July 24, 2023 Issue

Jill Lepore, in her absorbing “Bear Season,” in this week’s issue, says, “What is the American definition of wilderness? A place where there are bears.” I recall John McPhee vividly making this point in his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, April 24 & May 1, 1977), an account of a canoe-and-kayak trip he took with a four-man study team down the Salmon River of Alaska’s Brooks Range. McPhee writes,

Meanwhile, the sight of the bear stirred me like nothing else the country could contain. What mattered was not so much the bear himself as what the bear implied. He was the predominant thing in that country, and for him to be in it at all meant that there had to be more country like it in every direction and more of the same kind of country all around. He implied a world. He was an affirmation to the rest of the earth that his kind of place was extant.

One thing I've never understood about McPhee’s bear encounter in “The Encircled River” is that, after the encounter, when he and his companions get back to camp, they don’t talk about it. I know that if I were on a wilderness hike and met a grizzly, and were lucky enough to survive, I’d be gabbling about it to just about anyone who’d listen. McPhee writes,

We sat around the campfire for at least another hour. We talked of rain and kestrels, oil and antlers, the height and the headwaters of the river. Neither Hession or Fedeler once mentioned the bear.

When I got into my sleeping bag, though, and closed my eyes, there he was, in color, on the side of the hill. The vision was indelible, but fear was not what put it there. More, it was a sense of sheer luck at having chosen in the first place to follow Fedeler and Hession up the river and into the hills – a memento not so much of one moment as of the entire circuit of the long afternoon. It was a vision of a whole land, with an animal in it. This was his country, clearly enough. To be there was to be incorporated, in however small a measure, into its substance – his country, and if you wanted to visit it you had better knock.

Lepore’s “Bear Season” continues the splendid tradition of New Yorker bear writing, including three pieces by McPhee (“The Encircled River,” “A Textbook Place for Bears,” and “Direct Eye Contact”), and Ian Frazier’s “Bear News.”

Style, Structure, and John McPhee

Diagram of "Travels in Georgia," from John McPhee's "Structure"

Is structure an element of style? Not usually, says Terry Eagleton, in his recent review of Ludovico Silva’s Marx’s Literary Style. Eagleton writes, 

Yet the concept of style stretches to more than imagery, and Silva’s book is largely silent about these other aspects: tone, rhythm, pace, pitch, mood, syntax, texture and so on. Instead, it turns its attention to the formal structure of Marx’s texts, though one wouldn’t usually include structure under the heading of style. [“Be like the Silkworm,” London Review of Books, June 29, 2023]

It’s an interesting question. John McPhee, in his Draft No. 4 (2017), says, “To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not. Where you have a free hand, you can make interesting choices.” Where you have a free hand - right there, I think, is where style comes in. 

Structure is one of McPhee’s stylistic resources: see, for example, his artful use of flashback in “Travels in Georgia” and “The Encircled River," among other great pieces. William L. Howarth, in his excellent Introduction to The John McPhee Reader (1991), says, “Structural order is not just a means of self-discipline for McPhee the writer; it is the main ingredient in his work that attracts his reader.” I agree. To me, structure is an essential aspect of McPhee’s extraordinary style. 

Favorite Photo Reviews 1: Geoff Dyer's "The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs"

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

This is the tenth and final post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs” (The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016; retitled “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg,” in Dyer’s superb 2021 essay collection See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. 

In this masterful piece, Dyer probes the mysterious heart of a great photograph - Eli Weinberg’s Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956. He first saw it at the photography exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, at the Museum Africa, Johannesburg, in 2014.

Dyer unfolds his commentary in at least seven dazzling analytical moves. First, he describes the photo:

Lines of black people, three or four deep. In the foreground, to the left of the frame, a man whose armband marks him out as some kind of steward, his old and very worn jacket sagging from his shoulders. Women are in the front, holding placards reading, “WE STAND BY OUR LEADERS.” There’s a range of ages, the youngest looking like they might be in their late teens. So almost all of them would now be either dead or in their late seventies.

Dyer notes the way the demonstrators fill the frame:

The demonstrators fill the frame so that - in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras - the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute. Beyond the frame of the picture lies the apparatus of the apartheid state with its immense resources of physical intimidation, bureaucratic control and psychological coercion: the police and soldiers making sure that the opposition stand in — and know — their place. (In a picture taken the following day you can see Peter Magubane - best known for his photographs of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 - being arrested, his face pushed up against the wall.) Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.

Then he springs his first surprise:

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy with a pudding-bowl haircut. I’m guessing he’s about thirteen. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left - a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly - and he’s white. He is there, that is the fact of the matter - his watch might even enable us to tell the time he was there, the exact moment the picture was taken. We look at the photograph and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question it insists on our asking: what is he doing there?

Hoping to find out more about the boy in the photo, Dyer contacts the co-curator of the exhibition, Rory Bester. Bester tells him he’s “90 percent sure it’s the photographer’s son. ... [Mark] often accompanied him while he was working ... both when he was a trade unionist and when he was a photographer.” Dyer digs deeper. He writes,

A 2014 investigation on a South African news website, in which friends of the Weinberg family and fellow activists who were present that day were asked if they could identify the boy in the picture, casts doubts on this score - some were certain it was Mark; some didn’t recognize him. When I checked back with Bester he said that “No more information has come to light about E.W.’s son, except that nobody has contradicted the ‘belief’ that it is indeed his son.”

Then Dyer introduces a new element in his analysis. He says,

Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence, sixty years on, in our remote-ish future. We want to hear his version of what happened. According to Bester, several people in photographs in the show came by to identify themselves and to be re-photographed in front of the old pictures. This has been done in other situations, by other people photographed in the midst of historical events. It’s often illuminating, partly because of the way people’s memories are contradicted, reinforced or even created by the existence of a photograph.

This leads Dyer to another connection:

Consider, for example, a picture that is in some ways the mirror image of this one, taken less than a year later, by Will Counts in Little Rock, Ark. Instead of a solitary white boy surrounded by crowds of peaceful, welcoming black people, there is a solitary black girl surrounded by a baying mob of whites. The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine African-American students who were supposed to be entering Little Rock Central High School together at the start of desegregation. At the last moment, she found herself walking alone, being abused by the crowd. One snarling white face, that of 15-year-old Hazel Bryan, became the symbol of intransigent racial bigotry.

Commenting on Counts’ picture, Dyer says that Bryan later apologized to Eckford and that Eckford accepted it and “In 1997, on the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women met in person - at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness.”

This is followed by yet another revelation:

Except it wasn’t the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering them. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

That last sentence is inspired! A great line to end on, but Dyer isn’t done. He pivots back to Weinberg’s photo and unfurls yet another surprise:

Let’s go back to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather from almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

We’re near the end of the piece now. One paragraph left, and … two more revelations! Dyer writes,

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he died in 1965 at twenty-four - so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident, Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! Who said photographs aren’t narrative? You just have to know how to unpack them. Dyer is a genius at it. Under his perceptive gaze, the meaning of Weinberg’s great photo waxes ever richer and more mysterious. 

Favorite Photo Reviews 2: Eren Orbey's "A Photographer's Parents Wave Farewell"

Deanna Dikeman, Leaving and Waving 7 (1991)

This is the ninth post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Eren Orbey’s “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell” (“Photo Booth,” newyorker.com, March 4, 2020), a review of Deanna Dikeman’s portrait series Leaving and Waving, currently on view at deannadikeman.com.

In 1990, when Dikeman’s parents were in their early seventies, they sold her childhood home, in Sioux City, Iowa, and moved to a bright-red ranch house in the same town. Dikeman, a photographer then in her thirties, spent many visits documenting the idyll of their retirement. Orbey writes,

At the end of their daughter’s visits, like countless other mothers and fathers in the suburbs, Dikeman’s parents would stand outside the house to send her off while she got in her car and drove away. One day in 1991, she thought to photograph them in this pose, moved by a mounting awareness that the peaceful years would not last forever. Dikeman’s mother wore indigo shorts and a bright pink blouse that morning; her father, in beige slacks, lingered behind her on the lawn, in the ragged shade of a maple tree. The image shows their arms rising together in a farewell wave. For more than twenty years, during every departure thereafter, Dikeman photographed her parents at the same moment, rolling down her car window and aiming her lens toward their home. Dikeman’s mother was known to scold her daughter for her incessant photography. “Oh, Deanna, put that thing away,” she’d say. Both parents followed her outdoors anyway.

Orbey says Dikeman’s Leaving and Waving “compresses nearly three decades of these adieux into a deft and affecting chronology.” He says,

Each image reiterates the quiet loyalty of her parents’ tradition. They recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather. In summer, they blow kisses from the driveway. In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind snowbanks. Inevitably, they age. A few of Dikeman’s portraits, cropped to include the interior of the departing car, convey the parallel progress of her own life. The hand that clutches her camera lens, sometimes visible in the side mirrors, eventually sheds its wedding band. Early photographs show the matted fur of an old dog’s ears and the blurred face of her baby son. In later shots, the boy is grown and behind the wheel, backing down the driveway as Dikeman photographs her elderly parents from the passenger seat.

That passage is inspired! It beautifully captures the melancholy essence of Dikeman’s pictures - life as a sequence of farewells - the sadness of human transience.

Orbey’s piece is brilliantly illustrated with twenty-one photos from Dikeman’s series, arranged in chronological order, starting with the first “farewell” in 1991. In 2009, her father dies. In subsequent shots, only the mother is present (sometimes accompanied by a relative). Then in 2017, she dies. The series ends with a shot of the house, no one in the driveway, no one waving good-bye. Orbey writes,

Most of the images in “Leaving and Waving” are offhand snapshots, captured in the brief moments of a car’s retreat. Only the final shot, of an empty driveway, allowed Dikeman more time. After her mother’s funeral, she set up a tripod on the street and shot fifty frames while her sister waited at a nearby Starbucks. Last spring, her son left her own home, in Columbia, Missouri, to drive east for his first job out of college. They loaded up his car with belongings, and, as it idled in the driveway, he looked at his mother and asked, “Aren’t you going to take a picture?” Dikeman, a bit surprised, rushed inside to retrieve her camera and, for the first time, accept a fresh role in an old ritual.

A perfect ending to an exquisite piece, reminding us that photography is essentially an elegiac art. 

Favorite Photo Reviews 3: Anthony Lane's "A Balzac of the Camera"

Eugène Atget, Café, Boulevard Montparnasse, 6th and 14th Arrondissement (1925)

This is the eighth post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Anthony Lane’s “A Balzac of the Camera” (The New Yorker, April 25, 1994; retitled “Eugène Atget,” in his great 2002 essay collection Nobody’s Perfect).   

It’s a review of Atget Paris, a fat paperback of Eugène Atget photos published in 1992 by Hazan/Ginkgo Press. Lane writes,

There is no mistaking an Atget photograph, but no easy means of describing it, either; he seems to impose no style, and yet no one else, faced with the same scene, could ever have arrived at the same likeness. He is known, sometimes dismissively, for the conjuring of atmosphere; this book directs you to his mastery of line as well. (It’s worth recalling that Walker Evans and Ansel Adams were among Atget’s earliest fans.) The edges of his buildings are pure and hard, unbothered by background fuss, but as you look into the distance the light relaxes into a feathery haze. You are left with the extraordinary sensation that perspective is a matter not only of space but of time: in front of your eyes it is high noon, but day seems to be breaking at the end of every street.

Lane says that it was Atget’s lifework “to capture Paris in photographs.” He says,

His prey was more elusive than you might expect - not the proud, orderly streets planned by Haussmann but all that was ignored in that grand design: the arcana of the old city, its brothels and doorways and dirty fountains, the stages on which the daily drama was played out. Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice, but he couldn’t have cared less about the seeing the sights. Not once, in almost forty years behind the camera, did he point it at the Eiffel Tower.

Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice - how I love that line! It’s one of my favourites in all of art criticism. Stopping to absorb the detail that others failed to notice is exactly what great artists do. It’s one of their prime impulses. This piece by Lane is one of my touchstones.

Postscript: Tony Bennett 1926 - 2023

Tony Bennett (Photo by Wyatt Counts)

I see in the Times that Tony Bennett died. He is the subject of one of Whitney Balliett’s finest pieces – “A Quality That Let’s You In” (The New Yorker, January 7, 1974; included in his great 1979 collection American Singers). Balliett called Bennett an “elusive singer.” He wrote,

He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimos. He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer. But Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together. It is pitched slightly higher than Sinatra’s. (It was once a tenor, but it has deepened over the years), and it has a rich, expanding quality that is immediately identifiable. It has a joyous quality, a pleased, shouting-within quality. It has, in a modest way, something of the hallelujah strain of Mahalia Jackson.

Balliett described Bennett’s face as being “easily sculptured by light.” He said,

In broad daytime, he tends to look jagged and awkwardly composed: his generous Roman nose booms and his pale-green eyes become slits. But the subdued lighting in the Amalfi [where Bennett was having supper] made him handsome and compact. His eyes became melancholy and shone darkly, the deep lines that run past his mouth were stoical, and his nose was regal. His voice, though, never changed. It is a singer’s voice – soft, slightly hoarse, and always on the verge of sliding into melody.

I’m listening to Bennett’s superb 2015 album The Silver Lining, as I write this. The way he nails the soaring high note at the end of Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” is thrilling. To think he was almost ninety when he did that. The guy was a marvel – one of the great jazz singers of all time. 

Favorite Photo Reviews 4: Zadie Smith's "Through the Portal"

Deana Lawson, Sharon (2007)

This is the seventh post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Zadie Smith’s “Through the Portal” (The New Yorker, May 7, 2018), an unforgettable exploration of Deana Lawson’s photographs of diaspora.

In choosing this piece, I set aside my dislike of staged photos. Smith’s writing is so good, it counteracted my aversion. What do I mean by “so good”? Check this out:

Imagine a goddess. Envision a queen. Her skin is dark, her hair is black. Anointed with Jergens lotion, she possesses a spectacular beauty. Around her lovely wrist winds a simple silver band, like two rivers meeting at a delta. Her curves are ideal, her eyes narrowed and severe; the fingers of her right hand signal an army, prepared to follow wherever she leads. Is this the goddess of fertility? Of wisdom? War? No doubt she’s divine—we have only to look at her to see that. Yet what is a goddess doing here, before these thin net curtains? What relation can she possibly have to that cheap metal radiator, the chipped baseboards, the wonky plastic blinds? Where is her kingdom, her palace, her worshippers? Has there been some kind of mistake?

That’s Smith’s opening paragraph, a riff on Lawson’s transfixing Sharon (2007). Smith calls Lawson’s work “prelapsarian” - “it comes before the Fall.” She says,

Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa. Typically, she photographs her subjects semi-nude or naked, and in cramped domestic spaces, yet they rarely look either vulnerable or confined. (“When I’m going out to make work,” Lawson has said, “usually I’m choosing people that come from a lower- or working-class situation. Like, I’m choosing people around the neighborhood.”) Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.

The contrast between these beautiful gods and their quotidian surroundings is striking. Smith says,

Circumstances are in no way hidden or removed from the shot; nothing is tidied up or away, and everything is included. Dirty laundry is aired in public (and appears on the floor). Half-painted walls, faulty wiring, sheetless mattresses, cardboard boxes filled with old-format technology, beat-up couches, frayed rugs, curling tiles, broken blinds.

I relish Smith’s focus on this seemingly banal stuff. In one of my favourite passages, she writes,

Paragraphs could be written on Lawson’s curtains alone: cheap curtains, net curtains, curtains taped up—or else hanging from shower rings—curtains torn, faded, thin, permeable. Curtains, like doors, are an attempt to mark off space from the outside world: they create a home for the family, a sanctuary for a people, or they may simply describe the borders of a private realm. In these photographs, though, borders are fragile, penetrable, thin as gauze. And yet everywhere there is impregnable defiance—and aspiration. There is “kinship in free fall.

Her description of Lawson’s great Livingroom, Brownsville, Brooklyn (2015) is superb:

In “Living Room” (2015), taken in Brownsville, Brooklyn, all the scars are visible: the taped-up curtain, the boxes and laundry, the piled-up DVDs, that damn metal radiator. At its center pose a queen and her consort. He’s on a chair, topless, while she stands unclothed behind him. They are physically beautiful—he in his early twenties, she perhaps a little older—and seem to have about them that potent mix of mutual ownership and dependence, mutual dominance and submission, that has existed between queens and their male kin from time immemorial. But this is only speculation. The couple keep their counsel. Despite being on display, like objects, and partially exposed—like their ancestors on the auction block—they maintain a fierce privacy, bordered on all sides. They are exposed but well defended: salon-fresh hair, with the edges perfect; a flash of gold in her ear; his best bluejeans; her nails on point. Self-mastery in the midst of chaos. And the way they look at you! A gaze so intense that it’s the viewer who ends up feeling naked.

That last line is inspired! The whole piece is inspired - one of the best photography reviews I’ve ever read.

Interesting Emendations: Ben McGrath's "Riverman"

I’ve just finished reading Ben McGrath’s Riverman (2022). What an extraordinary reconstruction of a remarkable life! It’s a moving portrait of a strange voyager, solo canoeist Dick Conant, who, over the course of twenty years, paddled thousands of miles of American rivers, and then in 2014 disappeared near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. McGrath first wrote about Conant in a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” story called “Southbound” (September 22, 2014). Then, after Conant went missing, McGrath wrote a much longer profile of him, “The Wayfarer” (The New Yorker, December 14, 2015) - one of the best New Yorker pieces of the last twenty years, in my opinion: (see my “Best of the Decade #6: Ben McGrath’s ‘The Wayfarer,’ ” July 1, 2020). But McGrath wasn’t done. Conant’s story so obsessed him, he wrote Riverman - a book-length account of Conant’s life and travels. 

Riverman deserves a detailed review. But I’m not ready to do that just yet. I want to go back and read it again, this time more slowly, paying attention to its intricate structure. What I’ll do today is focus on one of my favourite passages in the New Yorker piece and compare it with the version in the book.

Here’s the passage:

While preparing to leave town, Conant discovered that one of his backpacks, containing months’ worth of reserve medication, had been stolen. Trying not to panic, he paddled on, toward Trenton. A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead. Then, eight or nine miles north of the city, he encountered some differences between the canal as it flowed and the map in his mind, formed from advance Google satellite scouting. He spied a corrugated culvert pipe, off to the left, through which water was leaking down into a creek—the Assunpink Creek, he presumed—and he decided to have a little fun, paddling into the rusty chute. Down he went, into the dark, gaining speed as he bumped along for thirty or forty feet. He was briefly airborne before splashing out at the bottom and taking on about a gallon of water, a small price for the experience of canoeing “like a ski jumper!,” as he put it. The canal runoff provided the creek with some helpful momentum, and for the next several hours he negotiated snags and shoals and descended minor rapids, all while looking for a plausibly private campsite. 

Comparing this passage with the book version, I see five changes: 

1. In the first sentence, “stolen” is now “stolen or misplaced.”

2. In the fourth sentence, “he encountered some differences between the canal as it flowed and the map in his mind, formed from advance Google satellite scouting” is now “he encountered some differences between the canal as it flowed and the map in his mind.”

3. In the fifth sentence, “the Assunpink Creek, he presumed” is now “the Assunpink Creek, he presumed, recalling his reading, in Austin, about the Second Battle of Trenton.”

4. In the sixth sentence, “as he bumped along for thirty or forty feet” is now “as he bumped along for thirty feet.”

5. In the seventh sentence, “canoeing ‘like a ski jumper!,’ as he put it” is now “canoeing ‘like a ski jumper!’ as he put it” (the comma is deleted).

None of these changes are major. But, to me, they’re fascinating. They show the fine-tuning that goes into a great piece of writing. I was relieved to see that the third sentence - one of the most inspired lines in the piece - is unchanged. It’s so beautiful, I want to quote it again: “A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead.” 

Favorite Photo Reviews 5: Henry Miller's "The Eye of Paris"

Brassai, Chair in the Tuileries (1932)

This is the sixth post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Henry Miller’s “The Eye of Paris” (included in his 1940 essay collection The Wisdom of the Heart), an intense, powerful, rhapsodic celebration of the work of Hungarian-born photographer Brassai (Gyula Halész). Miller calls Brassai “an eye, a living eye.” He praises his “normal vision.” He says,

Brassai has that rare gift which so many artists despise - normal vision. He has no need to distort or deform, no need to lie or to preach. He would not alter the living arrangement of the world by one iota; he sees the world precisely as it is and as few men in the world see it because seldom do we encounter a human being endowed with normal vision. Everything to which his eye attaches itself acquires value and significance, a value and significance, I might say, heretofore avoided or ignored. The fragment, the defect, the commonplace - he detects in them what there is of novelty or perfection. He explores with equal patience, equal interest, a crack in the wall or the panorama of a city. Seeing becomes an end in itself. For Brassai is an eye, a living eye.

How I love that “he sees the world precisely as it is.” In other words, Brassai sees the world not as symbol or metaphor, but as “the thing itself” (Edward Weston’s great phrase). He says it again later in his piece, referring to Brassai’s “desire not to tamper with the object but regard it as it is.”

He admires Brassai’s ability to give the ordinary its beautiful due: “What is most familiar to the eye, what has become stale and commonplace, acquires through the flick of his magic lens the properties of the unique.”

My favourite part of Miller’s essay is his description of Brassai’s wonderful Chair in the Tuileries (1932). Are you ready for it? Fasten your seatbelt:

I think of chair because among all the objects which Brassai has photographed his chair with the wire legs stands out with a majesty that is singular and disquieting. It is a chair of the lowest denomination, a chair which has been sat on by beggars and by royalty, by little trot-about-whores and by queenly opera divas. It is a chair which the municipality rents daily to any and every one who wishes to pay fifty centimes for sitting down in the open air. A chair with little holes in the seat and wire legs which come to a loop at the bottom. The most unostentatious, the most inexpensive, the most ridiculous chair, if a chair can be ridiculous, which could be devised. Brassai chose precisely this insignificant chair and, snapping it where he found it, unearthed what there was in it of dignity and veracity. THIS IS A CHAIR. Nothing more. No sentimentalism about the lovely backsides which once graced it, no romanticism about the lunatics who fabricated it, no statistics about the hours of sweat and anguish that went into the creation of it, no sarcasm about the era which produced it, no odious comparisons with chairs of other days, no humbug about the dreams of the idlers who monopolize it, no scorn for the nakedness of it, no gratitude either. Walking along a path of the Jardin des Tuileries one day he saw this chair standing on the edge of a grating. He saw at once chair, grating, tree, clouds, sun, people. He saw that the chair was as much a part of that fine spring day as the tree, the clouds, the sun, the people. He took it as it was, with its honest little holes, its slender wire legs. Perhaps the Prince of Wales once sat on it, perhaps a holy man, perhaps a leper, perhaps a murderer or an idiot. Who sat on it did not interest Brassai in the least. It was a spring day and the foliage was greening; the earth was in a ferment, the roots convulsed with sap. On such a day, if one is alive, one can well believe that out of the dead body of the earth there will spring forth a race of men immortal in their splendor. On such a day there is visible in the stalest object a promise, a hope, a possibility. Nothing is dead, except in the imagination. Animate or inanimate, all bodies under the sun give expression to their vitality. Especially on a fine day in spring!

And so on that day, in that glorious hour, the homely, inexpensive chair belonging to the municipality of Paris became the empty throne which is always beseeching the restless spirit of man to end his fear and longing and proclaim the kingdom of man.

Perhaps Miller gets a little carried away towards the end there. Nevertheless, I love it - a soaring aria in tribute to a great photograph.

July 10 & 17, 2023 Issue

Parul Sehgal, in her absorbing “Tell No Tales,” in this week’s issue, surveys the literature of the “story skeptics” - writers and scholars who resist the “magic of storytelling.” She writes,

Meanwhile, the story skeptics trace how we have learned to live—as Jonathan Gottschall writes in “The Story Paradox”—in “unconscious obedience” to the grammar of story. Story lulls. It encourages us to overlook the fact that it is, first, an act of selection. Details are amplified or muted. Apparent irrelevancies are integrated or pruned. Each decision is an argument, each argument an imposition of meaning, each imposition an exercise of power. When applied to history, it is a process that the late scholar Hayden White termed “emplotment”—in which experience is altered when squeezed into even the most rudimentary beginning-middle-end structure. Memoirists are increasingly conscious of the toll that such arcs exact. The American poet Maggie Smith, in her new book, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” notes wryly, “It’s a mistake to think of my life as plot, but isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story?” 

Well, all writing is selection. Nevertheless, I agree with Sehgal that it’s a mistake to think of life in terms of story. Our lives are not like novels. It’s delusion to think they are. So … how to represent life if not by narrative? What is the alternative to story? Sehgal proposes “swarm”:

Swarm, not story: when a heroine in Elena Ferrante’s work loses the plot or floats free from it, it is that very word she reaches for—“swarm.” “Frantumaglia”—a jumble of fragments—is what Ferrante titled a collection of her nonfiction writing, deploying an expression that her mother would use to describe being “racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart.” A swarm possesses its own discipline but moves untethered. Nothing about the notion of a swarm comforts or consoles. It doesn’t contain, like a story. It allows—contradiction, dissonance, doubt, pure immanence, movement, an open destiny, an open road.

That appeals to me. Another alternative is form-finding. Galen Strawson defines it as follows:

Storytelling is a species of form-finding, and the basic model for it, perhaps, is the way in which gifted and impartial journalists or historians report a sequence of events. Obviously they select among the facts, but they do not, we suppose, distort to falsify them, and they do more than merely list them in the correct temporal order, for they also place them in a connected account. Storytelling of this sort involves the ability to detect - not invent - developmental coherencies in the manifold of one’s life. It’s one way in which one may be able to apprehend the deep personal constancies that do in fact exist in the life of every human being - although this can also be done by form-finding without storytelling. [“A Fallacy of Our Age,” included in Strawson’s 2018 essay collection Things That Bother Me]

Favorite Photo Reviews 6: Judith Thurman's "Exposure Time"

Diane Arbus, Untitled (7) (1970-71)

This is the fifth post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Judith Thurman’s “Exposure Time” (The New Yorker, October 13, 2003; included in her 2007 essay collection Cleopatra’s Nose).

It’s a review of two Diane Arbus exhibition catalogues: Diane Arbus: Family Albums and Diane Arbus: Revelations. Thurman calls these books “judicious” and says they “give perspective to her [Arbus’s] intentions and, in the process, to her character.”

Thurman describes Arbus’s photos as “creepy.” She says,

Looking at Arbus’s work, one has that visceral shock of the forbidden. It’s creepy not because her subjects are handicapped, loony, hideous, bizarre, sad, or perverse (though most of them are) but because there is something fundamentally taboo about the way she bares their primitive substance without their seeming to know it. The beholder’s shudder relates to the memory, conscious or not, of that ancient nightmare in which one walks through the school cafeteria besmirched by some human stain while thinking one is safely clothed. Our dignity depends upon continence in the broadest sense of the word, and Arbus’s subjects leak their souls.

Thurman says that “Arbus’s lasting contribution to modern art is as a portraitist.” She compares Arbus with the great German portraitist August Sander (1876-1964):

Arbus’s freaks may have been the objects of her “sweet lust,” but she doesn’t fetishize them, and they were never a cabinet of specimens to her the way Sander’s pageant of anonymous German types was to him. On the other hand, Sander was concerned with class distinctions and social roles, while Arbus harrowed the more subjective, unstable terrain of eroticism and gender. Some of her sitters—in a way, all of them—seem not to have noticed how far their forms have strayed from those of the creatures they were supposed to be. They are members of a transitional species who inhabit a limbo where young girls wear the blasted look of menopausal women; middle-aged homosexuals pass themselves off as femmes fatales; dyspeptic infants grimace with the bloated rage of old men; and bodies are mortified with pins, fire, hormones, needles, knives, razors, makeup, surgery, and strobe lights.

Thurman identifies “depth” as a key element of Arbus’s style:

Perhaps Arbus seems ruthless because she exposes her subjects’ naïve faith in their connection with and resemblance to the rest of humanity even as she cuts them from the herd. While they may pose with a lover or in family groups (the Jewish giant and his parents; the dominatrix and her client; the blasé suburbanites on their chaises longues; the blind couple in bed; the Russian midget and his friends; the bespectacled, obese nudists; the woman with her baby monkey), their illusion of belonging is belied by her exposé of their isolation. The depth that Arbus gives to that isolation both as a social fact and as a psychological predicament distinguishes her style from the superficial flamboyance of other photographers (now legion) who specialize, fashionably and forgettably, in the grotesque. It also sinks her subjects into a well so deep that one feels they will never be able to emerge.

My favourite part of Thurman’s review is her superb description of Arbus’s great Untitled (7) (1970-71):

In one of her masterpieces, “Untitled (7),” the rural landscape seems bathed in the lowering and eerie radiance of an eclipse, and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects—descendants of Goya’s gargoyles—march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear. A grave child of indeterminate sex with a painted mustache and averted gaze holds hands with a masked old woman in a white shift. They are oblivious of—and in a way liberated from—Arbus’s gaze. After years of posing her subjects frontally, she had begun to prefer that they did not look at her. “I think I will see them more clearly,” she wrote to Amy, “if they are not watching me watching them.”

That “the rural landscape seems bathed in the lowering and eerie radiance of an eclipse, and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects—descendants of Goya’s gargoyles—march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear” is inspired!

Favorite Photo Reviews 7: Eudora Welty's "One Time, One Place"

Eudora Welty, Woman in Thirties (193x)

This is the fourth post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Eudora Welty’s “One Time, One Place” (included in her 1978 essay collection The Eye of the Story).

In this piece, which originally appeared as the Preface to Welty’s One Time, One Place: A Snapshot Album (1970), Welty reviews her own photography. She begins, “These photographs are my present choices from several hundred I made in Mississippi when I had just come home from college and into the Depression.”

Welty worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as publicity agent for the State office. In this capacity, she travelled around Mississippi, 

visiting the newly opened farm-to-market roads or the new airfields hacked out of old cow pastures, interviewing a judge in some new juvenile court, riding along on a Bookmobile route and distributing books into open hands like the treasures they were, helping put up booths in country fairs, and at night, in some country-town hotel room under a loud electric fan, writing the Projects up for the county weeklies to print if they found the space.

She says, “In no time, I was taking a camera with me.”

She says the meaning she extracted from her travels was always “personal and particular” (“The message was personal and particular. More than what is phenomenal, that strikes home. It happened to me everywhere I went, and I took these pictures”).

She used a “Kodak model one step more advanced than the Brownie.” The local Standard Photo Company of Jackson developed her rolls of film, and she made herself a contact-print frame and printed at night in the kitchen when she was home. She says, “With good fortune, I secured an enlarger at secondhand from the State Highway Department, which went on the kitchen table. It had a single shutter-opening, and I timed exposures by a trial-and-error system of countdown.”

Her assessment of her photos is modest. She writes, 

This is not to apologize for these crudities, because I think what merit the pictures do have has nothing to do with how they were made: their merit lies entirely in their subject matter. I presume to put them into a book now because I feel that, taken all together, they cannot help but amount to a record of a kind - a record of fact, putting together some of the elements of one time and one place.

She says, “A better and less ignorant photographer would certainly have come up with better pictures, but not these pictures; for he could hardly have been as well positioned as I was, moving through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was part of it, born into it, taken for granted.”

She refers to her photos as “snapshots”:

The book is like an album as well in that the pictures all are snapshots. It will be evident that the majority of them were snapped without the awareness of the subjects or with only their peripheral awareness. These ought to be the best, but I’m not sure they are. The snapshots made with people’s awareness are, for the most part, just as unposed: I simply asked people if they would mind going on with what they were doing and letting me take a picture. I can’t remember ever being met with a demurrer stronger than amusement. (The lady bootlegger, the one in the fedora with the drawn-back icepick, was only pretending to drive me away - it was a joke; she knew I hadn’t come to turn her in.)

She says of her “poverty-marked” subjects,

Whatever you might think of those lives as symbols of a bad time, the human beings who were living them thought a good deal more of them than that. If I took picture after picture out of simple high spirits and the joy of being alive, the way I began, I can add that in my subjects I met often with the same high spirits, the same joy. Trouble, even to the point of disaster, has its pale, and these defiant things of the spirit repeatedly go beyond it, joy the same as courage.

Welty identifies trust as one of her photography’s main ingredients:

In taking all these pictures, I was attended, I now know, by an angel - a presence of trust. In particular, the photographs of black persons by a white person may not testify soon again to such intimacy. It is trust that dates the pictures now, more than the vanished years.

She describes her camera as an “eye”:

The camera I focused in front of me may have been a shy person’s protection, in which I see no harm. It was an eye though - not quite mine, but a quicker and an unblinking one - and it couldn’t see pain where it looked, or give any, though neither it could it catch effervescence, color, transience, kindness, or what was not there. It was what I used, at any rate, and like any tool, it used me.

She says of her portraits,

When a heroic face like that of the woman in the buttoned sweater - who I think must come first in this book - looks back at me from her picture, what I respond to now, just as I did the first time, is not the Depression, not the Black, not the South, not even the perennially sorry state of the whole world, but the story of her life in her face. And though I did not take these pictures to prove anything, I think they most assuredly do show something - which is to make a far better claim for them. Her face to me is full of meaning more truthful and more terrible and, I think, more noble than any generalization about people could have prepared me for or could describe for me now. I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.

She says of her process,

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer’s truth: the thing to wait on, to reach there in time for, is the moment in which people will reveal themselves. You have to be ready, in yourself; you have to know the moment when you see it. The human face and the human body are eloquent in themselves, and a snapshot is a moment’s glimpse (as a story may be a long look, a growing contemplation) into what never stops moving, never ceases to express for itself something of our common feeling. Every feeling waits upon its gesture. Then when it does come, how unpredictable it turns out to be, after all.

That “Every feeling waits upon its gesture” is inspired! The whole essay is inspired! Welty was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. “One Time, One Place” is one of her best pieces. 

The First Person Is Real (Contra Merve Emre)

Merve Emre (Photo from The New York Review of Books)

Merve Emre, in her profoundly wrongheaded “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022), argues that the “I” in personal essays is a fiction. She says, 

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. 

She goes further. She contends that individual subjectivity, on which the “I” is based, is also fiction. She writes,

What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

My answer is that, if all these “what ifs” were true, the personal essay would die. It would no longer be a firsthand account of lived experience. To me (this is my own individual subjectivity speaking), the “I” of the personal essay authenticates the experience it describes. It’s what makes that experience real. For example:

I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

That’s from Anne Boyer’s brilliant “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019), her memoir of her experience fighting triple-negative breast cancer. “Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.” How I love that sentence! Subjective to the bone. Is it fake? Come on! It’s presented in the magazine as “personal history,” i.e., as fact. There’s no doubting the authenticity of her experience. And, I submit, there’s no doubting the authenticity of her “I.” She is who she represents herself to be. How do I know? Because her “I” is part of her glorious style. And her style is who she is. 

Here's another example, this from one of my favorite personal essays – Edward Hoagland’s “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his great 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River):

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

That’s from the essay’s remarkable opening paragraph. Whose “I” is that if not Hoagland’s? No one else writes that way. His style is as identifiable as a fingerprint. Subjectivity is at the heart of it. He has his own distinctive way of looking at things. His use of the first person to express himself is as natural to him as breathing. I can’t imagine him writing any other way.

Take another example. This is from Aleksandar Hemon’s wonderful “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011), his account of leaving Sarajevo and learning to live in Chicago. He writes,

I was still working for Greenpeace at this point, walking different city neighborhoods and suburbs every day, but every night I came back to the Edgewater studio I could call my own. I was beginning to develop a set of ritualistic practices. Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

I think it’s just plain common sense to interpret Hemon’s “I” as signifying Hemon himself. If it isn’t Hemon, who is it? Who is splurging on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway? Who is watching the Bulls’ games at Gino’s North, “high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar”? Who is spending weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. Some ideal version of himself? I don’t think so. Hemon isn’t into writing ideal versions of himself. On the contrary, his aim is to bring us as close as he can to his immigrant experience. The piece is represented as fact, and I think it is fact, every word, including Hemon’s “I.” The onus is on Emre to prove otherwise. Invoking Adorno doesn’t cut it. 

Another example:

I had written about movies for almost fifteen years, trying to be true to the spirit of what I loved about movies, trying to develop a voice that would avoid saphead objectivity and let the reader in on what sort of person was responding to the world in this particular way.

That’s Pauline Kael, from her wonderful “The Movie Lover” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1994). There’s no chameleon here, no glittering veneer. Individual subjectivity exists. It thrives! It’s the key to great writing, nothing less. 

One more example:

I do not take notes as I read. I dog-ear—verso-top, recto-bottom—and underline sentences and paragraphs. I create a document and type out every underlined sentence and paragraph, sorted by book. Then I create a second document and sort the sentences and paragraphs by subject. The process of doing this usually gets me to a preliminary articulation of the argument I want to make, its beginning and its end, its arc, and its subclaims. I handwrite outlines in a very haphazard way, on the backs of bank statements and other stray envelopes strewn across my worktable. 

Seven “I”s. Who do they belong to? Answer: Merve Emre: see “Educate, Entertain, Scold, Charm: Merve Emre, interviewed by Lauren Kane” (The New York Review of Books, April 16, 2022). Is it really her? Perhaps those “I”s are just made-up versions of herself. But I don't think so. I think it’s really her in full individualist subjective mode. Writing outlines on the backs of bank statements? How bourgeois!   

Favorite Photo Reviews 8: Philip Gefter's "Sex and Longing in Larry Sultan's California Suburbs"

Larry Sultan, Business Page (1985)

This is the third post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Philip Gefter’s “Sex and Longing in Larry Sultan’s California Suburbs” (“Photo Booth,” newyorker.com, April 9, 2017).

I chose this piece because, firstly, it introduced me to the work of an amazing photographer I’d never heard of before - Larry Sultan; and secondly, I love the title. The great thing about this review is the photography itself - eleven images, arranged slideshow-style. I remember flicking through them for the first time. I came to #4, Business Page (1985). It blew my mind. I’d never seen anything like it. I love light. I love shadows. I love reflections. This picture had all three of those elements, plus something ravishingly extra - illumination. The way the natural light illumines the newspaper page is extraordinary. It’s a dazzling, transfixing, original composition. It went directly into my personal collection of great photographs. 

The writing in this piece in not too shabby either. I relish this observation: “Larry’s photographs possess a quality of hard-edged California light, heightened color, optical precision, and, often, domestic familiarity made more fascinating by the power of his imagination.”

Favorite Photo Reviews 9: Robert Hass's "Robert Adams and Los Angeles"

Robert Adams, Redlands Looking Toward Los Angeles (1978)

This is the second post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Robert Hass’s wonderful “Robert Adams and Los Angeles” (included in his superb 2012 essay collection What Light Can Do).

It’s a review of a collection of Robert Adams’ pictures of the Los Angeles Basin, 1978-1983. I savor this piece for its classic tw0-step approach to critical writing: (1) describe; (2) analyze. Hass writes,

Consider “Redlands Looking Toward Los Angeles.” We are looking upward at a fan palm with a cropped top, somewhat asymmetrical - it seems to have more branches on the right side than the left. Near it - nearer, one would think, than makes sense - a slender pine with odd sprigs of bunched needles sprouting directly from the trunk, perhaps through some genetic peculiarity. Next to it and behind it - the distances are hard to judge - a profoundly asymmetrical and leafless tree of indistinct species, dead, or perhaps it’s winter. To the right of the picture a bushy, leaved tree much smaller or farther away, making a kind of lyric messiness as it spindles five or six trunks or trunkless toward the light. The light itself has caught in the edge of the of the palm’s trunk in a way that seems almost tender. Beyond and below this strange botanical collection, in the left half of the picture, there is a carved-up valley, a freeway perhaps and a dry aqueduct, next to which are a few more trees, possibly cottonwoods or Fremont willows, which suggest that the aqueduct and freeway had once been a riverbed that encouraged these natural configurations. On the embankment above the ribbon of freeway, what is possibly a train - it looks like a long dark caterpillar - and beyond that, little serpentine curves of white roads probably, though it looks like the glint of light on water. For the far background, two or three ridges of bare hills, and that L.A. sky, almost entirely effaced by something in the atmosphere, smoke or smog, which seems also to give everything else in the picture, except perhaps the edges of the palm, a hazy, softened, slightly out-of-focus look.

That’s one of the best descriptions of a photo I’ve ever read. And Hass isn’t done. He follows it with this brilliant analysis:

What emotion does it evoke, and what thoughts? The palm tree stands for Southern California; so do the freeways and the aqueduct. The first thing we notice, looking at it, is where we are. For me the second was some mix in the composition between the stark darkness of the tree silhouettes and the gentle and hazy light. Then, looking more closely, the slightly grotesque aspect of the trees. And the sense of space, and the dissolving distances. By then we have absorbed the fact that this image is in a wild, odd way very beautiful. And then, as if it were an almost comic afterthought, we might notice how much our responses depend on the way in which what we are looking at is an almost classical composition. Foreground and distance, a rivery space winding through the middle. It could be John Constable or, for that matter, Ansel Adams. The question that came to me was whether or not the composition was ironic. It doesn’t feel ironic, but it has a way of evoking an ideal of beauty that holds us responsible for what we are seeing. 

Near the end of this superb piece, Hass says of Adams’ work, it shows us “image after image of things we have seen but not noticed, or noticed and not seen, or don’t remember having seen or noticed, while recognizing that we’ve been seeing them all our lives.” This is well put. It reminds me of D. H. Lawrence’s definition of poetry: “an effort of attention.” Great photography shows us things we have seen but not noticed. It’s an effort of attention. 

Favorite Photo Reviews 10: Janet Malcolm's "The View from Plato's Cave"

Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein, Toni, October, 1975

I love photography reviews – their comparison of images, exploration of detail, illumination of style, formulation of theory. When done right, they’re an excellent source of descriptive analysis, a form of writing I devour. Over the next few weeks, I’ll list ten of my favorite pieces and try to say why I like them. Today, I’ll start with #10:  Janet Malcolm’s brilliant “The View from Plato’s Cave” (The New Yorker, October 18, 1976; included in her great 1980 collection Diana & Nikon).

It's a review of a 1976 exhibition of photos by Nina Alexander and Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein, at Susan Caldwell Gallery, in Soho. The pictures are of a terminally ill thirty-nine-year-old woman taken during the last months of her life and after her death. The piece is memorable for Malcolm’s bravura description of one of Hilscher-Wittgenstein’s pictures, titled Toni, October (1975):

The enormously enlarged photograph of the incision-slashed torso was the pivotal image of the show; it compelled immediate, stunned attention, and its presence invaded one’s perception of the other, less overtly horrifying images. Its horror comes from the fact that it is not a clinical study of a body on an operating table, or a medical-textbook illustration showing a person enduring photography as he does treatment, but a picture of a beautiful young woman posed in a graceful, even slightly vain attitude. She has put a silver necklace around her neck and a bracelet on one wrist. (The other wrist is encircled by a plastic hospital tag.) Her body has the delicate slenderness of a boy’s, and the photograph subtly evokes Edward Weston’s lovely study of his son Neil’s nude torso—it is similarly cropped at the neck and the pubes. The two savage arcs of messy black surgical stitches that rip into the right breast and tear down the abdomen are like obscene marks made on a statue by a vandal. The tense clash of imagery—the brutal yoking of the emblems of pain, pathology, mutilation, and inanition with the attributes of health, wholeness, volition, and grace—is paralleled by a conflict of feeling within the viewer, who is both repelled by and drawn to the image: appalled by the way the woman is exposing what it is “normal” to keep out of sight, and yet fascinated by the details thereby revealed. And, oddly, the closer the viewer looks at the incisions, the less distress he feels; finally, his repugnance recedes and is replaced by something akin to awe for the work of the anonymous surgeon, for the neat and clean way the body has been closed, for the small outward signs of damage.

Malcolm’s analysis of Toni, October is equally compelling. She writes,

The transfixing specificity of this image was present in no other work in the show; the other selections moved the viewer not by what they showed but because of what he had been told about the subject’s tragic situation. For there is nothing in the picture of the woman’s face during a spasm of pain to show that she is afflicted with cancer rather than with menstrual cramps, or in the picture of the embrace with her daughter to indicate that she is going to die rather than leave for a holiday, or even in the pictures of the corpse to make one see that this is real rather than a piece of theatre. The picture story presented here, like those in Life and Look, requires extra-photographic information by which to convey its meaning; without the introductory message, the pictures make little impression or sense. Only the photograph of the torso illustrates its own meaning, requires no explanation, has no ambiguity, can be nothing but what it manifestly appears to be.

I first read this piece forty-seven years ago when it appeared in The New Yorker. That “transfixing specificity” has stayed with me ever since. It’s one of my prime criteria for identifying great art.