-White, heeding war photographer Robert Capa’s advice: “If your pictures are no good, you aren’t close enough,”faced danger on the front lines. She unflinchingly recorded the dazed faces of survivors when Buchenwald was liberated. Her work for Life magazine both popularized the photo-essay and opened the way for women to compete with male journalists, proving women were physically and technically capable of such a demanding task.
Adams, “Sand Dunes, White Sands National Monument, N.M.,” c.1942, Courtesy of Trustees for Ansel Adams Trust, NY. A master of landscape photography, Adams was legendary for his technical skill, as seen in this balanced, controlled picture composed with precise clarity.
ADAMS: THE AMERICAN WEST. When he was 14, Ansel Adams (1902-84) took his first picture with a Brownie box camera of mountain peaks in the Yosemite Valley. For the next six decades, he took pictures of Yosemite, each a technically perfect rendition of unspoiled nature. “Big country — space for heart and imagination,” he described it. The preeminent photographer of the American West, Adams never grew bored with these scenes. A conservationist and mountaineer, he loved the wilderness intensely and believed “a great photograph is a full expression of what one feels.”
With Stieglitz, Weston, and Paul Strand, Adams was a leading advocate of “straight” photography. Avoiding tricky camera angles, he previsualized his final image in a large-format view camera. This allowed him to capture the scene with rich texture, meticulous detail, and an infinite tonal range from light to dark. Above all, the quality of light infuses Adams’s scenes with drama. Shades vary from clear white to inky black, dividing his photographs into distinct zones. Trained as a pianist, Adams brought the same technical control to photography and achieved virtuoso prints that shine with clarity. A photograph, he believed, is “an instrument of love and revelation.”
STREET PHOTOGRAPHY. In the ’60s, with the rise of Pop art and Venturi’s stress on vernacular architecture, a new style of photography arose called “snapshot aesthetic.” Professionals deliberately framed casual, unposed photos resembling amateur efforts in order to banish traces of artifice. In this head-on approach, “street photographers” like Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Joel Meyerowitz documented the “social landscape” of cities.
Arbus, known for her images of “freaks” — transvestites, hermaphrodites, giants, and dwarfs — brought the most harrowing eye to this task. Yet she approached these marginal people without prejudging them. What seems most bizarre in her work are the shots of “normal” people, fixed in unrehearsed poses that transform them into grotesques. In one picture of a mother and child, the mother’s fingers seem to be squeezing the life out of her son, who drools a river of spittle and glares at the camera. In a 1972 retrospective at