The New Yorker & Me: Paolo Pellegrin - Transformer or Transcriber?

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, May 28, 2022

Paolo Pellegrin - Transformer or Transcriber?

Photo by Paolo Pellegrin, from Ben Taub's "In Search of the Sublime"

Ben Taub, in his absorbing “In Search of the Sublime" (The New Yorker, May 23, 2022), a profile of photographer Paolo Pellegrin, mentions that, in 2019, Pellegrin joined him “in documenting an expedition to send a manned submersible to the deepest point in each ocean.” I vividly recall that piece. Titled “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” it appeared in the May 18, 2020 New Yorker. It was my choice for best reporting piece of 2020 (see here). It contained several striking black-and-white photos by Pellegrin, including this one:

Pellegrin’s photos for Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” are notable for their matter-of-factness. They don’t transform their subjects; they transcribe them – clearly, precisely, concretely. They show them exactly as they are (albeit in black and white). That’s why I like them so much. And that’s why I’m surprised by some of the things that Pellegrin says about his art in Taub’s profile of him. For example, Taub quotes him as saying about his photography project in Namibia: “Yes, of course it’s about landscapes and nature, but I have to transform it,” he said. “It has to become something else, or else it doesn’t really work for what I’m trying to do or say. You have to, in a sense, go beyond—especially when it’s very beautiful.”

Really? Looking at Pellegrin’s wonderful “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” photos, I would never have pegged him as a “transformer.” Perhaps different projects call for different approaches. I prefer Pellegrin’s “transcriber” mode, when he regards his subjects as they are.