Known and Strange Things Read online

  No image stands alone; each is related in straightforward or convoluted ways to other pictures. Ilnitsky’s photograph reads to me as a sad update of a famous one by Sam Abell taken in Moscow in 1983. Abell’s picture also shows a diaphanous white lace curtain, but, in this case, it is not drawn aside. We see through the curtain a windowsill lined with seven pears, luminous in late-afternoon light, beyond which are visible the spires of Red Square. Abell had gone to Russia to shoot a story about the life of Tolstoy. For days he was shadowed by security forces who must have assumed he was a spy. Then, one Sunday, in his hotel room, he realized that the pears sitting on the windowsill might make an interesting picture. And so he worked on the composition for twelve hours, until a breeze lifted the curtain in just the right way. The resulting photograph evokes a private reverie in an atmosphere of Cold War paranoia. Andropov was the leader of the Soviet Union, Reagan was the president of the United States, and relations between the two countries were deteriorating. “People ask me why I worked on one composition so long,” Abell wrote in response to my questions about this image. “My answer: for solace.”

  Another surprisingly quiet depiction of aftermath is Glenna Gordon’s series on the things left behind by the Nigerian girls abducted by Boko Haram. Unlike Abell and Ilnitsky, Gordon did not take her photos in situ. She had the objects—schoolbooks, pens, dresses, shoes—sent from Chibok, where the girls lived, to Abuja, and she photographed them in a studio there. In Gordon’s project, the human victims are themselves missing, not simply excluded. Their abduction could not be photographed, nor could their captivity; Gordon’s photographs nevertheless bring us into close contact with the girls’ lives. When we look at a blue blouse with the name written on its collar—“Hauwa Mutah”—we might reflect on the awful fate of this one particular girl among hundreds. It is like Gilles Peress’s photograph of a stained infant bodysuit on the ground, taken just after the genocide in Rwanda, an image that persists in the memory longer than yet another horrific photograph of a corpse.

  Gordon’s notes tell us that Hauwa Mutah, the girl who owned the blue blouse, was the sixth-born of nine children. Her favorite subjects were English and geography, and she hoped to become a biochemist. Now, almost a year after the abduction, with the exception of a small number of the girls who escaped, there is no certainty as to whether they are alive or whether they will ever be found. The faint biographical traces left by this one girl activated my own memories and emotional responses. In my teens, my favorite subjects were English and geography. During the year I spent in a Nigerian boarding school, I wrote my name on my school uniform so that nothing would go missing in the communal wash. The blue blouse restores these fragments to me in a way a portrait of the girl might not have. Photographs of people’s things reach us in this way even in the absence of such biographical coincidences because we recognize their things as being like ours. Our infants wear bodysuits, too. We have favorite coffee mugs, too. There’s that lace curtain we have always liked, or have always meant to change.

  Proust once wrote in a letter, “We think we no longer love the dead because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.” Objects, sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no longer is; stillness, in photography, can be more affecting than action. This is in part because of the respectful distance that a photograph of objects can create between the one who looks, far from the place of trouble, and the one whose trouble those objects signify. But it is also because objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life. They have been touched, or worn through use. They have frayed, or been placed just so. Perhaps the kind of “object photography” made by Abell, Ilnitsky, Gordon, Peress, and many others in conflict zones cannot ever effect the political change we hope for from highly dramatic images. Perhaps their photographs don’t make us think of the photographers’ bravery, the way other conflict pictures do, or urge us to immediate action. We look at them anyway, for the change that they bring about elsewhere: in the core of the sympathetic self. We look at them for the way they cooperate with the imagination, the way they contain what cannot otherwise be accommodated, and the way they grant us, to however modest a degree, some kind of solace.

  Saul Leiter

  THE FIRST COMMERCIALLY available color photographic process, Autochrome, was introduced in the United States in 1907. Alfred Stieglitz and George Seeley soon began experimenting with it, but it was not until the 1950s that color photography began to come into its own as an artistic medium, in the work of Ernst Haas, Helen Levitt, and others. This was the generation of the photographer Saul Leiter, the Pittsburgh-born son of a Talmudic scholar, who photographed the streets of New York City for six decades and died in November 2013 at the age of eighty-nine.

  Leiter was perhaps the most interesting of the fifties color photographers in his use of form. His bold chromaticism, off-center composition, and frequent use of vertical framing attracted attention—the work reminded people of Japanese painting and Abstract Expressionism—and he was included in Always the Young Strangers, an exhibition curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. But Leiter didn’t court fame, and, though he continued to work, his photographs almost vanished from public view. Then they came back to light in 2006, with Saul Leiter: Early Color, a monograph published by Steidl. The book brought him belated recognition, gallery representation, a stream of publications, and a new generation of fans.

  Color is in the mainstream of photographic practice now. It is essential to the inspired street work of Harry Gruyaert and Joel Meyerowitz, the large-format portraits of Rineke Dijkstra, the architectural views of Candida Höfer, the personal journalism of Nan Goldin, and the stately landscapes of Andreas Gursky. But, for a long time, it was considered superficial and suspect. Henri Cartier-Bresson was firmly against it on the grounds that it interfered with formal priorities. John Szarkowski, the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, dismissed most color photography before he began championing William Eggleston’s in the 1970s. This was the milieu—which, if not hostile, was not exactly encouraging—out of which Saul Leiter created a series of breathtaking, almost miraculous, photographs. He shot Kodachrome slides, and many of them were not printed until decades after they were exposed.

  One of the most effective gestures in Leiter’s work is to have great fields of undifferentiated dark or light, an overhanging canopy, say, or a snowdrift, interrupted by gashes of color. He returned again and again to a small constellation of subjects: mirrors and glass, shadows and silhouettes, reflection, blur, fog, rain, snow, doors, buses, cars, fedoras. He was a virtuoso of shallow depth of field: certain sections of some of the photographs look as if they have been applied with a quick brush. It will come as no surprise to a viewer of his work that Leiter was also a painter, that his heroes were Degas, Vuillard, and Bonnard, and that he knew the work of Rothko and de Kooning well. There are points of contact between his work and that of photographers like Louis Faurer and Robert Frank, the so-called New York School, but Leiter was an original. He loved beauty. To make a living, he photographed fashion spreads for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and the levity of his commercial work seeped into his personal work.

  But the overriding emotion in his work is a stillness, tenderness, and grace that is at odds with the mad rush of New York street life. In No Great Hurry, the understated film made about Leiter by the filmmaker Tomas Leach, contains an exchange that gets to the core of Leiter’s practice. Late in the film, Leiter says, “There are the things that are out in the open and then there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe. You think?” I loved this confirmation of Leiter’s loyalty to concealed realities, but loved even more his doubt, his interrogation of the hard-won insight. Leach, the filmmaker, replied off-camera, “That could be true.” Leiter then asked him, “You think it’s true?” “It could be,”
Leach said. “It could be very true,” Leiter said, still not committing fully. “We like to pretend that what is public is what the real world is all about.”

  Leiter’s best photographs lack all pretense, and are full of a productive doubt. When I heard the news of Leiter’s death, I asked Leach what the experience of working on the film—over a period of three years—had been like. “He was funny, intelligent, and insightful,” Leach wrote to me. “He was full of curiosity and mischief.” The Magnum photographer Alex Webb, who is celebrated for the sophistication of his color work, said Leiter had “an uncanny ability to pull complex situations out of everyday life, images that echo the abstraction of painting and yet, simultaneously, clearly depict the world.”

  Undoubtedly, the charm of some of Leiter’s pictures lies in the fact that they depict fifties places, fifties cars, and fifties people (we rarely dress so well today), and that those analog reds and greens are more moving, somehow, than what our own digital cameras can offer up. But pictures such as Through Boards (1957), Canopy (1958), and Walking with Soames (1958) would be winners in any era. They are high points of lyric photography, which, once seen, become—like all the best pictures, poems, and paintings—a permanent part of our lives.

  I asked the photographer Rebecca Norris Webb, whose own work is similarly concentrated and subtle, about Leiter. She praised his quietness, singling out the images taken through a window or some sort of glass: “some a delightful puzzle of reflections, and others softly aglow in the muted light of a storm, one of the few natural forces capable of slowing us New Yorkers down long enough to send us into a kind of reverie.”

  The content of Saul Leiter’s photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don’t so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water. One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. Precisely how the hypnotic and dreamlike feeling is achieved in Leiter’s works is a mystery, even to their creator. As he said in In No Great Hurry, laughing, “If I’d only known which ones would be very good and liked, I wouldn’t have had to do all the thousands of others.”

  A True Picture of Black Skin

  WHAT COMES TO mind when we think of photography and the civil rights movement? Direct, viscerally affecting images with familiar subjects: huge rallies, impassioned speakers, people carrying placards (“I Am a Man”), dogs and fire hoses turned on innocent protesters. These photos, as well as the portraits of national leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, are explicit about the subject at hand. They tell us what is happening and make a case for why things must change. Our present moment, a time of vigorous demand for equal treatment, evokes those years of sadness and hope in black American life and renews the relevance of those photos. But there are other, less expected images from the civil rights years that are also worth thinking about: images that are forceful but less illustrative.

  One such image left me short of breath the first time I saw it. It’s of a young woman whose face is at once relaxed and intense. She is apparently in bright sunshine, but both her face and the rest of the picture give off a feeling of modulated darkness; we can see her beautiful features, but they are underlit somehow. Only later did I learn the picture’s title, Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963, which helps explain the young woman’s serene and resolute expression. It is an expression suitable for the event she’s attending, the most famous civil rights march of them all. The title also confirms the sense that she’s standing in a great crowd, even though we see only half of one other person’s face (a boy’s, indistinct in the foreground) and, behind the young woman, the barest suggestion of two other bodies.

  The picture was taken by Roy DeCarava, one of the most intriguing and poetic of American photographers. The power of this picture is in the loveliness of its dark areas. His work was, in fact, an exploration of just how much could be seen in the shadowed parts of a photograph, or how much could be imagined into those shadows. He resisted being too explicit in his work, a reticence that expresses itself in his choice of subjects as well as in the way he presented them.

  DeCarava, a lifelong New Yorker, came of age in the generation after the Harlem Renaissance and took part in a flowering in the visual arts that followed that largely literary movement. By the time he died in 2009, at eighty-nine, he was celebrated for his melancholy and understated scenes, most of which were shot in New York City: streets, subways, jazz clubs, the interiors of houses, the people who lived in them. His pictures all share a visual grammar of decorous mystery: a young woman in a white graduation dress in the empty valley of a lot, a pair of silhouetted dancers reading each other’s bodies in a cavernous hall, a solitary hand and its cuff-linked wrist emerging from the midday gloom of a taxi window. DeCarava took photographs of white people tenderly but seldom. Black life was his greater love and steadier commitment. With his camera he tried to think through the peculiar challenge of shooting black subjects at a time when black appearance, in both senses (the way black people looked and the very presence of black people), was under question.

  All technology arises out of specific social circumstances. In our time, as in previous generations, cameras and the mechanical tools of photography have rarely made it easy to photograph black skin. The dynamic range of film emulsions, for example, was generally calibrated for white skin and had limited sensitivity to brown, red, or yellow skin tones. Light meters had similar limitations, with a tendency to underexpose dark skin. And for many years, beginning in the mid-1940s, the smaller film-developing units manufactured by Kodak came with Shirley cards, so named after the white model who was featured on them and whose whiteness was marked on the cards as “normal.” Some of these instruments improved with time. In the age of digital photography, for instance, Shirley cards are hardly used anymore. But even now, there are reminders that photographic technology is neither value-free nor ethnically neutral. In 2009 the face-recognition technology on HP webcams had difficulty recognizing black faces, suggesting, again, that the process of calibration had favored lighter skin.

  An artist tries to elicit from unfriendly tools the best they can manage. A black photographer of black skin can adjust his or her light meters; or make the necessary exposure compensations while shooting; or correct the image at the printing stage. These small adjustments would have been necessary for most photographers who worked with black subjects, from James Van Der Zee at the beginning of the century to DeCarava’s best-known contemporary, Gordon Parks, who was on the staff of Life magazine. Parks’s work, like DeCarava’s, was concerned with human dignity, specifically as it was expressed in black communities. Unlike DeCarava, and like most other photographers, Parks aimed for and achieved a certain clarity and technical finish in his photo essays. The highlights were high, the shadows were dark, the midtones well judged. This was work without exaggeration; perhaps for this reason it sometimes lacked a smoldering fire even though it was never less than soulful.

  DeCarava, on the other hand, insisted on finding a way into the inner life of his scenes. He worked without assistants and did his own developing, and almost all his work bore the mark of his idiosyncrasies. The chiaroscuro effects came from technical choices: a combination of exposure manipulation, darkroom virtuosity, and occasionally printing on soft paper. And yet there’s also a sense that he gave the pictures what they wanted, instead of imposing an agenda on them. In Mississippi Freedom Marcher, for example, even the whites of the shirts have been pulled down, into a range of soft, dreamy grays, so that the tonalities of the photograph agree with the young woman’s strong, quiet expression. This exploration of the possibilities of dark gray would be interesting in any photographer, but DeCarava did it time and again specifically as a photographer of black skin. Instead of trying to brighten blackness, he went against expectation and darkened it further. What is dark is neither blank nor empty. It is in fa
ct full of wise light, which, with patient seeing, can open out into glories.

  This confidence in “playing in the dark” (to borrow a phrase of Toni Morrison’s) intensified the emotional content of DeCarava’s pictures. The viewer’s eye might at first protest, seeking more conventional contrasts, wanting more obvious lighting. But, gradually, there comes an acceptance of the photograph and its subtle implications: that there’s more there than we might think at first glance, but also that, when we are looking at others, we might come to the understanding that they don’t have to give themselves up to us. They are allowed to stay in the shadows if they wish.

  Thinking about DeCarava’s work in this way reminds me of the philosopher Édouard Glissant, who was born in Martinique, educated at the Sorbonne, and profoundly involved in anticolonial movements of the fifties and sixties. One of Glissant’s main projects was an exploration of the word “opacity.” Glissant defined it as a right to not have to be understood on others’ terms, a right to be misunderstood if need be. The argument was rooted in linguistic considerations: it was a stance against certain expectations of transparency embedded in the French language. Glissant sought to defend the opacity, obscurity, and inscrutability of Caribbean blacks and other marginalized peoples. External pressures insisted on everything being illuminated, simplified, and explained. Glissant’s response: no. And this gentle refusal, this suggestion that there is another way, a deeper way, holds true for DeCarava, too.