From Daguerreotypes to Borges:

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From Daguerreotypes to Borges:

A PhotoTour of Los Angeles

by Stuart Lynn

Last week I visited three museums in the Los Angeles area that showcase four very different, brilliant photographic collections. Each in its own way brought home to me the far reaches of photography.

• The Bowers Museum, in Santa Anna, is hosting an exhibit 'Bridges to Understanding,' the work of internationally respected photographer Phil Borges. With stunning simplicity, his portfolio documents portraits of indigenous peoples across the world. The large format images, printed from full-frame negatives with rough black boundaries, are in black and white but faces and other exposed flesh are gently tinted. The eyes of the portraits reveal lifetimes of struggle. Yet the eyes in his portraits of smiling children barely touched by the adult world seem to accept the harshness of their surroundings. These compelling images can be understood both as exhibited in their large 4ft square format, with some backlit through glass, and in the intimate formats of the printed book (see, for example, two books of Borges' work: 'Enduring Spirit' with Isabel Allende's forward, and 'Tibetan Portrait: the Power of Compassion' with text by the Dalai Lama).

The captions are an integral part of the portraits, belying the belief that image is all there is. For example, the text accompanying Borges's portrait of Kinesi, a Samburu child living near Mt. Nyuru in Kenya, explains that he is the only one out of seven children attending school. He walks (or runs) alone for over four hours each day to the nearest schoolhouse. His mother tells how 'he runs not out of fear of predators but from the excitement of school.'

The exhibit is based on a project of the same name, 'Bridges to Understanding,' launched by Borges to link children from remote areas around the world across the Internet. Children are provided with digital cameras to document their cultures, and exchange these photos across the Internet with children from other cultures to promote greater global awareness and understanding.

'The thing that's important to know is that you never know.
You're always sort of feeling your way.'
(Arbus)

• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has assembled an incredible retrospective, 'Diane Arbus Revelations.' Arbus abandoned a career in fashion photography to document the ordinary yet extraordinary people of New York and its environs in the middle of the twentieth century. Her brilliant images shock yet evoke sympathy for the worn faces and damaged bodies of her subjects. Hers is a world in which the abnormal appears normal and the normal abnormal. She transforms the passage of entire lives into a single moment and strips away hypocrisy to reveal uncomfortable truths. In '1938 Debutante of the Year' taken some twenty years later, a cynical, ravished older caricature of the formerly young woman lolls on a silk-sheeted bed, draped in a boa, cigarette in hand burning out along with her life.

As Arbus moved deeper into a stark world of carnival sideshow performers, transvestites and others distanced from much of mainstream society, she abandoned 35mm for full-frame black and white images, printed directly with jagged black borders. Unlike Borges' photos, however, her prints are small and intimate, drawing the viewer - sometimes unwillingly - into conversation with her subjects. Her lighting is whatever is available, at times harsh and contrasty, but it always connects her subjects to their surroundings. The exhibit also showcases her cameras and enlarger, and other aspects of her techniques and technology.

The J. Paul Getty Museum has been collecting photographs for twenty years. To celebrate the anniversary, they are hosting two exhibits, 'Photographers of Genius at the Getty' and 'Recent Acquisitions.'

'Photographers of Genius at the Getty' is a visual journey through almost 150 years of photographic history, from the earliest salt prints of William Fox Henry Talbot, the daguerreotypes of Girault de Pranguey, the cyanotypes of Anna Atkinson, and all the way to Diane Arbus.

Along the way, we witness the early struggles of photographers to escape the limitations of technology and reach for new aesthetic representations and forms. 'Drawing with light' only slowly became possible. Yet, as early as the 1860s, photographers were breaking through the barriers. The delicate landscapes and cityscapes of the French photographer, Camille Silvy, glow with suffused light. His 'Twilight' was built in the darkroom from parts of four superimposed separate negatives. Shades of digital manipulation to come? As chronicled in the exhibition, photography emerges to document our world. It creates lasting portraits and expresses social changes and mores as in O'Sullivan's group photos of slaves being freed, Hines' photos of child laborers, Evans' memorable portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs in Alabama, and Lange's haunting portraits of migrant workers in the 1930s. It reveals the chiaroscuro of smoky cityscapes and the vast, emergent landscapes of the American West. It embraces the experimental discoveries of Moholy-Nagy's cubist abstractions and Man Ray's surrealistic depiction of a nude woman, posed as in a painting by Ingres, but with the f-holes of a violin or cello added to emphasize the contours of her back. Josef Sudek's 'Late Roses' (1959) reminds us of the organic pictorial power of nature. An exquisite still-life is backed by a framed window which looks out onto a rain-soaked landscape. Rivulets of water run down the windowpane and create a soft, patterned contrast to the hard outlines of the petals. Frederick Summer's surreal works abstract eviscerated human limbs and animal parts to further illustrate the pictorial strength of organic images.

Man Ray at the Getty
(Photo by Stuart Lynn)

For all those interested in the roots of photography and the historical interplay among technology, aesthetics and purpose, this is an exhibit not to be missed.

• 'Recent Acquisitions' focuses on four photographers from different eras:

o Eugene Atget took up photography at forty, in 1898, to document Paris and its surroundings. He created a visual poem using soft images of ordinary items: newspaper kiosk, small courtyard, park bench. He favored the intimacy and routine of daily life rather than famous monuments – he never took a photo of the Eiffel Tower or of the Arc de Triomphe. Marking a key transition in photography, Atget's work influenced many photographers in the last century.

o Brett Weston was the son of innovative photographer Edmund Weston. In his short career in the early twentieth century, he opened photography to a world of rhythmic patterns with reality bordering on abstract. Photographs of industrial architecture in New York, where he was stationed in the army, coexist with landscapes of the West in a coherent body of work which lays emphasis on composition, repetition and form.

o William Garnett pioneered aerial photography and exploited its artistic qualities. His photographic 'paintings' unveil flowing patterns of nature across the shadowy, contoured surface of the land. Ansel Adams called Garnett's work 'revealing' because it exposed new forms shot from the air which could not be seen from the ground. His images emphasize natural rhythms with no specific centers of interest, and are beautiful in their simplicity and uniqueness.

o William Rogovin's realistic portraits of poor and dispossessed industrial laborers echo many of the concerns in Arbus's work. Hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was forced to abandon his career as an optometrist and concentrate on photography. He focused on migrant workers and miners from around the world, from Appalachia to South Africa. He captured them at work and with their families, illustrating their misery and poverty and their resignation to daily routine. Coal-stained eyes stare out from under helmets or Sunday clothes, tired but defiant and accusatory.

Summary: All four exhibits provided different insights into the amazing power of photography as an artistic and documentary medium, emphasizing the linking of these axes. They underscore that there are no boundaries, permanent guides or rules to taking good photographs, but only exploration, grappling with new ways to reach out and communicate - exploiting evolving technologies to overcome limits. They brought home to me the danger of restricted, competitive photography with its imposed boundaries, and showed the full value of new and fresh insights. Diane Arbus sensitively summed up the lack of absolutes in photography: 'The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.'