Karsh II.
At the entry to the Karsh exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there is an eight by ten view camera on a tripod and on the wall beside it a photograph of Yousef Karsh holding an eight by ten negative to the light. The camera is one that Karsh used and so the museum visitor is given a graphic image of the size of the negatives and the camera lens used to make the many photographs in this career retrospective.
One of the most impressive attributes of the large format camera is its ability to render detail with great clarity. With a sharp focus, correct exposure, slow film with a fine grain, and good studio lighting, the resulting photographs will almost always have a very professional look to them regardless of the expertise of the photographer to capture the Character of his subjects.
Karsh certainly knew how to use the large format camera. He consistently released the shutter at exactly the right moment; with an eight by ten negative one does not run off 300 shots in fifteen minutes and hope for the best …one makes the photograph when he sees it. But in looking at these photographs, and I saw this exhibit on two separate occasions and twice on both visits, I am not at all convinced the he was a fine art photographer. He certainly was not a master of lighting. And I am not always convinced that he successfully depicted character rather than the subject’s well known public image.
The photograph of Albert Schweitzer with his head slightly lowered and his eyes cast down is a remarkable photograph of the hair on his head, in his moustache, and the lines and pores of his aging face. It is a graphic depiction of The Aged, but I don’t understand it as a portrait of Albert Schweitzer …I have read two of his books and his biography. As it regards Albert Schweitzer this photograph only tells me that he grew old.
In her biography, The Life of Yousef Karsh, Maria Tippett reports that Karsh was unhappy with his trip to Hollywood to photograph the stars because most of them, personalities manufactured through the studio system, never relinquished their manufactured images; Humphrey Bogart was always Humphrey Bogart in front of a camera, as was Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lorre, and all of the others. Those photographs are included in this retrospective and we can see that Ms. Tippett was correct. Unfortunately the museum does not explain the photographer’s unhappiness with these photographs and so many visitors are likely to think that they are good photographs. They are not. They are run of the mill, the Hollywood mill, and Karsh knew that. It says something about the cultivation of his own celebrity status, however, that he continued to allow these to be publically exhibited.
Overall this all inclusive retrospective shows us that Karsh had access to all of the major personalities of the mid twentieth century from movie stars to statesmen, to scientists and writers, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Regardless of their work, each of them is a recognizable personality. With only a very few persons does he offer us something more than is usually shown.
In particular his photograph of the very young Fidel Castro is quite revealing. His face cropped close to the edges he stares directly at us. He burns with ambition, energy, ideas, and dreams. I have known this face through photographs for fifty years now. I lived in Miami the year he took over the Cuban government. And based on his public image and his coverage in the American press, I have never before sensed what a charismatic and inspiring personality he was…or as he is presented here. Which, I wonder, is the real man?
By contrast, that same winter I worked for over a month on a theatrical production written and directed by Tennessee Williams. I socialized with him on a number of occasions. I hardly recognized him from the photograph here taken only three years before I knew him. Karsh has placed him in a clichéd setting, the disheveled alcoholic author in a frenzy of work, manuscript, cigarette, and scotch and soda close at hand. Here he looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Even in his cups it was my experience that Tennessee Williams always comported himself like the southern gentleman that he was. He was always at a step removed from every situation, he was always the observer. I find the character of the man depicted in this photograph to be untrue.
In some of the earliest works we can see the photographs Karsh made working with an amateur theatrical group in Canada. Each of these photographs is staged but captures a moment of the drama. The influence of stage lighting and set design on his work is apparent. It can be seen that he used that sense of dramatic lighting in most of his portraits. But that does not always work for him. His lighting is often heavy handed. His works are not luminous; the light does not illuminate so much as it “hits” the subject. Often it disrupts the balance of values, as when the key is too high. And the lighting set up is too often merely routine …key, fill, background and always from the same angles in photograph after photograph. There is rarely a sense in his work that the subject and setting called for an individual resolution of the problems encountered, when it does, usually when there was no electrical outlet for his lights, it is available light and it seems it is always from the right.
Later in his career Karsh accepted some commissions to photograph various towns in Canada. I see nothing in these that I have not seen elsewhere. The photographs of his travels with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen are utterly mundane.
But I do see something I would not have expected to find in his photographs made in the factories for Ford of Canada. In both the photographs shown, Gow Crapper installing the back window of a car, and Terry Wasyke and Marris Lehoux in discussion with one holding the nozzle of a spray gun, there is a very high pitch of homoeroticism: Terry and Marris look as if they are about to get to it. Beyond that sudden sexual intrusion into his work, completely lacking in all of his other work including two female nudes, these photographs stand out because they are both so beside the point of the assignment.
As is the photograph in a paper factory in which one of the workers has climbed up onto the center of a huge, about forty by one hundred feet, roll of white paper in order to take his lunch, a la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The contrivance here is so obvious and the whole of it is so beside the point, I can’t imagine why it would have been made or why it continues to be shown.
Despite the fact that many of these are nice pictures, and a few of them perhaps great …Churchill, Picasso, Helen Keller, Shaw, Hemingway, and Pablo Casals, most of these are simply common .
As for seeing them, in this installation the MFA has made that almost impossible. Except for one color photograph all of these are black and white, many with black grounds. All have wide white mattes and black museum frames. The lighting is from high overhead and there is a high level of light in the gallery. As a result the glass over the photographs often acts as mirrors and so one sees himself looking at the photographs. I considered at one point making a photograph of this layered experience which would include the photographer, the subject, the photograph and the viewer. While the lighting at the library is not much better, there the photographs are illuminated with small fluorescent lights above each photograph, the library installation is by far the better of the two.
But the final insult in this gallery is a television interview with Karsh that runs over and over again as one moves about the room. In most museums these audio components have ear phones so that the visitors can proceed in silence. Going to the attendant to tell him how annoying I thought that was he stood up straight and stared at me “How do you think I feel: I have to stand here all day and listen to it!” Yes, the economy may have gone south but at least the Bush administration has been successful with their policy of a trickle down abrogation of personal responsibility.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
http://www.mfa.org/master/sub.asp?key=1854&subkey=7143
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