Life magazine started the whole myth of photojournalism’s storytelling power, but in truth Life was just a very good illustrated press, in which photographs were never allowed to wander unattended. The patron saint of photojournalists is Lewis Hine, who made pictures of child laborers and sweatshops at the turn of the century. Its greatest hero was W. Eugene Smith, who combined an honest concern for human suffering with a canny eye for dramatic composition and lighting, and a very cranky disposition. Now the reigning saint of the form is Sebastian Salgado, whose harrowing coverage of starving Ethiopians and miserable Third World workers manages, somehow, to be as glamorous as any high-fashion shot. When the question arises about whether this sort of agony ’n ecstasy is ethically and morally proper, it’s best to mention Picasso’s Guernica, which ought to derail the conversation long enough for you to slip away. PORTRAITURE
Cartier-Bresson (not to mention Coco Chanel) observed that after the age of forty, we have the faces we deserve. Portrait photographers tend to divide up between those who hide the evidence and those who uncover it. Bachrach and Karsh represent the first group, Avedon and Penn the second. Portraits of known people are more interesting than all the rest because we have a chance to decide whether what we see jibes with what we think we know about them—thus the outrage and/or delirium caused by Avedon’s warts-and-all celebrities. The best of the nineteenth-century portraitists, and one of the best ever, was Nadar, a Parisian hobnobber whose pictures of that great self-imagist Sarah Bernhardt are unparalleled. Then again, since faces are the landscapes of lives, the best portrait ever made is probably mouldering in your family attic. Should an argument develop over who is the Greatest Portraitist of Photography, come down staunchly on the side of the aforementioned August Sander, a German who wandered the Wälder before World War II, chronicling his countrymen in a series of haunting stereotypes. Add Manhattan neurosis and the Age of Anxiety and you have Diane Arbus. Throw in mud-wrestling sitcom stars, body-painted movie stars, and the blithe belief that anything celebrities do, however silly, is worth recording for the ages, and you have Annie Leibovitz. Pile on hype and homosexuality and you have Robert Mapplethorpe. DOCUMENTARY
In one way or another, all photographs are documentary, so all photographers are documentarists. Some, of course, are more so than others. A documentary photographer is a photojournalist whose deadline is a hundred years hence; posterity is the point. The first great large-scale documentary work was done by Matthew Brady and a group of photographers he hired to cover the Civil War (including Timothy O’Sullivan, who, as has been noted, later played the first, best notes in what has become the Ansel Adams songbook). The most famous and exhaustive documentary project was the misery-loves-company team put together by Roy Stryker to photograph sharecroppers, sharecroppers, more sharecroppers, and occasional other types during the Great Depression. This led to the discovery of the bribe in photography: If we take everybody’s picture, maybe they’ll go away and leave us alone.
Ironically, one of the great working-class heroes of documentary photojournalism was Walker Evans, a patrician sort who did much of his paying work for Fortune magazine. It seems highly likely that Evans viewed the whole idea of photography with some embarrassment, since many of his pictures show empty rooms, or people photographed from behind.
Much of the devotion and energy that used to fuel documentary photographers has been co-opted by television. Generations X, Y, and Z figure that it’s way cooler to gather up old photographs, film them, add music and the voices of movie stars, and get famous. After all, Walker Evans never won an Emmy. SURREALISM
In one way or another, all photographs are surreal, too, since that isn’t actually Uncle Frank smirking on the beach, but just a little slip of paper coated with chemicals. But some photographers insist on being official surrealists. The harder they try to put things together in odd and unsettling ways, the more miserably they fail. Jerry Velsmann’s cloud-covered ceilings are pretty obvious stuff. The problem is that life as we know it is already odd and unsettling. So for true surrealism, we are right back with documentary photography—especially when done by people who know where to look for the kind of juxtapositions the rest of us pretend we don’t see.
Robert Frank is one of the great unofficial surrealists (his shot of a glowing jukebox certainly has the Magritte touch), as was Diane Arbus. Bill Brandt wasn’t bad, though the credit is due mostly to the fact that he’s a genius at the terrible print. The reigning king of the form these days is Joel-Peter Witkin, a masterful monster monger with a disturbing taste for amputees, dwarves, and severed heads. Somehow, Witkin presents your worst nightmares and makes you want to shell out big bucks to take one home. Surreal, isn’t it? WOMEN
The best of all women photographers is my aunt Isabel, who for several years was the only person on earth who could take my picture without causing me to vanish instantly. Other notable women are:
Lisette Modell, one of the world’s smallest photographers, who had such a gravitational attraction to large people that her first pictures made in the resorts of southern France look like monuments come to life. As is the case with certain gifted photographers, Modell was as good as she would ever get on the first day of her career. She has been called the mentor of Diane Arbus, which she used to admit and deny at the same time, for reasons known only to her.
Imogen Cunningham, who lived so long that rumors circulated that she had been archivally processed. Like photographs, photographers almost inevitably benefit from great age (although they fade, their value inevitably rises). Cunningham was never better than just all right, but she had covered so much time and territory that eventually she became the art-photography world’s unofficial mascot, a position she labored at by becoming adorably “feisty.” As a result, feisty old Johnny Carson displayed her to the world on The Tonight Show, shocking the millions who thought women photographers looked like Faye Dunaway in The Eyes of Laura Mars.
Berenice Abbott, who made the best portrait ever of James Joyce, single-handedly saved the work of Atget from the trash bin, and who, whether she liked it or not, became an institution without ever being a great photographer.
Helen Levitt, almost unknown, shy, brilliant, virtually invisible in shabby coat and furtive mien, who crept around New York for forty years or more taking in street life. She’s a genius in black-and-white or color, and when you state emphatically that Levitt is America’s greatest woman photographer, you will have the rare pleasure of being both esoteric and right.
The natural inheritor of Levitt’s mantle (and shabby coat) is Sylvia Plachy, a Hungarian immigrant with a wry, Frank-like eye but a far kinder heart. For years Plachy chronicled life at ground level, from sex workers in Times Square and tourists in Central Park to peddlers in Romania and refugees in war-torn Eastern Europe. Today, Plachy has moved uptown from the Voice to work for the New York Times, but she retains her edgy downtown sensibility, cranking out images that are sharp, surprising, and slightly off-kilter.