Sasha Frere-Jones on T. J. Clark

I’ve just finished reading Sasha Frere-Jones’ Bookforum review of T. J. Clark’s new essay collection Those Passions: On Art and Politics. For several weeks now, I’ve been considering buying this book, but the “politics” part of the title puts me off. I love Clark’s writings on painting. But I’m allergic to his Marxist politics, particularly his obsession with class. The tagline of Frere-Jones’ piece – “An art historian locates the political in paint” – seemed a red flag to me. And yes, according to his review, Those Passions does contain a lot of politics. He says, “Clark’s latest collection of essays, Those Passions, continues a project that stretches (at least) back to 1999’s Farewell to an Idea, slowly x-raying the paint to find the fingerprint of capital.” But he also says this: “In “Sex and Politics According to Delacroix,” Clark sees a world in the vortical bodies in Delacroix’s 1855 painting The Lion Hunt.” Wait a minute! Could this be the same piece that appeared in the October 10, 2019 London Review, the one called “A Horse’s Impossible Head”? I believe it is. It’s one of my all-time favorite Clark essays. Its political content is minimal; its ekphrasis is extensive and ravishing. Later in his review, Frere-Jones refers to another Clark essay in the new collection – “Madame Matisse’s Hat.” That’s another one of my favorites. It appeared in the August 14, 2008 London Review. That clinched it. These two essays alone are worth the price of the new book. I’m buying it.

Lisa Borst on Nicholson Baker

I want to compliment Lisa Borst on her excellent "Ways of Seeing," in the current issue of Bookforum. It’s a review of Nicholson Baker’s new book Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art. Borst writes, 

Finding a Likeness chronicles two years in which Baker took a break from fiction and literary journalism to teach himself “how to draw and paint on the far side of sixty,” recasting his interest in figurative language as a new focus on figurative art. The mechanics of getting “somewhat better at art”—the mimetic skill that drawing demands, the “erasefully slow” temporality imposed by shading a landscape or still life, the robust universe of instruments and tools (longtime Bakerian subjects) available to the amateur artist—echo many of his lifelong literary concerns. But the essential irony of the book—one Baker is way too humble to name—is that we spend much of it watching one of the best describers alive struggle with the basics of representation.  

“Figurative language,” “mimetic skill,” “one of the best describers alive,” “basics of representation” – these are words that immediately catch my attention. The art of description is one of my main interests. Baker’s book appears to be one that I’d enjoy enormously. Borst says of it,

Long before he turned to visual art, Baker was writing images. (There’s a generally synesthetic quality to much of his prose—blurbs on the back cover of my copy of Vox compare the novel to both Chagall’s drawings and Ravel’s Bolero—but the dominant mode, the sensory system to which he defaults, is the visual.) Baker’s exhilarating similes belong to a larger project of capturing how everyday things look in ultra-high-resolution detail; his sensibility, he admits in the early memoir U and I, is “image-hoarding.” Also in that book, in which Baker reflects on his literary indebtedness to John Updike, he refers to Updike’s image-forward style as “Prousto-Nabokovian,” one of many admiring epithets in the memoir that could equally apply to Baker himself. (I just don’t believe Baker, who in his previous book had described a woman’s pregnant belly as “Bernoullian,” and her pubic hair as “brief,” when he claims to envy Updike’s “adjectival resourcefulness.”) Nabokov’s crisp molecular comedy, his tendency toward anthimeria and dryly upcycled technical language, his cliché-demolishing descriptive precision; Proust’s luxuriant digressiveness, his great subject of time, and above all his sublime animation of psychological riffs by visual cues: already, by 1991, it was clear that these were Baker’s gifts too. 

Wow! That “cliché-demolishing descriptive precision” is superb! The whole passage is superb. Borst is on my wavelength. Nabokov and Updike are consummate describers. And she’s right; Baker is in their league (see, for example, his brilliant New Yorker pieces "A New Page" and "Painkiller Deathstreak"). His Finding a Likeness is a book I want to read. Thank you to Borst for bringing it to my attention. 

Ryan Ruby's "To Affinity and Beyond"

Great to see Bookforum back in business! There’s an absorbing piece in it by Ryan Ruby called “To Affinity and Beyond.” It touches on a lot of things I’m interested in – criticism, interpretation, argument, description. It’s a review of Brian Dillon’s new essay collection Affinities: On Art and Fascination. Ruby calls it “a kind of manifesto for an anti-critical criticism.” What’s “anti-critical” about it, says Ruby, is its lack of argument:

If nothing Dillon writes “pursues an argument” or is “built to convince,” it is, in part, an attempt to make a virtue of the limitation he confesses in Essayism: “I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument.” He associates argumentation with the academy, whose procedures of making “judgments and distinctions” are foreign to a sensibility that prefers describing objects and noting correspondences between them. 

I relish argument. Many of my favorite critical essays are fiercely polemical, e.g., Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hell,” Janet Malcolm’s “A Very Sadistic Man,” James Wood’s “Hysterical Realism,” Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares.” Argument gives criticism a piquant bite. But I don’t think it’s essential to its effectiveness. Description, on the other hand, is key. “All first-rate criticism defines what we are encountering,” Whitney Balliett said in his Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats (1983). Peter Schjeldahl said something similar in his Let’s See (2008): “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.”

The End of "Bookforum"

The New York Times reports that Bookforum is ceasing publication: see “Bookforum Is Closing, Leaving Ever Fewer Publications Devoted to Books” (December 12, 2022). This is sad news. I’ve been a Bookforum subscriber for almost a decade. Christine Smallwood, Sasha Frere-Jones, Christian Lorentzen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Joanna Biggs, Frank Guan, Lauren Oyler, Gene Seymour, Alex Abramovich, Laura Kipnis, Prudence Peiffer, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Minna Zallman Proctor, Albert Moblio – just some of the many brilliant, lively, provocative critics who regularly appeared in its pages. I’m going to miss them.  

October 25, 2021 Issue

Wow! Peter Schjeldahl is on fire! In this week’s issue, he rips MOMA PS1’s “Greater New York” for its “obeisance to supposedly unexceptional opinions.” He pens a truculent manifesto for our conformist times: 

Only doing things that one is not supposed to do and saying things that one is not supposed to say promise relief from a climate of stagnating sensibility. Being disreputable beckons. Open up. Reinstate surprise. ["Who's We?"]

Hah! I love it.

Speaking of saying things that one is not supposed to say, recall the 2017 controversy in which the artist Hannah Black requested that the Whitney remove Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Tilll’s body, Open Casket, from its Biennial show. Not only remove it; destroy it (see Calvin Tomkins, “Troubling Pictures,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2017). Black’s letter was widely condemned as an incitement to action that infringes artistic freedom. That was my own view of the matter, too. But recently I read a piece that changed my perspective. Charlotte Shane, in her review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Songs of Care and Constraint, in the current Bookforum, writes,

I, for one, found Black’s letter exhilarating, not because it filled me with vengeful glee but because it pushed against the status quo with exactitude and moral clarity. It expanded my sense of social possibility. It offered “magic—magic hard to come by elsewhere, and which can make life feel more worth living,” as Nelson writes of the art she implores us to leave alone. ["Free Fallin' "]

I don’t agree with Black’s request, but I admire her for having the ovaries to make it. Is this the kind of subversiveness that Schjeldahl has in mind? Probably not. He’s seeking “gratuitous transcendence,” “unforced pleasure.” But he is advocating “being disreputable,” and that’s what I relate to. Something Norman Mailer wrote many years ago (I’m quoting it from memory): “Better to expire a devil in the fire than an angel in the wings.” 

Lizzy Harding on Decrepit Lemons and Scrotal Grapes

Deborah Griscom Passmore, Pear, Belle Angevine (1900), from An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits and Nuts (2021), edited by Ananda Pellerin

A special shout-out to Lizzy Harding for her terrific capsule review of An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts: The U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection, in the current issue of Bookforum. Sample: “The teachable moments stand out: a decrepit lemon cocooned in gray mold, mangoes with a fungal infection, a mutant Concord grape that must be described as ‘scrotal.’ ” 

September 21, 2020 Issue

My favorite piece in this week’s issue is Julian Lucas’s “Death Sentences,” a review of Hervé Guibert’s writings on his battle with AIDS. Two passages in particular stand out:

1. Forget Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory, a means for deciphering the patterns in life’s dying light.

2. Perhaps it’s this mischievous affirmation of life’s mess and sensuality, even in the face of death, that will define Guibert’s contribution to the literature of illness. Rejecting its taboos, he scaled AIDS’ very long flight of steps and fearlessly recorded what he saw on the climb.

That last line is inspired!

Postscript: Another excellent essay on Guilbert is Wayne Koestenbaum’s “The Pleasure of the Text” (Bookforum, June/July/August, 2014; retitled “On Futility, Holes, and Hervé Guibert,” in Koestenbaum’s recent Figuring It Out). Koestenbaum says,

Futility and botched execution are the immortal matter of Guibert’s method. Futility and botched execution—combined, in Guibert’s work, with finesse, concision, and a heavy dose of negative capability, which includes curiosity about the worst things that can befall a body—are undying aesthetic and spiritual values, worth cherishing in any literature we dare to call our own.

Dorothea Lange's "A very blue eagle. Along California highway, 1936"

Dorothea Lange, "A very blue eagle. Along California highway, 1936"

Of all the photographs on display in Johanna Fateman’s interesting “A Different Side to Dorothea Lange” (newyorker.com, April 12, 2020), the one that's stayed with me is “A very blue eagle. Along California highway, 1936.” It's an unforgettable image of terrible suffering and eventual death.

Reading Bookforum’s excellent summer issue yesterday, I encountered “A very blue eagle” again. It’s featured in Zack Hatfield’s capsule review of Sam Contis’s Day Sleeper, a collection of lesser-known Lange images. Hatfield describes the picture as showing “an eagle crucified on a barbed-wire fence.” I suppose crucifixion is one way to view it. The outstretched wings caught on barbwire certainly suggest it. But I think the situation was likely more accident than execution. That’s the thing about great photographs; they’re endlessly interpretable. This one by Lange is no exception.  

Johanna Fateman's Excellent "Good as Hell"

Johanna Fateman (Photo from Los Angeles Review of Books)

Johanna Fateman, who reviews art shows in The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town,” has a terrific essay in the current Bookforum. It’s titled “Good as Hell,” an account of her experience listening to an audio version of Philippa Gregory’s The Red Queen (2010) while in coronavirus self-quarantine. Here’s a sample:

Or, sometimes, I wouldn’t completely follow along. I’d instead let Beaufort’s story—her many humiliations and her long, convoluted crawl to victory and vengeance—become a steady nightmare in the background. I’d doze off, losing the thread, then jolt awake at a note of alarm in the reader’s voice, a loud siren outside, or a spike of dread from nowhere. Then I’d put on a mask made from a T-shirt, and orange kitchen gloves, and stand in the doorway of the bedroom—the sickroom—gripping my phone in case it was time to call 911. I’d listen for the rise and fall of a breath, then another, and another, until it seemed safe to take myself back to the couch—to the desolation of Pembroke Castle, that is, or the slaughter at Tewkesbury Abbey. My phone, now held more loosely in my hand, conveyed the medieval horror calmly.

Fateman’s artful blending of her personal situation (“when nights in New York grew more cinematically wretched and scary: sleepless, ambulance sirens nonstop”) with “the intoxicating gloom of Gregory’s medieval Europe” is fascinating. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Notes on Becca Rothfeld's "The Joy of Text"

Notes on Becca Rothfeld’s “The Joy of Text” (Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2020), an effusive review of James Wood’s new essay collection Serious Noticing:

1. Rothfeld says that of the twenty-eight pieces included in Serious Noticing, “only two are negative” – "Paul Auster’s Shallowness” and “Hysterical Realism.” I think there’s a third: “George Orwell’s Very English Revolution,” in which Wood calls Orwell a “puritan masochist,” suggests that he “heightened” passages in his memoir Down and Out in Paris, and argues that Orwell’s socialism had Fascist roots. (See my “James Wood’s Vile ‘George Orwell’s Very English Revolution.’ ”)

2. Rothfeld says that Serious Noticing’s Introduction is new. This isn’t entirely true. Part of it is new, and part of it is from Wood’s “Using Everything,” included in his 2015 collection The Nearest Thing to Life.

3. My appreciation of Wood differs radically from Rothfeld’s. She says his writing is “sensuous,” “lush,” and “novelistic.” Those are just about the last words I’d use to describe his work. To me, Wood is a thinker, not a feeler. He’s at his best when he’s dissecting a piece of writing, showing how it works. His most inspired sentences aren’t lush; they’re glittering combines of observation and quotation (e.g., “How strange and original that ‘clutching itself’ is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shriveling”).

4. Rothfeld describes Wood’s Melville piece as “exquisite” – “perhaps the best in Serious Noticing.” I found it the least interesting – too much blather about God (e.g., “The difficulty is that, if we really did live in the world according to God’s time, we would be thought mad: for this is just what Jesus did”; “Language breaks up God, releases us from the one meaning of the predestinating God, but merely makes that God differently inscrutable by flooding Him with thousands of different meanings”). 

5. My favorite Wood essay is one he’s never collected – “Late and Soon” (The New Yorker, December 10, 2012), a review of Per Petterson’s novels. Wood’s extensive quotations from Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time and his fascinating analyses of those quotations persuaded me to seek this book out and read it. This is something I rarely do; I’m not a fan of fiction. I found I Curse the River of Time so good, I read it twice, savoring its “curling form and drifting sentences” (Wood’s words). I count it among my favorite books. 

September 23, 2019 Issue

It’s interesting to compare Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” in this week’s issue, with Melissa Anderson’s “For Interpretation,” in the current Bookforum. Both are reviews of Benjamin Moser’s recently published Sontag: Her Life and Work. Malcolm says Moser’s feelings for Sontag are mixed – “he always seems a little awed as well as irked by her.” She writes,

Midway through the biography, he drops the mask of neutral observer and reveals himself to be—you could almost say comes out as—an intellectual adversary of his subject.

Compare this with Anderson’s view: 

With Sontag, Moser intelligently brings together both public and private, onstage and off-. His scrutiny of her essays, fiction, films, and political activism is clear-eyed, his analysis of her tumultuous affective life sympathetic (if at times slightly less astute). 

Which is it – sympathetic or adversarial? I guess I’ll have to read Moser’s book to find out.

Sarah Nicole Prickett's "Magic Mirror": On Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm (Photo by Kevin Sturman)

I’m having second thoughts about Sarah Nicole Prickett’s “Magic Mirror” (Bookforum, Summer 2019). Yesterday, I deleted my post in which I agreed with her that “malice” is one of Janet Malcolm’s favorite words. As a key to Malcolm’s work, “malice” is overrated. After reading and rereading Prickett’s absorbing essay (as well as the longer version of it on bookforum.com), I realize that the Malcolm I relish – the superb describer, the brilliant analyst – isn’t there. Malcolm’s subtle comparison of Ted Hughes’s two versions of his foreword to the Journals of Sylvia Plath (The Silent Woman); her patient tracing of Freud’s concept of the unconscious through his case histories (“Dora”), her contrasting two versions of Walker Evans’ photo of the tenant farmer’s wife (“Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.”), her ardent defense of Joseph Mitchell’s “fabrications” (“The Master Writer of the City”); her comparison of the various biographical renderings of Chekhov’s death (Reading Chekhov); her close reading of the court documents in the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova (Iphegenia in Forest Hills) – these and many other memorable analytic moves are what I admire most in Malcolm. She is a comparative analyst extraordinaire. And she writes beautifully – where beauty means clarity, verve, candor, and subtlety. Prickett doesn’t touch on any of this. The closest she comes to getting at the essence of Malcolm’s writing is when she refers to Malcolm’s “typically gloves-off examination” of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina (in “Socks”). Yes, Malcolm’s writing is “gloves-off.” But that doesn’t make it malicious; it makes it delicious. I devour it. 

In Praise of Alex Abramovich's "Built to Last"

S. F. Denton, "Pickerel" (from John McPhee's "The Patch")

One aspect of Alex Abramovich’s “Built to Last” (Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2019) that I especially relish is his analysis of John McPhee’s style. He selects a “bravura passage” from McPhee’s “The Patch” (The New Yorker, February 8, 2010) and comments on it. Here’s the passage:

Pickerel have palatal teeth. They also have teeth on their tongues, not to mention those razor jaws. On their bodies, they sometimes bear scars from the teeth of other pickerel. Pickerel that have been found in the stomachs of pickerel have in turn contained pickerel in their stomachs. A minnow found in the stomach of a pickerel had a pickerel in its stomach that had in its stomach a minnow. Young pickerel start eating one another when they are scarcely two inches long. 

And here’s Abramovich’s comment:

That final turn is typical McPhee—you see the same fillip in the last line of the Cary Grant passage I’ve quoted above. A simple declarative sentence performs the rhetorical function a couplet provides in Shakespearean sonnets: It sticks the ending; it sums up the argument; and, in this instance, it sends us back to the Escher-like, ouroboric sentences that have preceded it.

That “Escher-like, ouroboric sentences” is wonderful. It’s an original attempt to describe McPhee’s pickerel-within-pickerel-within-pickerel construction. But what I really like about Abramovich’s approach is his use of quotation. Mark O’Connell says of James Wood, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). The same can be said about Abramovich's quotes in his McPhee piece. It's like he puts them up on a screen to highlight their brilliancies. 

McPhee is a master stylist. It’s time we had a full study of his form. Abramovich’s superb “Built to Last” points the way.

John McPhee's "The Patch"

I see John McPhee has a new book out called The Patch. There’s an excellent review of it by Alex Abramovich in Bookforum’s current issue. McPhee is one of The New Yorker's all-time greats. A new book by him is a major event. I look forward to reading and reviewing The Patch in the coming weeks. I can’t think of a better way to start the new year. 

Updike's Exquisite Word Paint (Contra Christine Smallwood)

Christine Smallwood, in her “State of Affairs” (Bookforum, Summer 2018), says of John Updike, “He could describe a barn well enough, but to what end?” If you have to ask that about Updike, chances are you’re not going to appreciate his art. For Updike, things are interesting in themselves. Like Dürer and Vermeer, artists he admired immensely, he describes the physical world in close avid detail: 

Shed needles from the larches had collected in streaks and puddles on the tarpaper and formed rusty ochre drifts along the wooden balustrade and the grooved aluminum base of the sliding glass doors.

The lilac leaves, flourishing, flowerless, had reached the height of Nancy’s window and, heart-shaped, brushed her screen.

Her brown eyes, gazing, each held in miniature the square skylight above them.

Treading lightly upon the rime-whitened grass, ice to his bare soles, he finally located, southward above the barn ridge with its twin scrolled lightning rods, a constellation gigantic and familiar: Orion.

He was sitting on the brittle grass, his feet in their papery slippers stinging. 

He called; she held still in answer, and appeared, closer approached, younger than he had remembered, smoother, more finely made – the silken skin translucent to her blood, the straight-boned nose faintly paler at the bridge, the brown irises warmed by gold and set tilted in the dainty shelving of her lids, quick lenses subtler than clouds, minutely shuttling as she spoke. 

These lines are all from Updike’s Couples (1968), a novel that Smallwood calls smug, pompous, and silly. She doesn’t get Updike’s writing. His art is the art of description. Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her “The Book of Laughter” (The New Yorker, October 7, 2013), calls him “a painter in words.” This seems exactly right.

"Not Parasitic, But Primary": On the Art of Criticism (Contra Brody and Robbins)

Garry Winogrand, "Gas Pumps, Santa Fe, New Mexico" (1955)

Michael Robbins, in his Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music (2017), says, “Criticism is parasitic literature.” Richard Brody said the same thing a few years ago: “Criticism is a parasitical operation” (“How To Be A Critic,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012). I can see why they think so: critical writing is a response to other people’s work. The critic appropriates the work of another in a work of his own. But I object to likening this process to that of a parasite. Great critics don’t suck life out of their subjects; they breathe it into them. For me, criticism isn’t parasitic; it’s symbiotic. T. J. Clark analyses Picasso’s The Blue Room as a vision of space (“Space is intimate. The rug heads off abruptly into infinity, but the sheet on the unmade bed laps over it and leaps toward us and asks to be touched”) and I see it with new eyes. James Wood writes, “Saving the dead – that is the paradoxically impossible project of Austerlitz,” thereby providing a key to Sebald’s broody masterpiece. Geoff Dyer reads a Garry Winogrand photo of seemingly nothing (it’s a picture of gas pumps near Santa Fe, New Mexico), noting “the red and white of Coke machine and T-shirt; the Mobil gas pumps and lights; the red-lettered ‘HUNTER’ against the white background of the billboard; and, framed by blue sky, the ‘LISTERINE’ sign in the stripey colours of toothpaste,” and suddenly I’m marvelling at Winogrand’s ingenious eye for colour. I could list dozens of such examples – criticism that is as creative and original and stimulating as the work it examines. Laura Kipnis speaks for me when she says (quoting A. O. Scott), “Criticism is an art in its own right. Wait, not just an art, one that may supersede all other arts! It’s larger and more encompassing – ‘not parasitic, but primary’ ” (“Critical Condition,” Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2016). 

Minna Zallman Proctor on Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"

Minna Zallman Proctor, in her “The Law of Uncertainty” (Bookforum, Summer 2016), quotes Janet Malcolm’s great Iphigenia in Forest Hills [“If any profession (apart from the novelist’s) is in the business of making things up, it is the profession of the trial lawyer”] and says, “The justice system will operate under the auspices of competing fabrications and decidedly will not provide the truth equation for the crime.” Proctor appears to accept Malcolm’s theory that “a trial is a contest between competing narratives” (Iphigenia in Forest Hills). This is a very literary way of looking at trials. Another way – more realistic, in my opinion – is to view the trial as a matter of proof. If the prosecution is able to prove all the elements of the alleged offense beyond a reasonable doubt, the accused will be found guilty. In other words, narrative, schmarrative.

Proctor is on firmer ground when she writes,

Throughout her investigative work, from one villainous bramble to the next, Malcolm is brilliant and irresistibly vexing. For her, observable truth lies not in the collection and skillful organization of facts but in the reliable complexity and inexplicableness of human behavior.

I agree. As Malcolm memorably says of Borukhova in Iphigenia in Forest Hills, “She couldn’t have done it and she must’ve done it.”

Postscript: A portion of Iphigenia in Forest Hills was originally published in the May 3, 2010, New Yorker (see here).

On August Sander: Dyer v. Lane

August Sander, Pastry Cook (1928)

I want to compare Geoff Dyer’s recent "Categorical Imperative" (Bookforum, Apr/May 2014) with Anthony Lane’s "Faces in the Crowd" (The New Yorker, February 10, 2003). Both are reviews of August Sander’s photography. But their perspectives differ from each other. Dyer looks at the faces of Sander’s portraits and finds they “look as extinct as mammals.” He says, “People just don’t look like this anymore.” Lane looks at them and says the experience is “like entering into a novel.” Dyer sees the pictures as fossils. He says the faces are “stuck like fossils in the geology of time.” Lane animates the photos. Here, for example, is his vivid description of “Pastry Cook” (1928):

Round as a bun, topped with a head like a shining cherry, the master of his craft stands firm and square on the tiles of his kitchen, one hand clasping the inch-thick handle of a spoon or whisk, the other curled around the handle of a large mixing bowl, whose curves are a perfect match for the swell of his paunch. There is not an ounce of mockery in the mixture, and the pastry-maker himself would consider the portrait fair, perhaps ennobling, yet the picture is lightly, irrefutably spiced with a pinch of the comic. In that balancing of the aesthetic scales, Sander has no equal.

That noticing of the way the mixing bowl’s curves match the swell of the pastry cook’s paunch is brilliant!

Like Lane, Dyer feels “the all-consuming psychological pull” of Sander’s portraits, “their immense and draining gravity.” But unlike him, instead of being drawn into the photos, he “craves escape” from them - “escape from the density of faces and clothes – of people.” 

I admire Dyer for the honesty of his response. But of the two approaches, I prefer Lane’s. Sander’s pictures are dense with details. Lane helps me see them. 

Mike Brodie's Railcar Reality

Mike Brodie, #5060, 2006-2009

Two young men in an empty silver-gray hopper railcar under a pale blue-white sky, wheat-colored grass to the left and the right, a line of hoppers and telephone poles trailing into the distance, a flat body of blue-gray water in the background, the hopper’s aqua-and-black sign (first line: “BSPX 1858”), sunlight slanting in from the left, illuminating the youths’ faces, casting the cars’ angular shadows on the yellow grass. Such are the particulars of Mike Brodie’s arresting photograph #5060 from his brilliant series A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (2006-2009). The image gives you plenty to contemplate and, at the same time, it makes you want to know more. Who are these guys? Where are they going? Why are they travelling this way? Are they on the run? Are they travelling together? What’s their future? It makes you want to know more about Brodie, too. Where was he located when he took this shot? How did he happen to be there? Was he travelling with these youths? Did he know them? The picture’s tilted perspective gives it a fresh, unstudied, snagged-on-the-wing look, a quick capture of railcar reality. Geoff Dyer, in his excellent "Artist in Training" (Bookforum, Summer 2013), a review of Brodie’s A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, says, “The pictures have the day-to-day intimacy and immediacy of a journal.” That’s the way Brodie’s great #5060 strikes me - the photographic equivalent of an inspired journal entry, a fragment of “the real thing,” nimbly caught with the tang, the freshness, still on it.

Postscript: See also Jessie Wender, "Mike Brodie's 'A Period of Juvenile Prosperity' " (“Photo Booth,” newyorker.com, January 29, 2013)