The Lucid Eye:
Photographs from the Collection of
Arnall Golden Gregory

August 27-September 25, 2009

All photographs courtesy of Arnall Golden Gregory LLP.

Exhibition Highlights: Texts by Jason Francisco, Curator

Introduction
Helen Levitt, New York, 1942
Margaret Bourke-White, The Living Dead of Buchenwald, 1945
Paul Strand, Man, Five Points Square, New York, 1916
William Christenberry, Coleman’s Café, Greensboro, Alabama, 1971
Mario Giacomelli, Pae Saggio, 1971
Bill Jacobson, Song of Sentient Beings, 1995

Introduction

Jack Spencer, Man with Fish, Como, MS, 1995

The hardest thing to accept about photographs is often the first thing about them: that they show and do not tell, depict and do not describe, make-manifest and do not aver. To be drawn into photographs is precisely to parry questions about appearances, and to find that the world’s surfaces are replete with illusions equally fragile and enduring. Photography—at its best—is a cunning art. Each image this exhibition is a masterwork in the practice of self-consciously artistic photography as it emerged during the twentieth century. Whether in the vein of abstraction, documentary, portraiture or fantasy—and frequently in combinations—photographs, as this exhibition offers them to us, are images with a particular purchase on miracles, one announcing another. If paintings (in Emile Zola’s famous definition) offer us nature perceived through a temperament, photographs offer much the same, and also nature perceived despite a temperament, without certifying how interpretation forms and deforms its referents. Too, the photographs here heighten our awareness of time’s polarities—time arrested and time hastened, time parceled into “moments” and time prolonged into epochs, time folded into human experience and time’s indifference to our experience even of memory. The pictures here likewise offer complex notions of space. If photographs (to paraphrase Gus Blaisdell) begin when we look away from where we are, the act of looking-away is radically cut down and then left to gestate within whatever rectangle is brought upon the sphere of vision, as well as the optical qualifications of a lens. A photograph renders space only in a frame’s worth, and only with certain properties of focus and drawing, and yet—or so doing—richly endows our conception of what exists to be seen beyond the edges of the picture itself. Perhaps most of all, the pictures here liven the severances so abundant in the photographic act—its seizures and enclosures—toward narrative, symbolic and philosophic ends, so that the whole we can imagine is comprised equally of stability and fluctuation, permanence and loss. In the images here, frames become frameworks and light itself trains the lucid eye. Ultimately it is impossible to say whether any photographs “capture” what they show (to use the currently dominant metaphor for what photographs do), or the opposite—release things toward us, circulate them within us, and push them past us, with an open invitation that we follow their mysteries. The photographs in this room are, in short, aesthetic triumphs. Each in its own way presents a degree of formal sophistication sufficiently acute to displace attention to form alone, and so invites other revelations—what might be called inner sight of the self and the world.

Jason Francisco
Visual Arts Department, Emory University

Helen Levitt
New York, 1942
Gelatin silver print

Helen Levitt’s street photographs of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s are among twentieth century photography’s most treasured examples of acute social observation in public places. Working with a 35mm rangefinder—a versatile and inconspicuous camera introduced in the mid 1920s—Levitt carefully followed the kaleidoscopic social activities in lower Manhattan’s crowded neighborhoods. In particular she studied children at play, which is to say the all-too-human spectacle of rituals, rules and contests for power as these acquire their own momentum and purpose, often without a sense of consequences. In this photograph (sure to make most parents today cringe), Levitt is present at a moment in which play leads to the brink of serious physical danger. Exuberant and spontaneous, the picture is also searingly non-sentimental. In the idiom of a single instant—well-found and exquisitely seen—Levitt creates a searching parable about the human condition.

Margaret Bourke-White
The Living Dead of Buchenwald, 1945
Gelatin silver print

Renowned for her pluck and her bravery as a pioneering photojournalist of the inter- and post-World War II period, Margaret Bourke-White accompanied Patton’s army through Germany in the spring of 1945, and was present for the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11th. Moving through the Nazi concentration camp “with a veil over my mind” to keep from being overwhelmed by the brutality whose remains confronted her, she photographed the mounds of corpses and the camp’s crematoria, its working and “living” spaces, and its survivors. “The Living Dead of Buchenwald” is her best-known photograph of the liberation, and indeed has become emblematic of the Shoah, the genocide of Europe’s Jews. As an emblem, its power largely derives from a complex equivocality. A group of men stands behind a barbed wire fence that extends across the entirety of the picture, from left to right and top to bottom. It is a fence without bounds, and yet a fence without power. The men stand close to it. Some touch it almost tenderly, while others lean on it for support. Many of the men wear prison garb, but some do not, and some have mixed their uniforms with the hats and coats of the outside world: it is clear that these are free men with the clothing of their persecution still to wear. The frontality of the picture’s composition, plus the stature that the men acquire from the photographer’s moderately low vantage point—not to mention the curious lighting, a mix of bright artificial light with low contrast ambient light—holds these men in a dramatic state of waiting. They wait as if for us, and we—who in the very act of looking into their image become their witnesses—are given a vicarious power to free them ourselves, over and over again. If their pendant appearance before us is a name for their perpetually unconsummated liberation, this is only to say that they abide in the very condition of photography itself.

Paul Strand
Man, Five Points Square, New York, 1916
Gravure

Genre scenes, depicting common people at everyday tasks, have been a part of high European art for centuries. Celebrated painters such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder in Renaissance Flanders, Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen and Pieter de Hooch in seventeenth century Holland, Louis le Nain in seventeenth century France, and William Hogarth in eighteenth century England—not to mention Vincent Van Gogh, Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet in nineteenth century France—created pictures of artisans, markets, inns, humble domestic activities, agricultural labor and street life. Honorific and often overtly sentimental, these images remained consistently popular among the bourgeois classes. Paul Strand’s picture, “Man, Five Points Square, New York, 1916” is a disquieted heir to the genre tradition. Originally published in the famous final double-issue of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work (dedicated entirely to Strand and announcing him as Stieglitz’s protégé), the picture is by turns demanding, even confrontational, and opaque. The close cropping of the figure—essentially a withholding of information—defines him by way of anonymity. We do not know where he comes from or where he is going, where he belongs or does not belong, even whether he is standing or sitting. Of his possessions we are given only to contemplate a collar, a button and a brim, which frame his weathered face and the particular tension in his eyes, whose focus is neither quite inward nor outward. In effect, we encounter what seems a wandering soul as much as a man in or out of place in the world. The upshot is a heightened but non-idealized vision of one sort of everyday actuality.

William Christenberry
Coleman’s Café, Greensboro, Alabama, 1971
Color coupler print

Photographs frequently—as if by their nature—work on and against language. In what form of art is it more ordinary (and indeed, ordained) to compare a picture to a vaunted “thousand words,” or to grapple with visual illusions as “stories?” Indeed, photographs are so prone to being rendered and re-rendered in words—and in so doing, rent from an austere, prepossessing silence—that implied states of language are a part of the photographer’s art. Photographs, we might say, are not only language-inducing images, but words stranded in the condition of pictures. William Christenberry’s 1971 photograph of a roadside Alabama eatery calls on language whose meanings are multiple and complex. The words “lure” and “allure” come quickly to mind: the ramshackle building is a draw for those seeking nourishment and company, but promises little—its advertisements and even its sign hanging as only meager indices of what lies within. The word “classic” also comes to mind, not only because the building appears as a relic (in two senses—something left behind and something seeming to typify an earlier way of life), but because its architecture is a variant of a classical design going back to antiquity. Its wooden posts hint at ancient stately columns, and the Coca-Cola sign on the building’s entablature winks at us as a distinctly American substitute for a frieze. When the color coupler print was originally made, the photograph’s colors were likely far more intense. Now, having faded (as color photographs do—color being an essentially a fugitive phenomenon in photography), the picture is lurid in the original and nearly lost meaning of the word—“sallow” and “pallid.”

Mario Giacomelli
Pae Saggio, 1971
Gelatin silver print

Is it possible to picture a wish? Are wishes sometimes found before they are thought? Of what pleasures does a pious heart dream? Mario Giacomelli’s photograph of monks in a snowstorm raises these questions with uncommon briskness. The scene is an aspectless white field—whiteness to the borders of the image and (we imagine) whiteness beyond them, an infinity of whiteness against (and toward) which the monks form finite markers. Their black habits make silhouettes that are expansively human. Four of the figures join together as if to become one billowing body, arriving (at last) into their brotherhood and their communion. Indeed, their wind-made shapes alter them into creatures that might fly, creatures to glide and cavort in air and water as on land and ice. They defy gravity without the awareness (or obligations) of defiance. The picture is not entirely one of play: the smiling figure emits a distinctly controlled exuberance, and the truncated, solemn figure to the far right shelters his truths within himself. In its contrasts and its boldness, its starkness and its gentleness, its abstraction and its tactility, the picture lays out a set of transformations. A good photograph, in Giacomelli’s hands, is an agent of an uncommon discovery, in which any insight we find gives itself as a wish to another insight, one spiriting us to the next in a glad displacement.

Bill Jacobson
Song of Sentient Beings, 1995
Gelatin silver print

While photography is often prized for its realism—its capacity to describe light and surfaces with such nuance that we deem its illusions (with or without embarrassment) to be “information”—optical sharpness and broad tonal definition are sometimes the wrong choices artistically. Bill Jacobson’s 1995 picture, “Song of Sentient Beings” presents a large, opalescent human form floating in a dark rectangle. To call the figure “blurry” seems deeply inadequate. There is not quite a word to describe its precise apartness from sharp focus, the particular softness of its contours, or the way its solidity seems the hypnotic equivalent of liquid and of gas. By virtue of Jacobson’s careful non-sharp focusing, the figure invokes humanness in a state of primal ambiguity. At once grown and fetal, the figure is as close to lifeless as to alive, as close to either sex as it is to sexlessness, as close to youth as to old age. It is without experience or circumstance, and almost as immaterial as light itself, which seems to glow from within it as much as to reflect from it. Still, however close the figure is to an emanation, however unearthly it seems, it is very much a body, and not without repose. With what dose of sympathy, the picture asks, does it become a subject rather than an object of our regard? By what inclination does it keep from slipping toward the realm of angels or corpses? What sentience can resolve its sentience?

Contact | Faculty | Study | Careers | Arts in Atlanta | Events and Exhibits | Spaces + Gallery

Visual Arts Home | Art History | Emory College | Arts at Emory | Emory University

Copyright © 2005 Emory University
Last updated: September 2, 2009