Karsh I.
I went to Boston expressly to see the career retrospective of the work of Yousuf Karsh at the Museum of Fine Art and discovered upon my arrival that the Boston Public Library was doing a Karsh exhibit as well. Because the work raises several issues, I am discussing my observations in two entries on this blog.
The celebrity photographer.
There are two schools of thought regarding the interpretation of art works. The one holds that the observer should know as much about the artist as is possible and the interests that inform his work. The other simply states that an art work should stand on its own. In this exhibition at the Boston Public Library almost all of the photographs are accompanied by the notes that Karsh made and published with the photographs when they were featured in magazines and in other exhibitions. Thus we might infer that he was encouraging us to follow the first school and to understand him as well as the art works, but in doing so one can not escape the feeling that Karsh is attempting to place himself in the same category of celebrity as his subjects.
Yousuf Karsh was born in Armenia and left that country as a refugee with his parents and siblings, taking up residence in Syria. In his teen years an uncle in Canada sponsored him for immigration and so he went there and became the uncle’s apprentice in his studio photography business. Recognizing that young Karsh had a natural talent for the medium, he secured for him an apprenticeship with John Garo, the Boston photographer. Karsh spent three years in Boston. While there he availed himself of the opportunity to study and read at the Boston Public Library and he visited the MFA to study the history of western art. Late in life he retired to Boston. The photographs in both these exhibitions were gifts made by his wife, Estrelita Karsh, to these two institutions.
From this biographical material it can be understood that the young Karsh, speaking little or no English, learned to use his eyes, to see, when he worked with his uncle, and that with Garo, whose subjects were the socially prominent, he learned to interact with an elite group of socially and politically active persons. From both photographers Karsh learned to organize and run a photography studio. Because he was successful at all of these things it can be understood that he began with a sharp native intelligence, an attribute that might not have been encouraged in his home life as his parents were uneducated peasants.
On his return to Canada Karsh opened a studio in Ottawa and through the encouragement of a friend became involved with an amateur theatrical group, many of the members being local politicians. Eventually he came to the attention of the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, who used Karsh to photograph important visitors, included in photographs that featured him as well, as a means to promote his tenure of office. It was through this connection, in 1942, that King arranged the sitting with Winston Churchill. That photograph, the definitive image of the World War II leader, thrust Karsh onto the international stage. It is an excellent photographs and it has tremendous presence. From that time forward his subjects were the makers and shapers of the modern world.
Through the notes, the notes and the photographs came to have equal importance: we have not only the presence of the subject but the presence of the photographer as well; Churchill is an important person and, through the anecdote, so is Karsh who made the photograph. While some self promotion is a vital necessity for any artist establishing his career, with Karsh one senses that self promotion had a far greater importance for him than it did for many other artists.
In recognizing the celebrity photographer, the photographer as celebrity, one has to draw a sharp distinction between the work as it is presented and the reputation that the work has achieved through the artist’s manipulation of the press and the public.
In the library exhibition all of the subjects are writers. Almost all of them are men. And all but four of them are wearing coats and ties. That particular form of dress removes these personalities to an earlier historic moment distant from our own. From his involvement with the theatrical group the observer can detect an influence in the dramatic lighting and in the staged mise en scene of many of these photographs. While dramatic lighting is an acceptable stylistic device, in too many of these, the mise en scene lapses into the clichéd. In the corner of what appears to be a library/study, we see a woman, Pearl Buck, sitting at a desk in profile to the camera. Behind her is a window with an open dictionary on a stand between the heavy draperies. Her desk top is cluttered with papers, a pot of pencils, and a desk calendar, suggesting a writer’s desk. In this photograph we are asked to believe that Miss Buck is deeply engaged with the work at hand. But if we step back from the photograph for a moment and study the lighting we have a different understanding.
Despite the opened window at the back with the view of an overcast gray day, which would indicate a diffused ambient lighting, a key light from the right sharply illuminates the face, a second light is at the back of her head, and a third light splays across the books in the bookcase behind her. The artificiality of the setting is augmented by the four light sources here. Thus we can see that this woman is not actually writing but that she is posing in a room that contains an 8 by 10 view camera, lighting equipment, and a photographer and his assistant. All of this intimacy and story telling is contrived.
Why was it contrived? Did Karsh find his subject so conventional as to be utterly boring? (Pearl Buck has the presence here of the president of a small town garden club.) Was it necessary to stage an event in order to salvage her public image as an important writer …or his as an important photographer of famous writers?
I think it can be understood that I consider this a bad photograph. And I was disappointed to find that many of the others were of this same school of thought. Others, Albert Camus, John Osborne, Norman Mailer, J.B. Priestley, are simply common photography studio portraits.
Some of them rise somewhat above that level. The Hemingway depicted is far more sweet, vulnerable, and human than his self projected image ever suggested. And the man, seen against a black ground, is the subject of a photograph that attempts to be nothing more than a photograph. It is a very good one: it has impact, composition, tonal values, texture, and the presence of an intriguing person. Conversely, the Francois Mauriac profile, also against black, a sliver of his head illuminated like a new moon, is a lovely strong image but I don’t know what that concept has to do with his contribution to letters. This could have been anyone with a hooked nose. His portrait of Cousteau, with an equally hooked nose, is a very, very similar photograph. The two photographs seen in the same exhibition diminish one another.
Some of the photographs are wonderful. The George Bernard Shaw portrait is exactly the public image that that man so carefully cultivated…he gave up not an inch of it! The Picasso is Picasso all the way. Both are wonderful photographs. (Did those two ever take a bad photograph?)
But when Karsh is really good, he is brilliant. In a portrait of two women one sits at the right in profile to the camera. Her hands are clasped and rest on a large book on the table before her. Her face conveys an inner peace, her benevolence and her willingness to experience whatever might befall her.
The other woman sits facing the camera but with her head tipped down as if straining to hear what is about to be said. Her right hand hovers above the clasped hands of the other woman. This woman too exudes peace and love but rather than a willingness to experience life her whole thrust is an intense desire to share and to communicate. Thus one is compelled to share and to give, one is compelled to experience and to accept. The dynamic between them is the essence of human interaction.
Against a black ground the two heads, one slightly above the other, are softly illuminated, gentle ovoid spheres. The hands at the left create an energetic but invisible diagonal from lower left to upper right. The bright edge of the book in the bottom left corner insists that it too has value to the composition; it too is a record of the human experience.
The two women could be any two women who have the ability to illustrate this moment. When these two are forgotten, this photograph will still retain its power.
The woman facing the camera is Polly Thompson and her companion, in profile, is Helen Keller.
I say when they are forgotten, because many of these subjects will be forgotten. Shortly after I entered the gallery a young couple, of college age if not college students, strode into the room. She went to the wall to read the introductory comments and he paced off around the room. Soon he shouted to her: “Hey. John F. Kennedy. He’s considered a writer because he wrote one book?” A few minutes later he laughed. “Wow. Winston Churchill. What the hell does he have to do with literature?” And as quickly he said: “This sucks. Let’s go.” She moved away from the comments and looked at a few of the photographs. She smiled. He kissed her and made much fuss over her. Arms wrapped about one another they breezed out to the room.
Oh, yes, considering the state of American education, these men and these few women will someday be forgotten. And I suspect that very few of these photographs and the anecdotes that accompany them will make an uneducated public curious to know who they were. These are rather dull men and women from another era in photographs presented in a style that is equally passé. As a person Yousuf Karsh was known to be charming, intelligent, ambitious, and completely professional in his working methods, but through his work we can see that he understood Art as something that was Deadly Serious. Despite their being portraits these photographs lack a human quality. He made some fine photographs, but I would say that overall these have historic rather than artistic value.
http://www.bpl.org/news/upcomingevents.htm#exhibits
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