Review: Winogrand, Gary. Figments From The Real World. NY: MoMA, 1983.

Winogrand is something of an oddity in that his epigrams on the craft – or the art, if he would allow – are often more impressive than his images.  Statements such as

“I photograph to find out what things look like photographed.”

“Good photographs get made despite, not because.”

resonate more deeply than pedestrian images redolent of contemporary vernacular shots reproduced over and over again on blogs and photo sites across the internet:  a head in a car window, a baby on the beach, two pairs of walking feet.  There are, of course, the iconic shots that show up in surveys of photographic history and which retain a special power: the couple in the zoo holding chimpanzees, the laughing girl with ice cream cone, girls on a park bench at the World’s Fair.  But seen as a collection, the overall impression left by much of his work is uninspiring.

Szarkowski provides an informative essay summarizing Winogrand’s career, portraying the New York native as something of a “city hick” suspicious and even contemptuous of the institutions that supported his work after the decline of the photo magazines – the galleries and the academy.   He produced only four photobooks during his lifetime, none of which enjoyed any commercial success, but experienced greater recognition and some middling fortune in the galleries and as a university lecturer.  The end of his career was a slow fade into obscurity, in which he shot, but left unedited, a third of a million images.

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Review: Curtis, Edward and Christopher Cardozo, ed. Hidden Faces (Native Nations Series). NY: Christopher Cardozo, 1997.

Actual book cover (does not include text)

I found Hidden Faces in the university database and put in a request without examining the book description.  I was a bit disappointed when a couple of days later the librarian handed me a volume I could carry in my hip pocket.  The book features approximately 50 images of mostly Navaho and Kwakiutl, the two tribes that produced and used ceremonial masks.  As the title makes clear, this is a collection of concealed faces, mostly by masks, though a few painted visages are also included. Bits of text lifted from The North American Indian describing the actor or the ceremony provide bite-sized bits of context.  In a volume this size, there is little more that can be offered.  Paper stock is weighty enough that printing on reverse doesn’t bleed through and the quality of image reproduction is quite high.  Still, this is not really something one might buy for a collection so much as an inexpensive gift.

Unfortunately this is the only volume on Curtis in the country’s university library system.  Having a poke around the internet I found a torrent of what appears to be scans of images from all 20 volumes of The North American Indian, Curtis’s monumental document of late 19th and early 20th century remnants of Native American tribes of the western United States.  What is most striking is the number of images of objects such as pottery, clothing, paintings, bags and satchels, dwellings, and flora.   Most reviews or collections – like Hidden Faces -   feature portraits, men on horseback, or dramatic landscapes.  For examples, click through for the rest of the post.

Review: Egan, Tim. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. Boston: Mariner Books, 2011..

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher is one of those rare nonfiction works that capture a time, a place, and a person so well it is a bit like reading fiction.  It helps that I am drawn to characters such as Edward Curtis, men given to wanderlust and noble – often lost –causes.  Author Tim Egan paints a rather romantic portrait of a self-taught photographer and anthropologist whose life work was to roam western North America photographing, filming, audio recording, data collecting, and writing on the remaining tribes of Native Americans.  Any hint of liaisons with Indian women, for example, is left to near the end of the story, and Curtis’ only fault seems to be his obsession with his project, leading to the ruin of his finances and marriage.

There is no question that Curtis’ three decades of intense labor is a monumental and genuine gift to humanity, a 20 volume document of the last days of the western Native Americans, The North America Indian.  Egan provides a few examples in Shadow Catcher’s final chapter of how modern descendants of several tribes have used Curtis’ data to reconstruct languages and practices entirely or partially forgotten.  Scholars have used Curtis’ oral accounts to reconstruct and rewrite important events in US history, such as the Battle of Little Big Horn, the last great pitched battle between Indians and Anglos.  Apart from more utilitarian applications, though, is the sheer aesthetic effect, the poignancy of haunted images of a land and a people forgotten by time.   Curtis clearly had great affinity for his subjects and devoted his life that we might see them as they might like to be remembered.

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