Newspaper Article

PHOTOGRAPHY / Beauty Is In The Eye of the Camera

Charles Taylor. Charles Taylor is a critic-at-large for the online magazine Salon

1999

Overview

One of the moodiest of the season's books is \"Edward Steichen: The Early Years.\" The cover photo alone, a top-hatted coachman approaching the Flatiron Building in a green dusk, is a more delicate version of the images conjured by Victorian gaslight melodrama. Not all the images here are in that mood. But many seem to be emerging out of some misty vortex, as if we were being allowed only a momentary glimpse before they recede. There's a stunning portrait of a leonine Rodin standing in front of one of his sculptures wrapped in a cloak that, as Steichen renders it, might well be marble itself. And there's a nude titled \"Figure With Iris\" that suggests what Klimt might have come up with had he been a photographer. There's an impressive variety of both influence and effect on display in \"Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt.\" The introductory essay by photography critic Bill Jay does a fine job of delineating those influences, and of making the case that Brandt's dabbling with surrealism was a continuation of the way his more photorealist work located drama and emotion in atmosphere. \"Assumption of the real is essential to surrealism,\" Jay writes. But there is more of a sense of the fantastic in Brandt's \"realistic\" than in the photos where he is consciously emulating the surrealists. The work done in the bars of Limehouse or Stepney during the '30s, and the shots taken during the blackout of the war years when, Brandt says, London \"looked more beautiful than before or since,\" does for that town what Brassai did for Paris. And though the nudes that play with the distortion of form are less satisfying than the ones that don't, the faces of Brandt's models - and it is the faces of people that most link them to the time in which they live - appear deceptively contemporary. \"Fifty Years of Portraits\" doesn't equal its impact because the bigness of the [Peter] Beard show is the point. Containing pages from the fat notebooks Beard has kept for years - a combination of scrapbooks, diary and collage - the show juxtaposes Beard's fashion photography and portraiture with the photos he's taken from his camp in Kenya. A picture of an unselfconsciously nude Eva Herzigova rifling through one of Beard's notebooks might be next to an image of a slaughtered elephant. Many of the photos have scribbled notes, designs, newspaper clippings, detritus crammed into the margins like a patchwork frame; many have a wash of spattered bovine blood. Portraits of Francis Bacon (who was Beard's friend) are given equal weight with the face of a baby gorilla taken in Rwanda one year before the genocide. Snaps of Beard's young daughter are included, as is an elephant fetus suspended in a jar. Far from being shallow, the mixture is the work of a man who doesn't compartmentalize, and who absolutely refuses to blunt his meanings. Beard insists there are both beauty and horror in these photos, just as the blood that spatters the prints is both lovely and repellent.

• Publisher: Newsday LLC
• Subject: Seliger, Mark