“To Show Our World Now”: The Midcentury Photographers Who Balanced Reportage with Artistry
From W. Eugene Smith to Dorothea Lange, photography in the 1950s and ’60s was alive with the tensions between record and metaphor.
Dorothea Lange, Bad Trouble over the Weekend, 1965, from Aperture, Fall 1969
© The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and courtesy Art Resource, NY
If the eye has a focal distance for any particular scene, might it also have a focal period, a time span in which an image can be apprehended in perfect focus? The idea occurs to me because of a possibility floated in the last Aperture of the 1960s, a monograph dedicated to W. Eugene Smith that gathers together his sublime expressionist images of atrocity, deprivation, and ordinary pleasure, from the invasion of Iwo Jima to Charlie Chaplin, Haiti, and the KKK.
Cover and spread of Aperture, Winter 1969, with photographs by W. Eugene Smith
In an afterword on Smith’s work, subtitled “Success or Failure: Art or History,” the critic, collector, and all-around polymath Lincoln Kirstein chews over the contested status of the photograph, coolly disparaging both its elevation to fetishized art object and its capacity for intercession in the realm of realpolitik. Nope and nope. A photograph can’t stop a war. The notion that war causes injury and horror is news to no one, from Homer on. The evidence a photograph brings home has long since been preceded by maimed veterans and body bags unloaded from military vessels. But one thing Kirstein thinks a photograph might do is address the future, specifically the new world order of the twenty-first century: “They may have their small if solid use by that world then to show our world now.”
© Bullock Family Photography LLC
In the same essay, Kirstein says of the photographer, “His greatest service is the seizure of the metaphorical moment.” That’s a great, if weirdly organized, sentence. You might more typically be inclined to write it as verb, not noun: “to seize,” as in snatch or secure, rather than “the seizure,” which carries with it simultaneous meanings of possessing and going into spasm. Seizure is not so dissimilar to Roland Barthes’s punctum, with its suggestion of an image that arrests the heart.
© Bullock Family Photography LLC
I want to take Kirstein at his word, to see what the world of the ’60s looks like from the platform of now, seen by way of a few seizures of the metaphorical moment that caught my eye. Let’s start in Fall 1961, with a sequence by Wynn Bullock that seems, at first glance, concerned with natural surface textures, especially where they offer stark contrasts. Redwoods, abandoned cabins, a collapsing bank. The standout picture is of a burned chair against a burned wooden wall. It’s an account of aesthetic process, a fascinated investigation into the sheeny, scaly properties of charcoal. But hasn’t something unpleasant happened here, to folk unknown? One of the costs of seizing the metaphorical moment is that it necessitates severing the threads of narrative.
Bullock’s burnt chair exemplifies a tension that runs right through the ’60s issues, made under the ardent stewardship of Minor White, between what a photograph can be and what a photograph can show, which is to say the artistic impulse versus that of documentary. Take Bad Trouble over the Weekend (1964) by Dorothea Lange, from the Fall 1969 issue. The down-home phrasing serves as an additional button of veracity on this portrait of devastation, testimony to a dire sociopolitical situation. Yet the surfaces are as finely recorded as Bullock’s: knitted collar, worn wedding band, thin hair, thin hands covering the face, the black stub of a cigarette. It’s a Raymond Carver story condensed to a single frame, a universal semaphore for distress. And the cause of the trouble? Long gone, along with the subject’s name.
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
Ray K. Metzker, whose sequence “My Camera and I in the Loop” appears in the Summer 1961 issue, is particularly articulate about the slippage between image and record. A choreography of solid bodies—cuffed/shirted/skirted/shod in white—emerges from slabs of urban dark, as theatrical in their composition as anything by Edward Hopper or Fritz Lang. Hardly reportage, except it is. “I began shooting,” Metzker explains, “in accord with my socioliteral viewpoint. The resulting pictures could not stand alone; they needed the propping of verbal explanation to exist.” Gradually, over the course of a painful winter, he saw that a photograph wasn’t anything save a “composition of light.” What it communicated or recorded was not as important to Metzker as the encounter between camera and eye: “To photograph is to be involved with form in its primal state.”
Even the most fantastical image betrays something about the world, not to mention about the person making it.
But is pure form any more attainable than pure reportage? Even the most fantastical image betrays something about the world, not to mention about the person making it. The Summer 1965 issue includes a series of dream scenes constructed by Edmund Teske. They’re layered, pictorial, artificial, melancholic, wistful, fey. Toward the end of the run, there’s a portrait of a man painting, his cold hawk’s face in profile. The eye travels down a lovely ogee: nape, shoulder, buttock. Something unsaid here, a secret pulse.
This curve reminds me of another story Kirstein told. His essay on Smith culminates with a little epilogue, the story of an anonymous journalist friend he calls Jerry. It’s 1942, and Jerry doesn’t want to be drafted. Finally, one hard-drinking night, he admits he’ll say he’s queer rather than risk being shot up. Kirstein needs to use the bathroom; Jerry doesn’t want to let him. When Kirstein does finally enter, he discovers the room is pasted floor to ceiling with Smith’s photographs of the Pacific landings, stolen from the Time magazine offices. Dead boys in Eden. “Did Jerry sit there and amuse himself by shots of Tarawa?” Kirstein wonders cruelly. “Now you know,” Jerry says as Kirstein reemerges. “I can’t take it. I’m scared. Did you see those pictures?” When Kirstein comments mockingly on their beautiful composition, poor Jerry cries out: “They’re real.”
I wonder, was Jerry a good reader of photography or not? He refused to accept the photograph as a composition of light. For him, it was a memo from the future: watch out. Everything extraneous had been scraped away, until there was just the moment, a seizure that could stop the heart. Who knows what the boys were called, or even what they’d done. It was the pictures that were real now.
This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue,” under the title “Did You See Those Pictures?”
