Hopes and fears
- The Australian
- June 11, 2011
PHOTOGRAPHY was not invented in America, and many of its greatest exponents have been European; but somehow America feels like its natural home. Reality there is skin deep but vivid, momentary, ungrounded, with a raw and naive quality that photography is perfectly adapted to capturing.
North America represented the modern world in its pure form; its great cities were the visible crystallisation of evolving industrial and capitalist society, whereas in Europe the new was always superimposed on the old, as it had been repeatedly since antiquity, in an ever more complex palimpsest.
Europe has always been, and remains, the homeland of memory; but when migrants moved to America, the country of opportunity, it seems the implicit corollary was to leave the past behind. Amnesia was a way of abolishing regrets and nostalgia, and opening oneself to a new beginning.
America itself was a place with no memories for the new arrivals, so anything was possible. People whose ancestors had subsisted as peasants or craftsmen for half a millennium in central Europe suddenly transformed themselves into entrepreneurs and proprietors, sometimes into millionaires. On the other hand, if things went wrong, everything could vanish without a trace, unsupported by traditions or communal structures.
There is a photograph by Weegee in American Dreams, at Bendigo Art Gallery, that epitomises this phenomenon. It shows several drunks asleep or slumped on a footpath in about 1940.
The one in the foreground wears a pinstriped suit; he was successful or at least respectable, it seems, moments ago and now something has gone wrong and his life has slipped into free fall. Once again it is as though his own memory and those of others concerning him have been erased and he is no one.
This disconcerting image is one of an absorbing collection that Tansy Curtin, the curator of the exhibition, has chosen from the enormous holdings of Eastman House, the former house of George Eastman, the founder of Kodak and the man who made cameras widely accessible at the end of the 19th century. The exhibition includes familiar and unfamiliar images, almost all of them in original prints made by the photographers themselves, many of them very subtle and beautiful.
The first picture we encounter is an enigmatic one by which is suggested the exhibition's title: it is a night scene by W. Eugene Smith (1955), the foreground occupied by a letterbox and a street sign with the single word Dream; in the middle ground a car is parked at an uncomfortable angle on the kerbside. The rest of the composition, strangely still, is filled with dark trees and hedges.
It is a reminder that this world of alternating hopes and hopelessness has its own distinctive weirdness, the peculiar mix of ambition, delusion and even madness captured by David Lynch in films such as Mulholland Drive and more recently alluded to in a different way in another film, Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road, based on the novel by Richard Yates (1962). It is a picture of the misery and tragedy that can result from ill-founded aspirations and the fallacious belief in possibility, which are diametrically opposed to European assumptions of tradition and continuity.
If Dream Street serves as a kind of preface, the exhibition really begins with a beautiful picture of a young girl sketching from nature, subtle, shadowy and sparingly defined by touches of light, taken by Gertrude Kaesebier in 1903. She was one of the group that pioneer Alfred Stieglitz brought together as the Photo-Secessionists, and the subject echoes their belief that photography should be taken seriously as an art form.
The ambitions of the pictorialists are represented in several early pieces, but the most prominent tendency, and the one that seems to fit the social realities of America most aptly, is social documentation. America may live in the shallow foreground space of the present rather than the depths of memory, but it has an insatiable appetite for introspection, inherited, no doubt, from the puritan examination of conscience and exacerbated by psychoanalysis.
The documentary work is particularly stark, corresponding to the harsh conditions of contemporary life, in the pictures of a century ago. Paul Strand's Blind Woman (1915), for example, with one eye closed and the other open but unseeing, off at an angle, a label around her neck proclaiming her blindness, is like a glimpse into the abyss of an almost unliveable existence.
Other pictures, such as Lewis Hine's 1905 Climbing into America, record the arrival of the people who would become new Americans: central European immigrants are going up a staircase at Ellis Island, soon to abandon the exotic hats and moustaches they are still wearing to become modern, well-fed but blank and amnesic workers of the kind evoked in the same photographer's famous Powerhouse Mechanic (1920), the unforgettable image of man serving machine.
Wealth and technological progress are evoked in a remarkable image by Margaret Bourke-White. It is the giant head of an eagle, symbol of the Chrysler corporation and figurehead of its cars, made of sheet steel and projecting from the company building. The picture recalls nothing so much as the gargoyles of Notre Dame, of which one of the more elaborate was the subject of a famous etching by Charles Meryon (1850); White's modern and industrial gargoyle similarly broods over the dark and sprawling city beneath.
Poverty subsists in the shadows of that city, as we have already seen in Weegee's picture of the drunks; another of his images shows children huddled together, sleeping on the landing of a fire escape, and a third is a brutal image of crime. Murder in Hell's Kitchen (c. 1940) shows a dead man in a dark suit, lying with his face smashed into the footpath in a pool of blood. The figure is in the upper part of the composition and the space devoted to the bare pavement - empty but for the revolver still lying there - gives the picture a quality of grim realism, sober rather than sensational.
Tiny and beautiful prints by Tina Modotti evoke the life of Mexico, which seems to belong to another century; a pictorialist feeling for composition and tonal structure lifts these pictures beyond the immediacy of documentation and endows them with an aura of timelessness.
One of Dorothea Lange's famous pictures of a poor, almost certainly illiterate migrant mother in California (1936) - among the few reprints in the show - speaks of rural poverty at home as well.
American documentary photographers venture overseas with World War II and take some of their most memorable images, including Frank Capa's famous picture of the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach (1944) and another by Bourke-White of two little boys poisoned by their German mother as her world fell apart with the fall of the Nazi Reich.
After the war, the documentary tendency becomes less tragic and more whimsical, as in Garry Winogrand's series Women are Beautiful (1972), in one of which a girl reading the paper seems to have escaped from a gaggle of mannequins in a store window, while in a second picture we see another girl talking in a phone booth - presumably to a boyfriend - while other lives pass by unawares.
In the work of Diane Arbus, though, the whimsical note veers towards the poignant and even the grotesque, and Nan Goldin's picture of a couple kissing on a couch (1988) recalls, in its very abandon, the highly ambivalent attitude of the Americans towards sexuality, another of their subjects for constant self-examination.
America is a place where a man can sack all the workers in a factory and be admired for his courage and leadership, but where a sexual peccadillo means public humiliation, media inquisition and disgrace. (This was written a week before the Dominique Strauss-Kahn allegations, which are more serious but still illustrate the same principle.)
It doesn't help that those caught out have all too often been loudly preaching the puritanical values they have flouted in private and have even joined in attacks on earlier victims.
But hypocrisy is endemic in American society and culture. Sex is the fuel of the film and pop music industries, and sex, whether as outright titillation, pseudo-advice or gossip, is what sells both men's and women's glossy magazines.
It is an alienated world in which women have to be packaged like whores but are supposed to remain, in reality, pure and nice; men are meant to be virile conquerors, but any actual infidelity will have wives hysterically calling the divorce lawyer. Cinema and television in particular are the vehicles for an unrelenting obsession that never quite amounts to a frank recognition of both the beauty and the darkness of the sexual drive.
The earliest picture with a sexual theme is a beautiful nude by Edward Weston, a girl folded almost into an abstract shape - a point emphasised by its juxtaposition with another picture by Weston, of a red pepper, lit in such a way as to emphasise its almost anthropomorphic curves. The formal elegance of Weston's nude is nicely offset by the touches of body hair that remind us of a time when women were less thoroughly indoctrinated into self-objectification.
Richard Avedon's famous picture of a naked Nastassja Kinski wrapped in a very phallic boa constrictor (1981) is witty as well as sexy, forming an interesting dialogue with Edward Steichen's picture of Mae West (1933), the actress famous for her suggestive remarks; but Avedon's picture seems merely camp compared with the two symmetrical, matching but different pictures of a powerful black nude by Robert Mapplethorpe (1981); the contentious parts are reduced to silhouettes, unlike some other photographs by the same artist, but the relevant point is amply made.
If there is a beyond in the American imagination - some ultimate backdrop to the social introspection and sexual anxiety - it is, as we can see in countless films, the natural environment of the land. Here it is particularly well represented in the beautiful photographs of Ansel Adams, evoking the sublime of the American wilderness through the play of momentary light effects on spectacular mountain scenery.
"I expected them to be bigger," said one visitor to another with a touch of disappointment; but it is really their small size that concentrates the vision, demands the viewer's attention and avoids the rhetorical exaltation of some 19th-century American landscape paintings.
Stephen Shore's colour photographs - exceptions in a mostly black-and-white exhibition - are at first sight as different as possible from Adams's landscapes: flat expanses of arid land traversed by highways. But they also evoke the vastness of the natural environment, although now in the sense of emptiness.
And as in Australia, we recognise the melancholy of a land on which nothing has ever been built, and where the first structures we have made speak only of banality.
American Dreams, Bendigo Art Gallery, until July 10
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theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/hopes-and-fears/story-e6frg8n6-1226
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