Acts of Seeing: Quickstop

John MacDougall, Quickstop, Iqaluit (2007)

I relish the “service station” shots of Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and others. Many years ago, in Iqaluit, Nunavut, I tried my hand at taking a picture of the gas bar in our neighborhood. The low Arctic sun was shining just right on the pump island, sort of spotlighting it. There was a snowmobile there, gassing up, which added a distinctive northern element. I love the colors – the greens and blues and dabs of red. You can see a hill of snow-covered tundra in the background. The scene has a certain cold beauty – at least to my yearning southern eyes. I miss the place. 

May 13, 2019 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his “Exposed,” in this week’s issue, refers to “photography’s artificiality” (“Winogrand was as fully and dramatically cognizant of photography’s artificiality as, say, Cindy Sherman, but he assumed a right to be judged strictly on the quality of his work”). The aspect of photography that I admire most is its factuality. Does the camera lie? Yes, but only when the photographer controlling the camera wants it to. Such a photographer is Jeff Wall, who stages many of his pictures. I’m allergic to his work. Garry Winogrand, on the other hand, is among photography’s most factual, least artificial artists. Even the skewed look of his images is born not of willed distortion, but of avidity to capture ever more within his picture frame. Schjeldahl writes:

You see the comprehensive capture of scenes on the wing. If the camera tilts, it’s not for arty effect but to squeeze in the relevant details of, say, a group of women bustling forward between a beggar in a wheelchair and a small group of people standing or sitting at a curb—three rhythms in flashing counterpoint.

That “comprehensive capture of scenes on the wing” beautifully describes Winogrand’s art. 

Geoff Dyer's "The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand"

Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018), a collection of his readings of one hundred Winogrand photographs, is a feat of critical imagination. I say “readings,” but a better word might be “riffs” – creative interpretations of photos in which, at first glance, nothing much appears to be happening. Take for example Winogrand’s 1964 black-and-white shot of a suburban house, its open garage containing a stylish American car (1958 Chev Impala Sport Coupe?) and a woman standing beside it. Dyer writes,

Atmospherically, it is one of Winogrand’s stillest images. The silent shadows. The perfect sky. No before and no after. The >s and s of the car's tail fins fit under the s and >s of the roof. The blank rectangle of the garage frames the smaller black rectangle of the car’s rear window: containers of the unknowable. The perfection of the image lends an idyllic air to what it depicts. But since the nature of any idyll is its transience or brevity, something in the picture subtly introduces an almost inaudible ticking … and the movement of time it so insistently denies. The car sleeps in the garage. The dream is intact but poised on the brink of wakefulness. All might not be quite what it seems. The fact that the car is protruding slightly from the garage – enough to cast a small shadow – suggests that perhaps it is not stationary, is being reversed out, which in turn reveals that she is not alone, is part of an active marriage. She is waiting to get in the car (without having to enter the dark) to go somewhere else. We can’t say for sure, but think of the woman quoted by Betty Friedan in her book The Feminine Mystique (published a year before this picture was taken): “I begin to feel I have no personality,” she famously said, before going on to identify the chores of the suburban housewife. “But who am I?”

That is a perfect Dyer riff, starting with its analysis of the photo’s “atmosphere” (“The silent shadows. The perfect sky. No before and no after”), and the ingenious use of angle brackets to describe the matching shapes of the tail fins and roof lines. Note how he gleans meaning from the car’s “small shadow,” and how this leads to his connecting the woman in the garage with the “woman quoted by Betty Friedan.” It’s all quite dazzling, and what makes it dazzling is Dyer’s use of imaginative inference.

Garry Winogrand, Untitled, Los Angeles, 1964

Here’s another example: Winogrand’s 1955 “gas pumps” photo. Dyer comments, 

There’s a certain amount of emptiness – the forecourt – in the middle of the picture but the something that is mainly there isthe colour. 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. There’s even a flattened bit of red — cigarette? — packaging littering the otherwise empty forecourt.

How I relish that “flattened bit of red.” It’s a detail I would’ve overlooked but for Dyer’s sharp eye. 

Garry Winogrand, Untitled, 1955

In his book, Dyer says, “Photography is all about details, about specific truths.” If you’re looking for keys to his critical approach, this is likely one of them. His attention to details is amazing: the face in the storefront window, “looking on like a gremlin,” in photo 96; the flowers at the corner of the building, in photo 22, blooming “like the sudden red of a bullet wound”; the open trunk of the station wagon, in photo 2, “conveying a sense of the funereal”; “the sunglasses suspended from a nail or hook on the far fence,” in photo 23, “suggesting that Winogrand has to go to some lengths to enable us to see what we see, to get this picture comprised overwhelmingly of horizontal bands”; the rectangle of light in the top-left corner of photo 24, “so pure and white that it has vaporized one entire wall of a building”; the shadows in photo 44 (“Can an afternoon really last so long? Yes, say the shadows”); the wooden stanchions, in photo 4, that “have the look of gallows”; the bike with “longhorn handlebars,” in photo 8, that “looks on curiously and cautiously”; the “ghostly, lovely bit of blue to the left of the young woman’s mouth,” in photo 19, “a reminder of how the sky – of which this blue is a metonym – can sneak in anywhere”; on and on – “galaxies of details,” as Dyer says, quoting Leo Rubinfien. 

My favourite Dyer riff is on the gorgeous 1967 Winogrand gracing the book’s front cover – the woman in the red coat. Dyer writes,

Has anyone so consistently chanced upon the random glamour of the street? To make sure I was not reacting over-enthusiastically to this image, I looked through Martin Harrison’s survey of fashion photography, Appearances, to see how it fared alongside famous images by Arthur Elgort, Louis Faurer and the rest. It doesn’t have the conceived and fully achieved perfection that we see in page after page of Vogue. If it had been posed, the woman with her back to us would have been more elegant, less boxy-looking but, equally, we would have lost that lovely — touching — accidental echo of hands that holds the black and white women together. It’s possible that, in a controlled shoot, a photographer might have arranged such a thing but the knowledge that it was contrived would have robbed the picture of its romance. 

That observation of the “lovely — touching — accidental echo of hands that holds the black and white women together” is inspired! The whole book is inspired - the equivalent of a brilliant jazz improvisation. Winogrand’s mesmerizing photos are the territory; Dyer’s inventive readings of them are the adventure.

The New York Times' "100 Notable Books of 2018": Two Serious Omissions

I’m pleased to see that one of my favorite books of 2018 – Zadie Smith’s essay collection Feel Free – made The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2018.” Smith’s book includes four New Yorker pieces: “Brother from Another Mother” (February 23, 2015); “Some Notes on Attunement” (December 17, 2012); “Crazy They Call Me” (March 6, 2017); and “A Bird of Few Words” (June 19, 2017).

But I’m puzzled that an equally delectable essay collection, Lorrie Moore’s See What Can Be Done (2018), is omitted. Moore’s book contains, among many excellent pieces, five New Yorker articles: “Legal Aide” (April 23 & 30, 2001); “Bioperversity” (May 19, 2003); “Wizards” (September 12, 2011); “Lena Dunham: Unwatchable in the Best Way” (March 17, 2012); and “Canada Dry” (May 21, 2012).

And I’m shocked that Geoff Dyer’s brilliant The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018) didn’t make the list. The Times’ own reviewer, Jennifer Szalai, called it “visually sumptuous” and “enormously ambitious” (“Geoff Dyer Takes to the Streets with Garry Winogrand,” March 28, 2018). Dyer’s splendid opus is, for me, the best book of 2018. I’ll post my review of it in the next few weeks.   

September 10, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Emily Witt’s “What Is New?,” a profile of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The newyorker.com version’s tagline says, “For three decades, the photographer has explored the fragility of the political consensus on which his personal utopia depends.” Maybe that’s true, although, to me, his explorations are as much hedonistic as they are political. The print version’s succinct “The life and art of Wolfgang Tillmans” is preferable. But I do like that “personal utopia.” It conveys Tillmans's cocoon-like cosmopolitan world – the Panorama Bar, his Berlin studio, galleries such as Nairobi’s GoDown Arts Centre – all superbly described by Witt. Here’s her depiction of his studio:

The space occupies an entire floor of a building originally intended as a department store, designed by the Bauhaus architect Max Taut. It has unfinished concrete floors and long rows of windows. Tillmans cultivates a small wilderness of houseplants—sculptural cacti, papyrus, greenish-purple-leafed begonias, delicate ferns—which he grows from cuttings that he gets from friends and collects on his travels. Walls are decorated with maps, exhibition posters, and protest signs, shelves are lined with records and books. Tillmans takes still-lifes, and I was reminded of one composed from half-smoked packs of Gauloises, decks of Post-it notes, and tape dispensers scattered between computer monitors and plants. He encourages a careful selection of visual clutter, which, he said, “keeps it interesting for the assistants and myself.”

Witt also gets at Tillmans’s creative process. My favourite passage is her description of his “casual, and barely noticeable, often in motion” way of taking pictures:

In Berlin, he took photographs of a building under renovation across the street from his studio, and of his friends dancing at Clausen’s fortieth birthday party. In Kenya, I saw Tillmans reach around a driver’s head to take a photograph through the driver’s-side window of people assembling wheelbarrows. After a radio interview at Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, he took a portrait of the host, Khainga O’Okwemba. As we were walking out of the building, he photographed a pink wastebasket in the corner of someone’s office, a spider plant placed underneath the stairs, and a sign declaring the corporation “a corruption-free zone.” In New York, three months later, walking north from the Whitney Museum to the David Zwirner gallery, in Chelsea, where Tillmans has a show this fall, he led me along the West Side Highway. As we walked past construction sites, open-bed trucks loaded with building material, and construction workers sawing amid showers of sparks, he took photographs. I saw the things that I have mentioned, but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph, if it became one at all. “People are so unable to talk about what makes a picture, because technically they’re all the same, they’re all pigment on paper, and we are using the same cameras,” Tillmans told me. “The reason why a photograph I take can be recognized is literally beyond words.”

That “but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph” is excellent, a variation on Garry Winogrand’s inspired “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” 

"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).