Gift Books, 1986 : Photo Books in Focus

Photography has a most peculiar relationship to what in the arts is called real life. It is tied to the world in a way painting, sculpture, even film, which can, arguably, create a convincing other world, are not. Photography must picture something outside itself; its necessary condition is always, as Roland Barthes put it, “that-has-been.” How does photography gain the autonomy of the work of art? How does it separate itself from the world it represents, as well as from the ubiquity of the photograph in snapshots, magazines, billboards? A number of strategies are recorded in this season’s output of photography books: from early 20th-Century soft-focus pictorialism--the attempt to give photography the evocativeness of paintings; to mid-century “straight photography” and the attempt to separate out the essence of the world itself, to capture “supreme instants”; to the recent resurgence, under postmodernism’s questioning of modernist truths and essences, of staged fictions, of photographs that lie.

The most beautiful example of the first approach, a strategy bent on beauty, is the newly reissued Sudek by Sonja Bullaty (Clarkson N. Potter: $35; 192 pp., 90 gravure photographs), first published in 1978. The photographs of church interiors cut by heavy light and domestic exteriors glimpsed through misted windows that Sudek referred to as “remembrances” are accompanied by the Czech photographer’s own written remembrances, small and often insightful statements on photography, and tellingly, painting and music.

Supreme Instants: The Photography of Edward Weston by Beaumont Newhall (New York Graphic Society: $50; 192 pp., 237 photographs, 102 duotones, 7 color), the catalogue for a major traveling exhibition that will appear locally at the County Museum of Art, takes as its title Weston’s description of the photographer’s goal. The book’s now classic images span three decades, recording Weston’s development as an artist, his abandonment of pictorialism and his rejection of the doctored image in favor of the clarity of “pure photography.” Newhall recounts Weston’s own exceptions to the demands of purity, his own dodgings and compositions, but more to reinforce some generalized sense of the artist’s rugged independence than to explain his process. The essay is aggravating; everything remains on the level of the anecdotal, held there by Newhall’s habit of referring to his subject as Edward. While there is much talk of the techniques of photography--which camera Edward bought when--there is little discussion of the photographs, of their workings or assumptions or iconography, and while there are a great many names mentioned, there is no context offered for the work. Still, the best of Weston’s photographs in the beautifully printed book do work as the artist intended. They transcend what they are pictures of; they leave their scenes to become full and autonomous images.

In addition to a healthy representation of the usual group of photographers-become-celebrities like Weston and Ansel Adams, there is the usual overabundance of photographs of celebrities. There are new collections of Karsh and Arnold Newman, and three Cecil Beaton books. The best of the genre is Alice Springs: Portraits, introduced by Helmut Newton (Twelvetrees: $35; 96 pp., 53 gravure photographs). Newton’s Australian-born wife Alice Springs takes pictures of just the sort of people one might expect--Charlotte Rampling, Princess Caroline, Karl Lagerfeld and Yves St. Laurent. What is unexpected is the formal complexity and detail, the depth of the black that sets off most of the faces and the richness of the grays that describe them. Against the wealth and publicness her subjects represent, Springs is surprisingly self-effacing; the brief texts that accompany the images tell the story of their making, and she seems perfectly willing to tell us of her ambivalences when she hasn’t gotten what she wanted.

The aim of the portrait photograph echoes Weston’s attempt to strip away the public image--the readily apparent--to find the essential truth beneath. Missives by Anne Turyn, with an introduction by Andy Grundberg (Alfred van der Marck: $35; 112 pp., 84 color photographs), suggests a different, one might say postmodern, understanding. Turyn’s photographs are clearly fictions, small narratives set in motion on table-top stages, and they are infected with language. Her titles and captions aren’t held outside the image as explanation, rather they are inscribed inside it, on blackboards, “magic slates,” and crumpled notepaper. As we read her texts, they reread the image, and it in turn fills in the written references, and makes literal their metaphors. Beneath a group of old and, with the advent of the digital clock radio, out-of-date alarm clocks, a letter reads, “Dear Pen Pal, We in America know that time passes.” Turyn understands that the photograph is always a stripping away, an abstraction: The other side of Barthes’ “that-has-been” is that “that” is no longer. The photograph, as Grundberg’s introduction tells us, is a measure not of presence but of loss. In the photograph, a segment of the world is stripped from its complex scene and reduced to an image that resembles not the world but the memory of it, malleable, symbolic, narrative.

The photograph’s reduction of real life to just another leveled and interchangeable image is the inadvertent lesson of a book that never questions its ability to tell it like it is. Based on its position on the best-seller list, A Day in the Life of America, compiled by Rick Smolan and David Cohen (Collins: $39.95; 272 pp.), is the most important book of the season. DITLA, as the book abbreviates its title, contains images by 200 international photojournalists taken from 6:30 a.m. to midnight on May 2, 1986. Individually, the pictures range from one or two of real interest to page after page of the sort of small curiosities that National Geographic seems to like so much--a Reno showgirl brushing her teeth in full, almost nonexistent costume. Together, the picture they present, beginning with the cowboy beneath the moon on the cover and the sunshot cloud above the logos of corporate sponsors on the title page, recalls the President’s campaign declaration that “it’s morning again in America.” It is not that there are no hungry or dispossessed in the book. There are a few, but it is clear that they are presented in cameo appearances, as abstractions of “the hungry and dispossessed.” In these pages, they are not specific individuals in specific situations, rather they stand as illustrations of some great theme like “the grand texture of American life.” That something has been flattened out in these images is most easily seen in the book’s most serious lapse. Included among the photographs joined together by the benign, and unacknowledged, category “groups”--a church choir, a girls’ dance class, and so on--is an evening gathering of the Ku Klux Klan. All photographs are just photographs and all us are just plain folks. For anyone genuinely interested in the subject, Robert Frank’s seminal photo essay “The Americans,” which introduced in 1959 a number of the subjects DITLA has rendered cliches, has been rereleased this year.

There are other views of other Americas in this season’s books. Clear countertexts to DITLA, they don’t share its noise or its optimism, and, because they were photographed by individual photographers rather than a bureaucracy of them, they can’t share its claim to objectivity. A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920-1936, edited by Philip Dunn and Thomas L. Johnson (Algonquin Books and Bruccoli Clark: $34.95, hardcover; $19.95, paperback; 200 pp., 186 photographs), presents the photographs of a black portrait photographer in Columbia, S.C., in the years between the world wars. They are a remarkable document of Columbia’s black middle class, representatives of what W. E. B. DuBois referred to as “the talented tenth.” The volume’s editors, responsible for selecting and printing the images found in cache of glass negatives, have researched the photographs, searching out the subjects or more often their descendants, offering an identity--education, employment, family--for many of the faces. If it doesn’t offer America an easy new beginning, it does offer a memory, and it suggests a history, a history constructed of individuals, one few of us know.

Quite removed from “A True Likeness,” but linked to it because its photographer is a member of the marginal and unfamiliar community it documents, is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin (Aperture: $39.95; 144 pp., 127 color photographs). Rather than a documentary, it is, as Goldin writes in her self-assured and deeply touching introduction, a diary, “my forms of control over my life” in New York’s East Village.