Slip of a Girl has been
sharing photos from the Fall 1951 issue of
Photography Workshop (#3). The photos are from, and most of the issue devoted to, "Assignment in Studio 61", an artistic experiment in which 12 photographers photograph the same items. Here's a more precise description from the publication itself:
Each photographer was shown into a studio room that contained an assortment of interesting props. Each was also given a dozen sheets of test pictures for selecting one to three models. Working within the confines of this one studio room and with these particular props and subjects, the photographer was then to let his imagination loose and make any sort of photographs that came into his mind -- portraits, still lifes, figure studies, abstractions or fashion pictures.
The
most recent photo she's shared comes from photo-journalist
W. Eugene Smith, who was at the time a staff photographer for
Life magazine. There are 20 more photos, little 2 & 1/2 inch squares, which I'm showing here -- not just because of their nudity, but because of the text published along with the photos.
We begin with the first paragraph (of four), written as an introduction by the publication:
W. Eugene Smith, an intense, congenial, 33-year-old photographer whose work we have admired for the past decade, approached the Studio 61 project with some reluctance. To Gene, a photograph is no simple matter of tripping a shutter. It is a profound personal experience. He insists on becoming, through his camera, intimately involved in his subject. He approaches the scene of picture making with a "desperate terror" that he will fail to record the perfect picture. The perfect picture, he explains with passionate vagueness, is a "three-dimensional, or mental essay" on the subject, and anything less than this is a humiliation just short of death.
The text continues to say that the photographer spent from dusk to dawn at the studio and still, "as usual, he was not satisfied with the results."
He only allowed the prints to be seen and published "after getting our promise to run his testimony that the pictures were to be considered only as 'finger exercises' for limbering up a subject."
And then Gene's own words were printed -- I find them fascinating:
I had just returned from Spain and a story that had involved my emotions to the exhaustion point, when it was suggested that I do this trick for the Workshop. All right, I thought, for once I would do pictures in which there was no need to be emotionally involved.
In that night of work, the nearer I got to shooting, the more upset I got. I soon realized that I couldn't compromise my integrity. I had no definite statement to make with a subject brought illogically into an assortment of props. I was trying to compose nothing into nothing. What I am interested in, as a photo-journalist, is truth. You would not ask Arthur Miller to write an Olsen and Johnsen musical. Nor would you ask William Faulkner to write an advertisement for Maidenform brassieres.
I objected to the layout treatment given my pictures. There were arbitrarily cut into twenty small squares by the editors. I never compose in squares, and when I do compose with the camera that I used that night -- a Contax -- I compose to the edge. Most of the time that night, I was searching and operating the camera for the sole purpose of relaxing my subject. I started taking pictures to build to something in the same way that a play is rehearsed; you allow the the thing to grow. (How many times have I taken a three rolls of of pictures as fast as I could! Just to get the subject to bored and unaware of of the camera.) Sometimes I wouldn't even have bothered to focus.
I feel that these odd scraps of pictures should not be published. No one would think of playing all the disconnected musical fragments Beethoven wrote in the construction of a symphony.
I aim to devote my camera to sincere presentation of character. I want to express this character accurately. Recently, I withdrew a print from an exhibition of mine -- a print that several critics had called one of my best photographs. I withdrew it because, since taking the the picture, I had come to know the subject better. My understanding of that person had changed; I had lost respect for this person and did not believe that he deserved the dignity that the portrait conveyed. To me, then, the picture was a fraud.
I would like to take my Studio 61 subject, study her for weeks, and then photograph her again. Perhaps, then, I could show in pictures what she truly is, who she is, why she is.
At the risk of sounding like your Art 101 instructor, here's what fascinates me about Smith's words and work...
I can't help but wonder what the photos looked like before the editor cropped them to those small squares... For example, #15 is the cropped version of the
latest one at Slip's blog; there's certainly a huge difference in the appeal to me.
And after reading Smith's words, I cringe at the obviously non-linear order the photos are presented in (yes, they are shown in the order presented on the page); it seems more insult to injury to have destroyed any attempt to show the growing story.
I also cringed every single time Smith used the word "pictures" rather than photographs (and then again when I typed it). This due to former my art instructors who insisted we use the word "photograph"; like "painting", it separated art from doodles, graphics & other visual things, and also distinguished one form of art from another. Perhaps this is not necessary to the conversation today; but, hey, it's my blog.
Speaking of art...
I would have enjoyed the photographs more (or at least most of them -- certainly some are 'better' than others to me) had I not read Smith's words. But knowing what I know now, I must say it begs the question that I once threw at my art instructor when she showed us images of a Venus statue buried deep in a garbage pit, found by archaeologists, then proffered as "art":
Is it really art if the artist himself is dissatisfied? If art is expression & communication, and the artist is unhappy with his result, then can it really be called art?
If not, then Smith's displeasure at the photographs renders them what... pornography? Maybe not, because while I like many of the photos, I don't find them arousing. (Hmm, well, maybe #6; but that's because I have breasts and I can feel the coldness emanating off of the metal headboard finger my bare -- not touching the headboard, but merely near it -- breast.) Then again, I don't get aroused by much of what is called "pornography." But as the photos were cropped, adjusted by an editor, would that make the editor the pornographer? Similarly, if I like them in any way, does that make the editor the artist?
And if the photos had both pleased Smith and aroused me, could they really be porn at all -- because Smith himself defines his work as pictures that show "what she truly is, who she is, why she is" and, since no one is "all arousing all the time" (no matter what your lover says!), doesn't that remove all possibility of his nude photographs being porn at all?
Maybe then the photos are indeed just 'pictures' or snaps like anyone with a camera would take. But they were not taken by just anyone; they are photos by W. Eugene Smith.
Does
Smith's standing as a photojournalist affect your viewing of the images?
Does his credibility change, do his words change in meaning -- or your interpretation thereof -- when you learn that Smith was institutionalized at Bellevue a year or so prior to his taking the photos?
Labels: Art, Essays, Images, Magazines, Photographers, Photographs
