Bruce Gilden offends me. His photographs offend me. His approach to photography offends me. Even his success as a photographer offends me.

I like that about Bruce Gilden. I’m actually glad he’s out there offending me. I think it’s important for the craft and art of photography that photographers like Gilden exist. I’ll come back to that in a bit – but first let’s try to understand how and why Bruce Gilden became Bruce Gilden.

Coney Island. 1977

He was born in Brooklyn in 1946. Brooklyn in the 1940s was largely a white ethic borough: first and second generation immigrants – Italians, Irish, Eastern European Jews, Ukrainians, Poles. This was the era that gave birth to the stereotypical ‘guy from Brooklyn’ so often seen in the movies – a brash, tough, street-wise smart ass who said things like “Yeah, my fadda said he’d moidah me if I joined da ahmy.” That stereotype turned Brooklyn into something of a national joke. It was a borough of underdogs — and sometimes resentful underdogs — and that helped shape the way Gilden saw the world.

He has described his childhood family as “a total mess”. Gilden says, “Emotionally I was beaten up as a kid. I had a tough upbringing…. I have that inside of me. You know, that anger. That I’ll always have.” That information is telling when you consider the way Gilden talks about his photography. “My pictures are me. Whatever I take a picture of, it’s me. It’s about how I feel and I don’t have to think about it.”

London. 2011

His childhood may have been rough, but Gilden was able to get into Penn State University, where he studied sociology. At some point he saw the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, about a London fashion photographer who accidentally photographs a murder. That was apparently enough for Gilden to decide he wanted to be a photographer. In 1968 Gilden was 22 years old and back in New York. He bought an inexpensive Miranda camera and began taking evening classes at the School of Visual Arts.

At that time, most street photography fell into two different approaches. There was the Cartier-Bresson approach – the photographer as ninja, moving gracefully and invisible, silently catching intimate but decisive moments. And there was the Garry Winogrand approach — a more New York City style, open and direct and overt. Where HC-B was a ghost, Winogrand was as obvious as a sore thumb. He just didn’t care if his subjects saw him taking their photograph. In fact, in many of Winogrand’s best photographs the subjects are looking directly at the photographer.

Gilden, the Brooklyn boy, took the Winogrand approach. Took it and eventually pushed it as far as it was possible to go.

Coney Island. 1986

Gilden’s first major project was sort of classically Winograndian; he photographed people at Coney Island, just a subway ride away. In all, he spent a couple of decades shooting the Coney Island beaches, mostly where the old and poor gathered to enjoy the sun and the waves. Even in the earlier images, you can see where Gilden began to expand the Winogrand universe.

Gilden got close to most of his subjects, using a wide angle lens, and often filling the entire frame with something for the eye to see. He started getting even closer than Winogrand would. Uncomfortably, intrusively, compulsively close.

This is the beginning of the Bruce Gilden we all know and…well, love or hate. Moving from the beach to the street, Gilden created his signature style. “My style evolved because I liked being among the common man,” Gilden has said. “I like characters. I always have. When I was five, I liked the ugliest wrestler, so it was easy for me to pick what I wanted to photograph.”

Moscow. 2001

Gilden’s street photos – the work that made him famous (or notorious) — grew out of his Coney Island experience. They’re an aggressive, sometimes confrontational, style of street portraiture. Videos of Gilden at work (and there are a lot of them available on YouTube) show him walking the streets looking for ‘characters’ – people who attract his attention for some reason. Maybe it’s a physical feature, maybe a style of dress, maybe the way they move. When he spots a ‘character’ he gets close, steps in front of the person, and with his camera in one hand and an old Vivitar flash in the other, he snaps a photo. In effect, this is photography by ambush.

Everything about this approach is intrusive. The subject is surprised, often startled or alarmed, sometimes angry. That spontaneous emotion is what drives Gilden’s work. When I say he gets close, I mean really close. He usually shoots with a 28mm wide angle lens, often at a distance of an arm’s length or less. He generally squats a bit, giving the image an upward angle that tends to exaggerate the facial contortions of many of his subjects. The flash effect adds to the overall grotesquerie.

The effect is startling. And raw. And powerful.

New York City. 1984

“[S]ince I work in a spontaneous way, I have to be a little bit sneaky because I don’t want them to know that I’m going to take a picture of them.” The ethics and morality of that approach (or the lack of ethics/morality) offends and outrages a lot of people. Gilden doesn’t care. He’s shooting the photographs he wants to shoot, and he’s getting the results he wants.

What I found most surprising, though, is that when you listen to Gilden talk about the people he photographs – not about his approach, but about the actual subjects – there’s a very obvious affection for them. “All these people I photograph, they’re like my friends…. I was drawn to them somehow.” These are Gilden’s people – the anxious, the distracted, the frustrated, the unusual, the uncertain, the damaged. “There are a lot of things wrong with this world, and I feel that, so that’s what my pictures are about. I always liked the underdog—the guy who’s not the average person—and I see a lot of pathos out there.”

Ireland, 1996

Gilden has, of course, a broader body of work. He’s not just a New York street photographer. He’s worked in Ireland, Portugal, India, Japan. He’s probably spent more time photographing Haiti than any traditional documentary photographer. He did a wonderful series of landscapes of foreclosed properties. Gilden has even done a series on state fair food.

He’s largely moved on from his street ambush work. Part of that decision was based on age. “I’m old. I mean, I function well, but I changed. I started to do the portraits, because I can’t beat up my legs.” All that squatting takes its toll on the knees. Now he’s focusing more on actual portraiture – though with a Gildenesque twist. He’s still working incredibly close, he’s still concentrating on ‘characters’, and he still tends to emphasize the grotesque. This IS Bruce Gilden, after all.

In the end, I’d say Gilden is a realist. He’s said there are no geniuses in photography; there are just people with talent and people without talent. He’s got a solid grasp on his place in the photographic firmament. “How many good pictures does anyone have? Maybe about twenty, twenty-five over forty-some years. I mean you don’t have a lot.”

Detroit, 2016.

At the beginning of this salon I said Gilden offends me, but that I’m glad he’s out there making his photographs. I said I thought Gilden was important for the craft and art of photography. Here’s why I say that.

Gilden’s work expands the range of the possible. In just about every creative human endeavor, it’s the deviants who drive change. Civil rights expanded because there were deviants who broke the law. Science expanded because there were deviants who refused to abide by the constraints of religion. Art expanded because there were deviants who ignored the rules of perspective, who splashed paint wildly and randomly, who ignored oils and watercolors and used spray paints on subway cars and alleyway walls.

By pushing at the extreme edges of photography, Bruce Gilden broadens the center. That’s where the vast majority of us work. Very few of us will ever attempt to emulate Gilden (and let’s face it, very few of us would want to), but his existence emboldens us just a wee bit. He relaxes the scope of what’s possible, and encourages us to at least think about the limits of what’s acceptable. He may offend us, but he also opens up new arenas of creativity. Bruce Gilden’s extremism protects our more modest creative steps.

Even though that’s true, I suspect Gilden would call bullshit on it.

He’s best known as a filmmaker, of course. Wings of Desire, The State of Things, and Paris, Texas. Wim Wenders has made more than forty films – mainly feature films and documentaries. He’s won international cinema awards by the truckload. Wenders is also a skilled photographer with an idiosyncratic approach and a distinctive point of view. He’s published several photography books that have been well-received internationally.

But I’m not going to write about any of that – with the exception of one film and one photography book. The film is Paris, Texas; the photo book is Written in the West.

But first let’s start with a few facts: Ernst Wilhelm Wenders was born in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1945, three months after the end of the Second World War in Europe. He grew up in an ancient city that had been largely destroyed by years of Allied bombing, a city captured by Allied military forces (primarily American) and was under the control of Allied (primarily British) military governors.

Growing up under those conditions, it’s probably not surprising that Wenders developed a fascination for American hardboiled detective fiction. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain. You had to be hardboiled to make a life out of the chaos of post-war Dusseldorf.

Wenders initially intended to follow in the footsteps of his father, a surgeon. He attended a year of medical school, before dropping out to study philosophy. He then abandoned philosophy in order to move to Paris and become a painter. Painting didn’t work out, so he applied to the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, France’s national film school. He applied, but never attended; Wenders failed the entrance exam.

He found work as a film reviewer for a number of small publications, before eventually returning to Germany. There he successfully enrolled in the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, a Munich film school.

In 1972, at the age of 27, Wenders decided to visit the United States. He didn’t come to the U.S. to see Manhattan, or Los Angeles, or Miami, or any of the usual destinations sought out by young European tourists.

No, Wenders came to America to see Butte, Montana.

Why Butte? Because it was the setting of his favorite detective novel: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, published in 1927. In the novel, the town is called Personville, though its fictional inhabitants called ‘Poisonville.’ Butte is an old working class mining town of fewer than 35,000 people – and it turned out to be exactly what Wenders hoped it would be.

“It’s one of my favorite places in America, Not just because the entire city looks like an open-air Edward Hopper studio – it does. In Butte time sort of stopped in the 1950s; you see stuff there you just don’t see anywhere else.”

So began Wenders’ romance with the American West. That romance reached its peak when he visited the Southwest to film Paris, Texas. In 1983 Wenders began scouting locations for the movie. He often traveled alone, with a pair of cameras – a 35mm Leica to shoot images for possible filming locations, and a medium format camera – a Plaubel Makina 6×7 – which he used for his own personal photography.

Wenders describes his wandering in the Southwest as “My first trip as a photographer.” He wrote:

“None of the places I photographed back then ended up becoming a location – some months later, in the movie Paris, Texas. Yet, to a large extent shooting was based on an intimate knowledge of the small towns and landscapes that I had previously explored alone.”

In 1986, a year after Paris, Texas was released, Wenders exhibited his personal photographs in a gallery printed and exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In 2000 those photos were published as a book – Written in the West.

A couple of weeks ago Wenders re-released that book, with some additional photos. The new work was shot with a Fuji 6×4.5 camera (he’d broken his Makina). The new version is called Written in the West, Revisited.

You don’t have to have seen Paris, Texas to appreciate and enjoy the photographs. But the film and the photobook are (if you’ll forgive the cliché) two sides of the same coin. They’re different facets of the same photographic vision. You could take individual frames from the movie and they’d fit perfectly with the photobook – not simply because many of them were shot in the same places, but because they share the same visual and emotional aesthetic.

(Still frame from Paris, Texas)

What I find interesting, though, is that while Paris, Texas and Written in the West share the same aesthetic, they were shot with an entirely different philosophical approach (not surprising, given that Wenders studied philosophy), The difference, of course, is that a film is a structured narrative, whereas still photography, at best, can only offer the hint of a narrative. The power of still photography lies in its ability to imply.

I love photography because I’m not the one who’s telling the story, I’m just listening to it. I think of my camera as a listening device.

There’s a deep sense of longing in these photographs. A sense of things caught in the act of disappearing – or have already disappeared in spirit – things that perhaps ought to be missed once they’re gone, but probably won’t be. There’s a sense of resigned isolation.

My impression is that’s also what Wenders must feel as he shoots the photographs. He’s often stated her prefers to work alone when he’s shooting. No assistant to haul his cameras or gear; he carries everything he needs himself.

And actually, if I’m not alone, I don’t take pictures. The basic thing I’m after, to abandon myself and immerse myself in the place, you can’t do that with somebody else around.

You see very few people in Wenders’ photographs. He feels if there’s a person in the frame, the viewer’s attention is always going to be focused on the person. He wants the attention to be on the land, and the ultimately ephemeral effect of humanity on the land.

All photography is grounded in time, of course. The length of time it takes to shoot the photo, and the fact that every photograph ever made is a photograph of the past. But few photographers are as conscious to the passage of time. That’s one of the reasons Wenders is fascinated about the American Southwest – the towns that are slowly dying, the businesses that have gone toes up, the bones of failed communities.

Places can speak very eloquently of world history. As long as you’re ready to wait and see. Places don’t necessarily open up right away. Sometimes you have to be patient until you earn their trust. Only then I can do justice to them and produce a good portrait of them. And that’s the least thing I owe them.

Wenders has a peculiar sensitivity to the effects of time. Time is unimaginably big, and Wenders’ photography hints at its enormity. During his film critic days, Wenders wrote that films about America “should be composed entirely of long and wide shots, as music about America already is.” He doesn’t always follow his own dictum in his films or in his photography. He doesn’t shoot only long, wide shots. But all of his work, cinematic or photography, almost universally has a long, wide feel. They’re long and wide in a sort of spiritual way.

I recently rewatched Paris, Texas. It was my third time. The plot doesn’t hold up quite as well, but my appreciation for the cinematography has magnified. I’d love to see that film without dialog, without any ambient sound, with nothing but the magnificent Ry Cooder soundtrack (based on Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground). The photography is all you need.

For me, it’s a matter of seeing these places and trying to read their story. You have this one moment and it tells you something about the past – very often a lot about the past, the people who passed through, who lived there, who dreamed there.

Wenders could be talking about Paris, Texas. Or about Written in the West, Revisited. It applies to both.

In my morning news-reader today was an article headlined Probing Question: Are Smartphones Changing Photography? The lede is:

Although cell phone cameras are a recent innovation, they continue nearly 150 years of tradition that photography should be broadly accessible and an extension of our own experience.

I suspect Mishka Henner would agree with that lede – although not in the way the article intends. The notion behind the article appears to be that the ubiquity of cellular photography is really just an extension of the work begun by George Eastman and the introduction of the Brownie camera, which brought photography to the masses. The reporter’s answer to the question of whether smartphones are changing photography appears to be ‘no’ – but let’s face it; the reporter wasn’t really attempting to address the question. The reporter was merely trying to fill a 700 word hole in the morning news. The article ends with this:

Ultimately, it’s not the lens or the camera that creates the image. It’s the person behind the lens.

Henner, I think, would absolutely agree that photography should be (and is) broadly accessible. I think he might also agree that it should be ‘an extension of our own experience.’ But where I believe Henner would disagree is that he makes a distinction between the act of photography and the consumption of photography. It’s no longer necessary to have a person behind the lens. But it’s still necessary for the image, if it’s to have any meaning whatsoever, to be viewed.

NATO Storage Annex, Coevorden / Staphorst Ammunition Depot

In the days of Eastman Kodak’s Brownie camera, we suddenly had tens of thousands of budding photographers whose images were seen by relatively few people. The audience – mostly family and friends – was limited by the fact that the image was physical and could only be seen by people who were in the same location as the print. Smartphone photography has broadened the base of photographers to thousands of millions. Because the images are digitalized and because of the creation of the Internet, those photographs could also, potentially, be seen by thousands of millions. In reality, the audience for those photos remains primarily family and friends; on average, there’s probably been only a slight increase in the number of people who view these photographs.

What’s been missing from the discussion are those millions of photographs being made by self-activated robotic photographers – photographs that for the most part are being automatically archived without being seen by anybody. Henner is bringing those images to an audience. Not the intended audience of technicians, but an audience of art lovers.

These photos are, as the reporter in the article suggests, broadly accessible. But while the photographs themselves may not be ‘an extension of our own experience’, the consumption of them – the choice of individual images, the framing of the images, and the presentation of them – is most certainly an extension of our own experience.

When asked if these photographs constitute ‘real photography’, Henner responded:

“I just think that people hang on too heavily to categories and ideas about what’s acceptable. I’m working with images of the world, that’s it. Whether a robot’s taken them, or a human being, the point is it almost doesn’t matter anymore.”

In 2011 Henner released a series entitled Dutch Landscapes. As you might guess, these aren’t traditional landscapes. They’re satellite images. Google had introduced is free satellite imagery service six years earlier, creating a problem for governments worldwide. There are places on this planet that governments don’t want visible. For the most part, governments have responded to Google’s satellite imagery by blurring out sensitive and secure locations. The practice of blurring doesn’t hide the locations; it simply obscures them.

Paleis Noordeinde, The Hague

The Dutch government took a different approach. They applied bold, multi-colored, pattern-disrupting polygons to cloak the areas. Henner was intrigued by the contradictory absurdity of creating a highly visible, attention-drawing graphic style to censor sensitive governmental sites meant to be hidden. He’s chosen to interpret this as a modern form of landscape art.

“In its raw form, satellite imagery can be quite dull,” Henner says. “Cropping, adjusting, and forming a body of work out of them completely transforms these images into something that can be beautiful, terrifying and also insightful.” The power of traditional landscape photography is grounded in the viewer’s contemplation of what is visible; with Henner’s Dutch Landscapes the power is derived from the contemplation of what is deliberately not visible.

Again, the imagery itself is non-political and non-ideological. By simply isolating geographic locations meant to be hidden, Henner introduces a political and ideological perspective – but that perspective resides in the viewer. Not in the image, not in Henner, but in the viewer. The point of view of the individual consuming the image determines how it is interpreted.

Bar G Feeders, Hereford, TX / Brahaney Oil Field, Plains, TX / Kern River Oil Field, Bakersfield, CA

That’s not quite the case with Henner’s Beef and Oil. This series focuses on the two largest commodities produced in the United States. Again, Henner has appropriated carefully selected and cropped satellite imagery. Although the images are offered without comment (other than information identifying the locations), they are both beautiful and disturbing. The stark colors, the well-defined geometric shapes, the initial confusion in regard to size and scale –taken in combination, these create very striking and compelling images.

The viewer doesn’t need to be aware of the fact that 35% of U.S. farms are purely devoted to raising cattle for beef, or that the U.S. exports nearly three billion pounds of beef yearly, bringing in more than US$5 billion. The viewer doesn’t need to know that the U.S. consumes around 19 million barrels of oil each day, or that the U.S. accounts for nearly a quarter of the world’s oil consumption. The viewer doesn’t have to understand that the reddish-brown ‘lake’ seen in one of the images is actually a massive cesspit for cattle waste. Simply by studying these images, it’s clear that some non-organic force is shaping the landscape, and doing it on a scale that’s visible from space. 

from Pumped

Henner may display the images without comment, but he’s well aware that critics will make up for that absence. The tension that arises between the disinterested camera and the human imperative to create meaning is the driving force that turns satellite imagery into a powerful political comment. That’s the heart of the project.

Henner continued his examination of the U.S. oil industry in a series called Pumped. In this series, he reveals isolated pumpjacks centered in a variety of beautifully textured and geometrically pleasing landscapes. The images are, for the most part, visually attractive. It’s only when the viewer realizes the blot in the middle of the image is an active oil pump that the ugly reality intrudes. It’s like looking at a lovely face and realizing what you thought was a beauty mark is, in fact, a pimple. Or a collection of cancerous cells.

from Pumped

What Mishka Henner actually does isn’t controversial. He simply takes existing satellite imagery and displays it for public consumption. What Henner shows, however, is most certainly controversial — because he shows aspects of the world many of us don’t really want to see, aspects we may not want to know about, aspects of the world governments would prefer to remain hidden. This, of course, is one of the purposes of documentary photography.

A decade ago, if you’ll recall from the previous Sunday Salon, Mishka Henner attended an exhibition of documentary photography at the Tate. That exhibit was devoted to “the quiet documentation of overlooked aspects of our world, whether architecture, objects, places or people.” In a very real sense, Mishka Henner is still engaged in that quiet documentation.

We all know how to do photography. You take a camera in hand, you find a thing you want to photograph, you point the camera at that thing, you release the shutter. The photographer has a reason for taking that photograph; the photographer decides what is photographed and how it’s photographed. The resulting image is an expression of the photographer’s interaction with the world.

What could be simpler?

That’s exactly how Mishka Henner used to do photography. It’s not how he does photography now.

Carretera de Fortuna, Murcia, Spain

Although he was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1976, Henner obtained his higher education in England. Did he study art? Did he study painting or photography? No, he did not. He studied sociology. He attended Loughborough University from 1994 to 1997, and Goldsmiths College from 1997 to 1998. He knocked around London for a few years (which is what one so often does with a degree in sociology). He tried his hand at a number of creative outlets – painting, writing, the theater.

Then in 2003 he attended the Cruel and Tender exhibit at the Tate Modern. The photography exhibit was devoted to “the quiet documentation of overlooked aspects of our world, whether architecture, objects, places or people.” It was the sort of exhibit that would appeal to a sociologist’s eye.

Henner described the exhibit as “life-changing.” He decided to become a documentary photographer. He spent the next six years working with Toronto-born photographer Liz Lock on a variety of documentary projects. They shot portraits, they accepted commissions from the Financial Times and The Independent, they engaged in a wide variety of long-term documentary projects. Henner, in the course of those six years, had become a successful documentarian.

“I found that I could discover something new by pointing a camera,” Henner said, “but the more proficient I became with the language of photography, the more frustrated I was with it. I wanted to find new ways of communicating.” That led him to do something dangerous. He began to think about the nature of photography.

SP1, Ancarano, Abruzzi, Italy

As he began to consider the essential qualities of the documentary process Henner became increasingly disillusioned with it. He stated the act of making documentary images was:

“…wrapped up in all sorts of relationships between yourself, your subjects, and your backers. It has little to do with truth. Positions are constantly negotiated and shifting, it’s something you carve out as you go along, employing all sorts of tricks and devices to search for convey authenticity.”

That’s as much a sociological observation as it is an artistic one. Documentary photography requires the photographer to take a politico-social position in relation to the subject matter, just as the photographer must take a physical position in relation to the subject of the photograph. As Wim Wenders once put it, “The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes.”

One of the last projects Henner worked on with Ms. Lock was about street prostitution in Manchester, England. While doing his research, he discovered an online community of men who used the ‘Street View’ feature of Google Maps to share the locations of prostitutes.

Google Street View (GSV) was a revelation to Henner. He became aware of the existence of a truly massive collection of images — images that were truly documentary — that were widely available and easily accessible, but that remained largely unseen. “We don’t need to carry a camera around with us all the time anymore,” Henner says, “because everything is being photographed in any case.” Henner realized he didn’t have to do photography the way it has always been done. Why shoot a new photograph when he could simply access and appropriate unseen photographs that already exist?

Carretera de Rubí, Terrassa, Spain

Henner found similar online communities of men who used GSV in Italy and Spain to locate roadside sex workers. He used that information to compile a series of images which he called No Man’s Land.

There is, of course, a long historical tradition of imagery of prostitutes – not just in photography, but in painting. That tradition is grounded in the notion that art should evoke a specific emotion in the viewer – lust, guilt, pity, embarrassment, empathy, sympathy. In contrast, Henner says his motivation isn’t to evoke any particular emotion at all; it’s to make people think. He says,

“I now consider the burden of sympathy expected from a narrow language of documentary to be a distracting filter in the expression of much more complex realities. Pity has a long and well-established aesthetic and I just don’t buy it anymore. In themselves the facts are terrible and I don’t need a sublime image to be convinced of that. In the context of representing street prostitution, striving for the sublime seems a far more perverse goal to me.”

Unlike most documentary photography dealing with sex workers, Henner’s No Man’s Land doesn’t take a moral, ethical, or political position. It’s simply an acknowledgment of existing conditions. That absence of position is made possible by the simple fact that no human agency was involved in shooting the photographs.

Carretera de Olot, Crespià, CT, Spain

William Eggleston coined the term ‘democratic camera’ to describe the notion that anything is worth photographing. But even with the most democratic camera there is an aesthetic determination made by the photographer before the camera is aimed and the shutter is released. The camera must be pointed at something by somebody. Google Street View removes the photographer from the documentary process. It removes aesthetics. It removes more than a century of tradition about what constitutes the act of photography.

There is no camera in a hand. There is nobody looking for something to photograph, nobody to decide what is worth photographing and what isn’t. There is nobody to point the camera, nobody to release the shutter. There is no human motivation for taking the photo, no human to decide what is photographed or how it’s photographed. The photograph is NOT an expression of the photographer’s interaction with the world because there is no photographer. There is a machine.

Because there is no photographer, there’s no photographer’s discretion and there’s no artistic influence. Because there’s no photographer, there are no standards of skill or craft to be met. GSV could be said to be the purest form of documentary photography.

Strada Provinciale 1 Bonifica del Tronto, Controguerra, Abruzzi, Italy

There are, of course, other photographers who have used GSV as a tool. What makes Henner’s No Man’s Land different isn’t just that it subverts the traditional practice of photography. It’s different because it was just the opening salvo in what has become a barrage of non-traditional conceptual works of documentary photography.

Henner doesn’t call himself a conceptual artist, but he says the conceptual art movement…

“…smashed through so many pretensions and facades that it appealed to me in a big way, especially in the work of appropriation artists. It was still documentary to me, but not as we knew it…. Now, I’m happiest when I’m making something that doesn’t look or feel like documentary photography but still manages to address a social context.”

Next week the Sunday Salon will examine some of Henner’s newer work to see ‘something that doesn’t look or feel like documentary photography but still manages to address a social context.’ We’ll look at how he’s expanded the notion of the robotic democratic camera to address an ever-widening range of issues and topics. We’ll see how Mishka Henner has found a way to infuse art and passion into neutral observation.

We’re not done with Mishka Henner.

There was a generation of Hungarian photographers – all born around the beginning of the 20^th century – who left Hungary at a young age and scattered their talent all over western Europe. Among them were André Kertész, Gyula Halász (better known as Brassaï), László Moholy-Nagy, André Friedmann (better known as Robert Capa), Martin Munkácsi, and a young woman named Eva Besnyö.

She was born in Budapest in 1910, a clever child who learned quickly. Some of her lessons were unpleasant. She learned about prejudice and she learned to be adaptable. Her father, Bela Blumengrund, was a lawyer who, in order to succeed in his practice, exchanged his Jewish birth name for one more Hungarian-sounding: Bernat Besnyö.

Her father expected Eva and her two sisters would all attend the university. Eva had other ideas. At the age of 18 she already knew she wanted to be a photographer. She owned a small Kodak Brownie camera, and encouraged and supported by her uncle, Eva Besnyö convinced her father to allow her to forgo the university and instead become an apprentice to a photographer. Her father insisted she work with the best – József Pécsi, who owned a well-regarded studio specializing in portraits, advertising, and architectural photography.

Boy with Cello – 1931

For two years Besnyö worked as an apprentice in the studio, learning and mastering the fundamentals of practical photography and darkroom technique. At some point in those two years, she acquired a good camera (a Rolleiflex) and, more importantly, a copy of a photography book that would change the way she saw the world and, in fact, would change her entire life.

Published in 1928, Die Welt ist Schon (The World is Beautiful), by photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch, is a collection of a hundred photographs of repeating natural forms, industrial still lifes, and mass-produced objects. The photographs are precise, sharp, made with scientific clarity. It must be remembered that the current fashion in photography at that time was self-consciously poetic and romantic. With the release of Die Welt ist Schon, the New Objectivity movement in photography began. And Eva Besnyö wanted to be a part of it.

Starnberger Strasse, Berlin – 1931

So in 1930, when she was 20 years old and had completed her apprenticeship, she moved to Berlin. Her father felt that if she must leave home to practice photography, she should go to Paris, but Besnyö felt Paris was too locked into romanticism. Berlin offered new ways of thinking, new ways of expression. She saw how Renger-Patzsch was using the New Objectivity approach to photograph things, and how August Sander was using it to photograph people as archetypes. Besnyö wanted to use the approach to explore the untidy territory between people and things.

In Berlin she found work with Peter Weller, who operated a photo-reportage agency. It was the perfect job for Besnyö; she was allowed – even encouraged – to wander in and around Berlin photographing everyday life. Her most well-known photograph (Boy with Cello) was made during this period.

As was the common practice of the time, most of her photographs in Besnyö’s Berlin period were published either under Weller’s name or under the name of his agency. But her work was being seen, she was getting paid, and other photographers knew the work was hers. Besnyö was happy.

She was also becoming politically active during this period. Along with other photographers (including Capa and Moholy-Nagy) and intellectuals, she attended workshops and lectures given by the Marxist Workers Evening School. She began to be given commissions through the NeoFot Picture Agency, which needed images of ordinary workers on the job – tradesmen making repairs, dock laborers, construction workers.

Untitled – 1933

But as a Jew and a budding Marxist, Besnyö was very much aware of the growing Nazi movement. In 1932, after two very productive years in Berlin, Besnyö decided to move to the Netherlands. In Amsterdam she joined with other artists, photographers, filmmakers, writers, and intellectuals who were fleeing Nazi repression.

With an individual exhibition in the internationally respected Van Lier art gallery in 1933, Besnyö garnered a reputation as an artist. Despite that, she remained an extremely competent working photographer, shooting portraits, architecture, fashion, and photojournalism as needed. Because her work is so diverse, it’s difficult to perceive the development of a personal, individual style. But she generally stayed within the basic parameters of New Objectivity, shooting from sometimes from unusual angles, seeking out diagonal lines when possible, always with an eye toward fusing dispassionate clarity with compassionate humanity.

Nicole Dumont, Amsterdam – 1934

In 1934 Besnyö joined an association of artists seeking to protect artistic and cultural rights against the growing Nazi influence. She participated in an exhibition called Olympics Under Dictatorship, protesting the 1936 Olympic games which were being held in Berlin.

Besnyö’s new homeland, the Netherlands, declared itself to be neutral during the beginnings of World War II. Germany, however, refused to acknowledge that neutrality. On May 10, 1940 they invaded the Netherlands. There was some initial resistance by the Dutch Army, but five days later when the Nazis threatened to bomb the port city of Rotterdam, the Dutch capitulated. Although a surrender agreement was being worked out, the German Air Force bombed the old town of Rotterdam anyway. More than 800 civilians were killed; around 24,000 houses were burnt and some eighty thousand people were left homeless.

Two months later, Besnyö photographed the ruins.

Rotterdam – 1940

With the Nazis occupying the Netherlands, living and working conditions for Jews were severely limited. Besnyö was soon forbidden from any journalistic work. She was limited to accepting only private photographic commissions. Soon even that work disappeared. In 1941 the first group of Jews were deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. A year later Jews were required to publicly identify themselves by wearing a Star of David and the Nazi began building concentration camps in the Netherlands.

Eva Besnyö went underground. She obtained false identity papers and managed to eke out a small, limited life until the end of the war. Although most of her family survived the war, her father was less lucky; he died in Auschwitz. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands before the Nazi invasion of 1940, only 30,000 survived.

Besnyö remained in the Netherlands the rest of her life. She married, had a son shortly after the end of the war and a daughter three years later. She continued to be a working photographer and politically active. In 1970, when she was 60 years old, Besnyö began documenting the Dolle-Mina feminist movement, and continued to be a part of that movement for the next six years. In 1980, when she was 70, Besnyö was offered a Ritterorden (a knighthood) by Queen Beatrix; Besnyö rejected it. In 1999 she was given the Erich Salomon Prize – a lifetime achievement award given annually by the German Society of Photography. She accepted it.

Angelnde Jungen, Leidsekade, Amsterdam – 1951

Eva Besnyö died in 2002.

She summed up her approach to photography in a 1991 interview:

“In the beginning, the form was more important than the content. Slowly but surely that tendency switched, up until the arrival of feminism. Suddenly, the subject took over. Form is essential to me. Composition is important, and I would have disavowed myself had I not taken that into consideration, which was the case for a time. I hope to have found a balance between form and content.”

I rather think she did. Even though Besnyö never developed a distinctive personal style, she consistently remained true to a personal vision. Earlier I mentioned she’d gone to Berlin seeking a balance between the industrial approach of Renger-Patzsch and the human approach of August Sander. I believe she found that balance and whenever her work allowed, she maintained it. If you review much of her work you’ll note she rarely shows the faces of her human subjects. She doesn’t treat them as archetypes like Sander, nor as objects like Renger-Patzsch. Instead Besnyö treats them as universal stand-ins for everybody. People occupy the world, but as individuals they’re ephemeral. The people in her photographs aren’t important as specific people; they’re important in that they they represent humanity. Each man is Every-man, each woman is Every-woman, each child is Every-child.

In her refusal to cast herself as an artist, in her determination to be a working photographer, Eva Besnyö could be said to be Every-photographer.

There’s not a great deal known about Chinese photographer Lu Guang in the West. A few facts gleaned from a couple of interviews, a sketchy bio saying where and when he went to school, a couple of passing references to groups who’ve hired him, a list of photography prizes he’s won – that’s about it.

We can make some assumptions and educated guesses about his life based on a general knowledge of history, and we can jigsaw those in with the few known facts. But most of what we actually know about the man comes from his work – from the photographs. And they tell us a lot.

Tianjin Steel Plant, Hebei Province, March 18, 2008

Here are the facts: Lu Guang was born in 1961 in the city of Yongkang in Zhejiang province on the coast of China. He became interested in photography at the age of nineteen, at a time when he was working in a silk factory in Yongkang. He later attended the Fine Arts Academy of Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he studied photography. He has since worked as a freelance photographer. Lu is best known for documenting terrible social and environmental situations that the Chinese government would prefer remain hidden.

That’s admirable in itself, to be sure. It’s all the more praiseworthy, though, when you remember that Lu grew up under the largest, and one of the most gloomy totalitarian governments in modern history. And when you consider that Asia, unlike the United States and Western Europe, has no real history of social documentary photography, the accomplishments of Lu Guang become absolutely astonishing.

When Lu was a boy growing up in Yongkang, China was almost entirely isolated from the world community. Mao Zedong’s policies at that time had turned the People’s Republic of China into a dull, grim world. Maoist orthodoxy required everybody to wear identical blue, green, or gray outfits. Ornamentation of any sort was considered decadent and deviant. Even the bicycles used for daily transportation were painted black. There was no such thing as self-expression; art was compelled to reflect the benefits of a socialist society.

Social documentary photography as we know it didn’t exist even as a concept. So how do we account for the career of Lu Guang?

Shepherd on the bank of the Yellow River. Shizuishan City, Ningxia, April 23, 2006

Lu was fifteen years old when Chairman Mao died. China’s new leaders implemented a socialist market economy, opening up the People’s Republic to foreign investment, to the global market, and to limited private competition. The shift in policy was a tremendous boost to the economy of the PRC. To industrial manufacturers, the allure of unlimited cheap labor unregulated by standards for worker safety or environmental concerns was irresistible.

The change in economic policy and the influx of Western industry was necessarily accompanied by the introduction of ideas that violated Maoist orthodoxy. It required the loosening of some of the restrictions on personal freedom. Under Mao, it would have been unthinkable for a factory worker in Yongkang to move to Beijing and study photography. But in 1993, when he was in his early 30s, Lu Guang did just that.

We can’t know this for a fact, but we can readily assume that at some point during his studies Lu was introduced to the photography of W. Eugene Smith. We know he eventually became familiar with Smith’s work on mercury pollution in Minimata, Japan in the 1970s. We also know Lu was passionate about the horrendous increase in pollution in China. Beyond that, we have to return to the realm of supposition.

Shanxi Province, the most polluted region in China today, also has the highest rate of birth defects. April 15, 2009

The province of Zhejiang, where Lu was born, was once known as The Land of Fish and Rice. It’s a region predominantly covered by hills and mountains. Luckily, it’s a coastal province. It could be said Zhejiang’s only true natural resource is deep water ports. Such ports are necessary for manufacturers to ship their goods abroad. So it’s not surprising that China’s change in economic policy drew manufacturing plants to Zhejiang. The Land of Fish and Rice is now home to electromechanical industries, textile plants, chemical industries, and construction material factories. It’s become one of the richest provinces in China. It’s also one of the most polluted.

Having grown up in Zhejiang, having worked in a silk factory, we can suppose Lu had witnessed the effects of global industrialization on people he knew. Having seen the photography of Eugene Smith, we can assume Lu grasped the potential of the medium to draw attention to the plight of people suffering from the effects of pollution. All we know for certain, though, is that after finishing his studies, Lu determinedly turned his attention and his lens on the working poor, on the marginalized populations of China, and on the unchecked havoc wrought by industrial pollution.

Using the money he earned from commercial photography, Lu began to travel around China and photographing the lives of the people he met. He photographed gold miners and coal miners, railway workers, HIV patients, the fishermen and their families who lived and worked on the increasingly polluted rivers. He documented a woman who took in babies who’d been born with severe birth defects and abandoned by their parents. He photographed shepherds who couldn’t stand the stink of the polluted rivers their flocks depended on for water. Lu gained international attention in 2003 when his photo series on peasants who’d become infected with HIV after selling their blood was awarded the first prize in the World Press Photo competition.

Families of fishermen gather drinking and cooking water. March 16, 2010

“I never think of winning an award when I take pictures,” Lu told an interviewer. “Recording is my priority. And of course, I want to solve problems. When I took these pictures, I told the local residents the reason why I took photos of them was that I wanted to help them solve the problems.”

He wants to help them solve the problems, but Lu is aware there’s little or nothing he can do to salvage the lives of the people he’s photographing. His work may benefit their children, or their grandchildren – but the current generation is already lost. For example, Lu documented the lives of families who’ve traditionally made their living fishing in Yanglin Harbor. Nearby factories now routinely pump sewage and unfiltered chemical waste water into the river feeding the harbor, even though it’s nominally illegal. The pollution kills many of the fish. The surviving fish feed off plants and small creatures tainted by the chemicals, becoming tainted themselves. The fishermen sell those fish, often to the low-wage workers employed by factories dumping waste into the harbor. The fishermen and their families eat the most tainted fish – the ones customers won’t buy. The families draw their cooking and drinking water from the harbor because purified water is too expensive. Nearby farmers rely on the river water to irrigate their fields; the chemical waste contaminates their crops. Cancer rates among children and the rate of birth defects have skyrocketed among factory workers, farmers, and fishermen in the region.

This generation is already lost. So too, perhaps, is the next.

Eleven-year-old Xu Li of Hutsou, diagnosed with bone cancer. Twenty villagers die of cancer every year. May 8, 2007

In 2009 Lu Guang’s Pollution in China series (from which most of the photographs here were drawn) was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. This is a grant given by the Smith Memorial Fund to photographers “who have demonstrated a deep commitment to documenting the human condition in the formidable tradition of compassionate dedication that W. Eugene Smith exhibited.”

That perfectly describes Lu, who was so inspired by Smith’s work early in his career. It’s impossible to look at the photograph of eleven year old Xu Li (above) without being reminded of Smith’s astonishing 1972 portrait of Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath. The resemblance of Lu’s photograph to Smith’s is undeniable, but perhaps the aspect of his life that most resembles Smith’s is his passion for honesty and his dedication to the people he photographs.

Winning an international photography prize like the Smith Grant is a grand thing, no mistake. Lu noted two ways in which winning the prize was important to him. “One, it recognized my work in the past years. Two, this set of photos will attract more people’s attention worldwide.”

Lu was being modest, though. He’s not just a photographer; he’s a humanitarian and a philanthropist in his own humble way. The Smith Grant includes a cash prize of US$30,000. He has used the money to fund his own work, to be sure, but he’s also given about half of that amount to help the people he photographs. “I myself don’t have much money,” he told an interviewer, “but I try my best to help them get on easier with life.” In another interview Lu said, “You cannot just be a cold-hearted photographer. I hope my camera will get more people to understand their plight and help them to some extent, but I myself should be the first one to help them with all my efforts.”

Factory worker in Wuhai City, Inner Mongolia, April 10, 2005

“Photography is hard work,” Lu has stated. He must despair at times. How could he not despair, seeing what he’s seen and knowing what he knows?

“I know that whenever I publish pictures, the related governments or organizations will go to investigate the issue and stop the pollution,” he says. “However, after a while, the pollution comes back again.”

And there it is. Local Chinese governments want and need the financial investment made by multinational corporations. In order to keep that investment revenue, even the honest officials are often willing to overlook environmental and safety violations. When local governments do act against polluters, they generally do so by issuing fines. By law, the maximum fine for illegal pollution in China is half a million yuan. That’s about US$85,000. It’s a great deal of money for a local government; to multinational corporations, it’s nothing.

Lu Guang knows his work will have relatively little impact on current environmental practices in China. But change has to begin somewhere and it has to begin with someone. In the meantime, he feels that recording the suffering of the people is important in itself. “I believe in all times, in every society, no matter how splendid it is, there is sadness that exists,” he says. “I just don’t want [the people] to be forgotten by all.”

I’ve been coming across the name Jason Eskenazi for two or three years now. It’s an easily remembered name. I’ve seen it pop up on the periphery of a conversation about street photography, I’ve heard it mentioned with respect by photographers I trust, I’ve seen the name come up in a few photo blogs and at least a couple of times in magazines. After a while I started thinking “I’ve got to check out this Eskenazi guy.” But for some reason, I never followed through.

A few months ago, completely by accident, I saw the following photograph. It’s such a wonderful photo on so many levels; I was immediately taken with it. Then I noticed it was by this Jason Eskanazi guy. And that was it…that was the spark I needed to seek out more of his photography, and after just a few minutes I discovered two things. First, Eskanazi is a wonderfully skilled and intuitive photographer. Second, I’d been a total putz for not tracking him down earlier.

Shutilovo village, Russia, 2003

Eskenazi, born in Queens, New York in 1960, traces his interest in photography back to 1968. “I was eight years old at my brother’s Bar Mitzvah. I would follow the photographer around like an assistant. I didn’t photograph. I was just fascinated by the photographer and what he did.” It took Eskenazi another eight years to acquire an actual camera; his father bought him a 35mm Cavalier – an inexpensive Pentax knock-off. But that was all it took.

“I’m naturally shy, as a lot of photographers are,” Eskenazi says. “Photography was a way for me to get out, contact and connect with people.” He photographed his fellow students for the Queens High School yearbook. He became the photo editor for the Queens College yearbook. He worked as a free-lance photographer for the Queens Tribune. He served as a photo assistant for other photographers. “I was just lugging equipment and changing light bulbs for color temperature and being a Polaroid stand-in for an interior design photographer.”

It may not have been exactly what Eskenazi wanted to do, but it was apparently close enough. The real problem was that he wasn’t doing it where he wanted to do it. He kept telling himself ‘I have to get out of Queens.’ He saved his money to finance his escape, but for some reason he never seemed to gather the impetus to actually pack and go.

In 1990 Jason Eskenazi was thirty years old; he was still banging out a living in the New York City photography community, still living in Queens, still hoping something extraordinary would happen. And hey, it did.

The Berlin Wall came down.

Untitled

“I couldn’t sit still anymore,” Eskenazi said. “I thought, ‘I have to out and take photos of world events to show people what was happening.’ I wanted to see what the Berlin Wall looked like. I wanted to see things for myself.”

He bought himself a ticket to Berlin, bought a many-pocketed photographer’s jacket he thought might make him look like Robert Capa, bought a whole bunch of Tri-X film. He packed his Nikon F3 and his Leica M6 and set out for Berlin, apparently without any sort of plan whatsoever. “My plan was to just walk the wall…to be there…to be close to where history was unfolding.”

Even at 30, Eskenazi had a very romanticized notion of photojournalism. His initial exposure to the real thing did little to dispel that notion. After Berlin, he followed other photojournalists to Bucharest, Romania where he saw one of the Turnley brothers (Peter and David, well-known American photojournalist twins) standing on the back of a truck shooting photos of demonstrators. “The sun was going through his hair and he looked like an angel in command of the scene.” Eskenazi didn’t know who Turnley was…didn’t know there was more than one of them. All he knew was that something beautiful and amazing was taking place, and he was there, being a part of it, shooting photos just like the angel on the back of that truck.

Somehow Eskanazi hooked up with other photojournalists, and they began following the shifting tide of democracy in Eastern Europe. He made some connections, began selling a few photographs, took a few assignments…and after a few years of this he began to realize photojournalism wasn’t what he really wanted to do.

Chechnya, 1996

“I started to figure out that I was less interested in the direct information of events and started to take a step back,” Eskenazi said. “Instead of photographing someone suffering, I would step back and include someone looking at the suffering, and then I would take another step back and include myself somehow in the frame. Not literally, but emotionally.”

That realization, it seems, sparked the end of his budding career as a photojournalist. Happily, it also sparked the beginning of his career as a fine arts street photographer. From what I’ve seen of his work, I’d suggest there was always a deep element of the street in his photography. Both photojournalism and street photography require a certain emotional detachment, and both try to catch a unique human moment, but street work is often tinged with a sort of self-aware irony that is (and has to be) absent in documentary photography. Photojournalism is about bringing those moments to the masses; street photography is about an inherently personal vision.

Eskenazi found himself in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union and became fascinated by the Russian people. He was shooting lots of photographs, but not with any sort of project in mind. He was, in effect, just ‘walking the Wall’ again, shooting whatever intrigued him. Those Russian photographs were the start of what would eventually become his first book: Wonderland.

Moscow, Russia, 1993

Why Wonderland? It’s not a term most people would apply to Russia, especially during a period of political, economic, and social collapse. But for Eskenazi there was something both magical and tragic about what was taking place around him. There was, he thought, an element of fairy tale about it. Fairy tales, he says, “are mostly about maturation, about growing up.” They’re about innocents going out into the world and encountering strangeness and mystery, encountering the unknown. He saw some parallels between classic fairy tales and the process the former Soviet Union was undergoing.

Eskanazi not only titled the book Wonderland, he structured it in a way reminiscent of a fairy tale. He decided to ignore the dates the photographs were shot and concentrated instead on sequencing a set of images. It begins with the photograph below, the putative protagonist, a young woman looking back on the old Soviet Union she’s leaving behind. However, “the pictures have no literal sequence,” Eskenazi said. “There are sequences trying to connect one image to the other image.” He would find something in the frame and use it to lead the viewer into another frame, though not necessarily the next immediate photograph. Instead, he’d insert another photo or two between the two related photographs. “I’m very conscious trying to do this; the more room you separate them, the more you leave room for the viewer to imagine something…. You want to stretch out the gap between the photos, to where there is some sort of connection, but it isn’t an obvious connection.” The result is a photography book that has an amorphous sense of flow; the eye recognizes it even when the mind doesn’t.

Moscow Hotel, 1998

Wonderland was critically well-received, but like most photography books it didn’t make any real money for the photographer. Eskenazi, though, had attained enough critical recognition that he began to collect awards and grants. He was given the Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant, he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, he won the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize for his work in a small Jewish village in Azerbaijan, he was given a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia with a large format camera and shoot portraits, he was funded to organize a Kids with Cameras project to teach photography to Jewish and Arab children in Jerusalem.

In 2008, it all came to an end. Eskenazi decided he’d had enough. “For some psychological reason, I couldn’t photograph anything I didn’t really care about,” he said. “Photography was pure for me, and I couldn’t corrupt it.”

He returned to New York City, quit shooting photographs, and took a job as a security guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Untitled

After a period spending guarding Greek statuary in the classical antiquities section of the museum, Eskenazi asked for a transfer to the photography galleries. “The room was carpeted,” he said, “and easier to stand in.”

I rather suspect there was more to it than that. The primary exhibition at the time was Robert Frank’s The Americans. “Every photographer had the book,” he said, “but I’d never really studied [it]. So only in that exhibition was I totally enveloped inside the maze of that sequence, every single day. I got to know those photos intimately.” Eskenazi felt a deep connection to Frank. “I saw him as a poor, Jewish shlump just like myself who just wanted to make photos.”

After a large dose of Robert Frank and twenty months in security guard harness, Eskenazi was ready to pick up the camera again. He headed for Turkey, where his grandparents were born. “I was just ‘walking the wall,’ just like back in Berlin. I just went out and found interesting things.” The result of that excursion was another book, The Black Garden. His plan is to eventually finish a third book which , along with Wonderland and The Black Garden will be an exploration of different cultures as they pass through changing times, and also a very personal visual autobiography of Eskenazi and his own maturation process.

When an interviewer told Jason Eskenazi that he seemed ‘happy with the choices you’ve made,’ the photographer said, “No, not happy, there were just no other choices for me to make. I didn’t choose the path of least resistance; there was only one path for me. I always feel like I’m treading water, not swimming. I’m not happy about everything, but I don’t regret anything either. One of the earliest lessons I learned was that I wasn’t saving the world, but I was saving myself through photography. There’s no easy way out. You have to go through these things to create something honest and meaningful. Every photographer has to walk the Wall.”

It’s Fashion Week in New York City. Twice a year in the major fashion capitals of the world (New York, Paris, London and Milan) designers preview the release of their new designs. Trends are set (or fail), reputations are made (or lost), and millions of dollars are spent. In the autumn, designs for the coming spring and summer are revealed; in the spring, autumn and winter designs are released.  In effect, fashion week is about predicting the future – it’s about trying to foresee what people will be wearing six months from now.

Obviously, Fashion Week is also an important time for fashion photographers. It seems fitting, then, to look at the unpredictable career of a fashion photographer whose future couldn’t possibly have been foreseen – a photographer who made her bones in the 1950s, who became one of the leading lights in fashion photography, who abandoned the business and disappeared from view for half a century, and who has in recent years been resurrected as a fashion icon.

I’m talking, of course, about Lillian Bassman.

Like so many of the photographers we’ve examined in these salons, Bassman didn’t originally intend to become a photographer – it just sort of happened. When she found her way to photography, it wasn’t so much a career move as it was an organic evolution of expression.

Lillian Violet Bassman was born in Brooklyn on June 15, 1917, the child of Russian émigrés. Her parents were Jewish intellectuals and Bassman was raised in a fashion that could best be described as bohemian. She and her sister “slept on couches on the floor covered with batik covers,” she told an interviewer. “We had only one thing that we had to do. Iron our own uniforms and wash our hair on Saturday. Otherwise we could be as free as birds.”

Her mother worked as a waitress in a vegetarian boarding house on Coney Island. When Bassman was six years old, she accompanied her family on an outing to Coney Island where she was introduced to Paul Himmel, the nine year old son of her mother’s employer. They became friends and that friendship developed into something more. When she was 15 years old Bassman convinced her parents to let her move in with him. They married ten years later – and remained married for the rest of their lives. Himmel died in 2009; they’d been married for 73 years.

It was Himmel who was initially interested in photography (he would eventually become good enough for his work to be included in Edward Steichen’s famous Family of Man exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art). Bassman wanted to be a dancer, but an injury to her heel crushed that hope. Instead, she attended a vocational high school and studied textile design. She found part-time work as a model for artists employed by the Works Project Administration – the Depression-era government program designed to provide jobs carrying out public works projects. Modeling, she said, was “the easiest way to get my 50 cents an hour, which was a lot of money at that time.” That eventually led her to a job as an assistant painter creating murals for the WPA.

During the early lean years of their relationship Bassman and Himmel relied on free admission to local museums for entertainment. They could spend hours wandering the halls, studying the paintings of old masters. That time served Bassman well, though its importance wouldn’t reveal itself for years.

Bassman continued her education by taking night courses in fashion illustration. She got an interview with Alexey Brodovitch, the Art Director at Harper’s Bazaar and the creator of the exclusive Design Laboratory at New York’s New School for Social Research. Brodovitch, a Russian émigré like Bassman’s parents, was impressed enough by her work that he waived her tuition and accepted Bassman as a student in the Design Lab.

It was Brodovitch’s practice at Harper’s to have a few talented young women in the office to act as his unpaid assistants. He offered one of those positions to Bassman, who accepted – but she soon balked at the lack of pay. She looked elsewhere for employment and was offered a position as an assistant art director at Elizabeth Arden, a cosmetics manufacturer. At that point Brodovitch relented. In 1941 Bassman became Brodovitch’s first paid female assistant. Four years later, Harper’s launched a magazine called Junior Bazaar, targeting teenaged girls – Lillian Bassman was named its art director. And that changed everything.

Even while at Harper’s Bassman had begun visiting the magazine’s darkroom on her lunch hour to see how photographer George Hoyningen-Huene used tissue and gauze to manipulate the printed photograph. “I was interested in developing a method of printing on my own,” she told B&W magazine in 1994. “I wanted everything soft edges and cropped.” At that point in her career she was more interested in the darkroom than in photography, more interested in the printed image than in making the negative. Bassman gave Junior Bazaar a look that matched her aesthetic.

One of the photographers Bassman often used was Richard Avedon, who’d also studied at Brodovitch’s Design Laboratory In 1947 Avedon was leaving for Paris to shoot fashion collections. Knowing of her growing interest in printing, he gave Bassman the keys to his studio – while he was away, she was free to use his darkroom. In order to get the negatives she wanted to print, she learned to become a photographer. The following year, 1948, Junior Bazaar folded. Brodovitch asked her what she’d like to do next. She told him “I think I’ll be a photographer.”

She and her husband started their own studio. “I did everything that could be photographed,” Bassman said, “children, food, liquor, cigarettes, lingerie, beauty products.” But it was lingerie that made her name as a fashion photographer. To that point, lingerie advertising had consisted primarily of images of stout, middle-aged women with their heads cropped off posing uncomfortably in massively engineered girdles. Bassman used the same models other photographers used in fashion shoots. Because advertising norms insisted the faces of lingerie models be hidden or obscured, Bassman initially developed a technique using shadow to shade their faces (later she would abandon that practice, allowing the faces of her models to be seen). She refused to allow male assistants in the studio during lingerie shoots; she spoke to the models about their boyfriends and husbands, about their lives and their plans, and generally created an ambience of comfort and calm – all of which was apparent in the final prints. “[A]nd then I became the lingerie queen of New York and America.”

Lingerie work led to fashion work, and Bassman developed a reputation among art directors for creating elegant, serene, romantic images. The women in her photographs always appeared to be doing something; they weren’t simply standing around showing off their clothes. She preferred to shoot her models outside, using natural light – and though the shots were clearly posed, they had an organic, active feel to them while still emphasizing the classic ideal of feminine grace and refinement.

That style, according to Bassman, grew out of the time she and her husband spent in museums as young lovers. “Elegance goes back to the earliest paintings,” she said. “Long necks. The thrust of the head in a certain position. The way the fingers work, fabrics work.” Bassman’s style was also influenced by her early love of dance, and she encouraged her models to move with a fluid sort of feminine poise that, as she said, “usually passes unnoticed in everyday life.” Bassman used a light hand when directing her models, but she was very clearly directing them and expected them to follow her lead.

That changed in the mid-1960s. Bassman didn’t like the shift in the fashion industry as it adopted and commercialized the English Mod culture. Worse, she didn’t like the new breed of models – the precursors of the modern supermodel. They were much more resistant to direction from the photographer. “I got sick of them,” she said. “They were becoming superstars. They weren’t my kind of models. They were dictating rather than taking direction.”

And so, in 1969, she quit. Abruptly and totally. She destroyed almost all of her commercial negatives; her more artful editorial negatives were stuffed in a couple of trash bags and jammed in a basement storage closet.

She forgot about the negatives; the fashion world forgot about her, and Bassman turned her artistic talents to other venues. She only photographed the things she wanted to photograph; she did a series on cracks in sidewalks, she photographed distorted images of fruit and vegetables, she rephotographed pictures of male bodybuilders reflected in mylar sheets. Her husband Paul, who’d also grown cynical about commercial photography, supported them by becoming a psychiatric social worker.

Likely they would have happily lived out their lives that way. But in the early 1990s, Martin Harrison, an art curator and historian from London, was visiting Bassman and her husband – and he found the trashbags of negatives. He encouraged her to revisit the photos. She was initially reluctant – then “I got a little intrigued, and I took them into the darkroom, and I started to do my own thing on them.” She applied some of the darkroom techniques she’d first learned in the 1940s.

Harrison arranged a show of her work, and suddenly Bassman was back at the center of the fashion world. She was hired by Neiman Marcus to shoot an advertising campaign, the New York Times Magazine hired her to shoot the couture collections in Paris, and at the age of 80 Lillian Bassman became the hot new thing. She quickly embraced digital photography when it became practical, and when she was 87 years old she learned to use Photoshop.

Lillian Bassman continued to work occasionally as a photographer and Photoshop artist until February 13^th of this year, when she died. She was 94 years old.

In the late 1940s, not long after she’d left Junior Bazaar and became an independent photographer, Bassman was hired by her old employer, Harper’s, to go to Paris and shoot the fall couture collection – just as Richard Avedon had done when he allowed her to use his darkroom. When Carmel Snow, the ferocious editor at Harper’s saw the first prints of Bassman’s photographs – images of a model at twilight on a hotel balcony, wrapped in chiffon and moonlight – she said “I didn’t bring you to Paris to make art; I brought you here to do the buttons and bows.” So she gave them buttons and bows. But a few years later, even the notoriously hard-to-please Mrs. Snow would acknowledge that Lillian Bassman could take the most awkward design and find a way to make it look elegant.

“There’s something in me that finds within the worst [fashion] something that gives the body some allure,” Bassman said. “Some way of moving. Some way of shifting the shoulder…. It’s a real undying love of fashion that shows through everything I’ve tried to do, and the way the body moves within the fashion.”

If there’s a metaphor for the life of Lillian Bassman, I think we can find it there. She found a way of moving through life, a way of shifting the shoulder that allowed her to reveal the elegance and grace she experienced in the world around her.

“What’s always interested me in photography is the way you can play with reality. Photography is based on reality, it looks like reality, but it’s not reality.”

The interviews I’ve read with Richard Kalvar suggest he’s not a particularly articulate man. He struggles, it seems, to put his thoughts into words. That’s a shame because it seems clear his thoughts about photography are pretty profound.

In the comment above, for example, Kalvar is speaking on several different levels here. On one level, he’s simply stating the obvious: a photograph of a thing is not the thing itself. On a second level, though, he’s talking about how photography strips away other sensory and temporal information – smell, sound, touch, motion – from what’s being photographed. Those things aren’t in the photograph, and yet they can be suggested through the photograph. On a third level Kalvar is referring to the fact that a photograph is a moment out of context, and as such it can’t be trusted in the way reality can be trusted. Things happen before the photograph was taken, and they continued to happen afterwards. And on yet another levels he’s acknowledging the Rashoman quality of all photography – that a photo conveys only one view of a thing that happened, but any number of views could be completely different and yet just as real.

This is what has drawn Kalvar to photography, and particularly black-and-white photography, for almost half a century. The mystery of the moment when that moment is removed from the ongoing world. That sounds very abstract, and it is; but Kalvar is very practical about the abstract. “It’s what I like to do,” he says.

4th Street, New York City, 1970

Kalvar was born in Brooklyn in 1944 to a family he describes as “relatively poor.” My impression is he comes from the working class, where people have jobs instead of careers. “You could always get a job,” he told an interviewer, “drive a taxi, work in a restaurant.” He apparently spent most of his high school years “screwing around,” as he puts it. Kalvar discovered he had something of a creative spark during those years, but didn’t have any outlet for it. Nor does he seem to have given much thought to the matter, aside from simply realizing he was more inventive than his friends.

Somehow Kalvar managed to get into Cornell University, where he studied literature. He dropped out of college in the mid-1960s and returned to New York City and started looking for a job. He found one with Jérôme Ducrot, a fashion photographer. Kalvar didn’t have any real interest in photography at the time, and no interest at all in fashion photography. He learned about photography simply because it helped with his job.

According to Kalvar, Ducrot “had a broad knowledge of photography and was a smart guy and who introduced me to things outside of fashion photography. He showed me books.” He worked for Ducrot for about a year, quitting after what Kalvar describes as “a big fight.” Whatever the argument was about, it didn’t ruin their relationship; Ducrot gave Kalvar one of his cameras – a Pentax – as a parting gift.

Kalvar had managed to save a small amount of money during his year with Ducrot. He decided to spend it on a trip to Europe. He very nearly didn’t take his camera with him. “I had this big knapsack, and I tried to squeeze everything in, but I couldn’t get the camera in, and I thought ‘Well, should I really take it?’ But then I pulled something else out, and stuffed the camera in, thank God.”

A nanny, the gardens of the Palais Galiera, Paris, 1971

That last minute decision led to Kalvar’s eventual career as a photographer. He banged around Europe for some time. The goal, he says, “wasn’t to take pictures but just to have an adventure.” He did take pictures, though, and sent the film back home to his father. He never saw the result of his photographs until he returned to the States ten months later. “But I knew,” he said. “I knew at the end of the trip that this was for me – that I’d found something that corresponded to the screwing around I used to do with my friends – I could express myself, express a way of seeing, a way of being, through photography.”

When he returned to New York, Kalvar found a job as a receptionist at Modernage, a photo processing lab (which, by the way, still exists at 555 8^th Avenue in the Garment District). “They let me stay in the evening and print for myself,” Kalvar said. “I printed up all the stuff I shot in Europe. I had a number of pictures I thought I liked. I started showing them around, and other people started to like them too. I had this feeling that I was going in this direction, that I was looking for something, which is similar to what I’m still doing today.”

Most often critics describe that ‘direction’ as street photography. It’s not a description Kalvar likes. “It’s not necessarily done on the street,” he says. But that’s not the extent of his problems with the description of his work as street photography. He feels his work isn’t so easily definable. He thinks of his work as “unposed pictures of people,” but acknowledges they could also include photos of animals or inanimate objects “when they happen to be possessed by human souls.” But event that’s not quite accurate, because the photos he’s after are about moments “with nothing particularly important going on.” And then he narrows it down even further, to include an element of play.

So Kalvar would, presumably, describe his goal as creating playful, unposed photographs of people or anthropomorphic animals or objects not engaged in doing anything of importance.

Tired dog, Rue de l'Ouest, 14th arrondissement, Paris, 1974

That’s a commendable goal, to be sure – but it doesn’t pay the rent. In order to shoot the sorts of photographs he wanted to shoot, Kalvar sought out any sort of photographic gig that would pay money. “Women’s magazines, things about knitting, anything to make a living.” He continued to shoot the photographs he wanted to shoot in his own time.

He still follows that path, in fact, though he’s come a long way from photographing knitting. The combination of his personal photography and his professional photography eventually led him to be recruited by Magnum, the pre-eminent photography agency, and a home in Paris, where he’s lived since around 1970. “I can do company portraits. I go there and get a nice picture of the guy that they can put in their annual report,” he says. That’s a rather dismissive way to look at his professional work, which often includes photojournalism assignments for major magazines like Newsweek. But Kalvar makes it very clear that there’s some degree of separation between what he does to earn money and what he does for self-expression.

For one thing, his professional work is almost entirely in color; his personal work is exclusively black-and-white. Why? “In order for the mystery to work, you need abstraction from reality. Black and white is an additional abstraction, in addition to selective framing, to the freezing of the moment that in reality is a part of an infinite number of other moments…you have one moment and it never moves again; you can keep looking at the picture forever. The black and white is one more step away from reality. Color, for me, is realer, but less interesting.”

Piazza della Rotonda, Rome, 1980

“I’m an amateur photographer and a professional photographer,” Kalvar says. “I’m a much more interesting amateur photographer than I am a professional photographer.” His professional work is done on assignment, obviously. So how does he approach is personal work?

He uses a Leica and he walks around a lot. “That’s necessary. I try to go to places where interesting things might happen. And I’m always looking. At relations between people. I’m attracted to people doing things with each other.” He looks for people engaged in conversation, then he lurks nearby, waiting to see if something interesting happens. To get the sort of photograph he wants requires a combination of being in the right place and being ready.

“In French, there’s a word, disponible,” he says, “meaning you’re letting yourself go, you’re available for things to happen. It’s a mental and emotional opening. In other words, you’re ready.” This corresponds pretty closely to the state Cartier-Bresson describes when he’s in search of his ‘decisive moment.’ It’s a sort of melding of heightened awareness, sensitivity to the moment, and a passive abandonment of concentration until it’s needed.

“I take a lot of lousy pictures,” Kalvar says, in his attempts to get the rare photograph that meets his personal criteria. He’s not always aware of when he’s successful. “There’s a certain irrational element that afterwards I can describe and try to analyze. I look at [the contact sheets] and suddenly I see, amid all the crap, something that sticks out and works – and works in a way that has a kind of hysterical tension in it.” There are also times when he’s missed out on photographs simply because he’s uncomfortable with the social circumstances. “I’m kind of shy and sneaky and aggressive at the same time,” he says. “Sometimes I have the nerve, sometimes I don’t.”

Kalver’s notion of a good personal photograph has to meet a pretty strict criteria. He’s been shooting photos for nearly half a century now, and in his most recent show there were fewer than 90 photographs he felt worked well enough to exhibit.

Piazza della Rotonda, Rome, 1982

I’ve largely ignored Kalvar’s professional accomplishments in this essay. I didn’t mention, for example, that he started the Viva photo agency in France in 1972. I noted that he was a member of Magnum, but I didn’t reveal that he began as an associate member, then became a full member, or that he’s served as both vice president and president of the agency. I didn’t mention any of his shows, or his book Earthlings (released in 2007).

I’ve ignored those aspects of his career primarily because I think they’re less important to Kalvar than being out in the world walking around, alert to events around him, open to the moment, disponsible. I’ve ignored those things because reality is less interesting to Kalvar than those moments that bend and distort reality, that curve reality into a shape that suggest many possible realities. “A photograph is what it appears to be. Already far from ‘reality’ because of its silence, lack of movement, two-dimensionality and isolation from everything outside the rectangle, it can create another reality, an emotion that did not exist in the ‘true’ situation. It’s the tension between these realities that lends it strength.”

We all share a reality with Richard Kalvar. But we’re not all privileged to see it in the same way he does.

He’s generally described as the greatest—or one of the greatest—of all British photographers. That’s a lot of weight for a person to carry around.

There’s always an inherent risk in writing about ‘the greatest’ in any field, including photography. Critics, admirers, other photographers—all sorts of people often have an emotional investment in ‘the greatest.’ It becomes so easy to offend somebody’s sensibilities and spark an argument. But the real problem in writing about the truly great photographers is that they aren’t easily contained in a single short essay.

It’s not just Brandt; I’ve felt the same way when it came to writing about any photographer described as ‘the greatest.’ I was reluctant to write about Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank and a few others who are described as being among the great.

One reason Brandt, for example, is considered to be among the great is because he’s famous for his landscapes. And for his portraiture. And for his photographs of British society. And for his images of ordinary folks during the Second World War. And for his nudes. Each of those facets of his work deserves to be examined and discussed—and yet it’s impossible to do that adequately in an essay of this length. It’s doubly impossible to do that AND to give the background necessary to understand Brandt as a person as well as understanding him as a photographer.

So—what to do? What I’ve chosen to do is focus this salon on the material I like best: Brandt’s early photographs of British society and his later portraits. His landscapes, his nudes, his photojournalism during the war—they’re all worthy of study, and I advise everybody to seek out those bodies of work. At some point in the future I may even return to them in another Sunday Salon. But for now I’m going to focus on Bill Brandt’s people, the portraits (both formal and informal) of the men and women who lived in the land Brandt loved.

Those photographs are exemplified, I think, in the very first Bill Brandt photograph I can recall seeing—a photo of a girl doing the Lambeth Walk.

East End girl, doing the Lambeth Walk c. 1936

There’s such a wonderful combination of innocence and awareness in that photo, such a contradiction between the joyful strut and the bleak setting. It’s an image that, once seen, takes up residence in the memory and lives there. The photograph is imbued with such a deep sense of time and place—England between the wars—that it might as well have a Union Jack stamped on it.

And yet one of the peculiarities of Bill Brandt (and there were many) is that even though he’s usually described as one of the best British photographers, he wasn’t born in Britain. He was born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt in Hamburg, Germany in 1904. His mother was German, his father was a British citizen who’d lived in Germany since the age of five. Young Willy (as he was called then) grew up more German than British.

His family was relatively wealthy and he had a privileged childhood. But despite the family’s social standing, Brandt’s father (as a British citizen) was interned for six months during World War I. For the most part, though, it appears the war had less impact on the Brandt family than on most Germans. Willy attended a school for the elite families of Hamburg, but did poorly as a student. When he was fifteen, his father, believing the boy was simply lazy, packed him off to a boarding school in Elmshorn in Prussia. The war had recently ended and many Germans were angry and resentful. Not surprisingly, Brandt’s British citizenship became an issue. Even though he’d never set foot in England, Brandt was sneered at by some of the teachers and bullied by the other students. According to Paul Delany, “There is ample evidence that Brandt suffered a psychic wound in his school days, something so hurtful that it affected every area of his life afterwards.” Whatever that wound was, Brandt never spoke about it. In fact, after he eventually established himself in England, Brandt would go to great lengths to deny his German heritage.

His studies at Elmshorn were periodically interrupted by illness. Brandt, like many Europeans after the war, suffered from tuberculosis (the rate of TB doubled during the last years of the war). He spent a great deal of time in a Swiss sanatorium, where he became interested in photography (the facility had a darkroom). That interest continued after Brandt was sent to Vienna to undergo an experimental form of psychoanalytic treatment for tuberculosis (a person could do an entire essay on this facet of Brandt’s life). In Vienna he met the poet Ezra Pound, who later introduced him Man Ray in Paris. In 1928 Brandt bought one of the newly-introduced Rolleiflex cameras. One year later, he was working as an assistant in Man Ray’s studio. Two years later, Brandt emigrated to England.

Housewife, Bethnal Green, 1937

Although he did occasional work for the News Chronicle, and for Verve and Weekly Illustrated magazines, Brandt primarily relied on his family contacts to gain access to subjects he wanted to photograph.

“I started by photographing London,” Brandt said, “the West End, the suburbs, the slums. I photographed everything that went on inside the large houses of wealthy families, the servants in the kitchen, formidable parlourmaids laying elaborate dinner tables, and preparing baths for the family; cocktail-parties in the garden and guests talking and playing bridge in the drawing rooms: a working-class family’s home, with several children asleep in one bed, and the mother knitting in a comer of the room. I photographed pubs, common lodging-houses at night, theatres, Turkish baths, prisons and people in their bedrooms.” Class-conscious England between the wars could be a playground for a photographer with money and access.

Many of those photographs were published as a book: The English at Home (1936). Two years later, his second book was released: A Night in London, which was inspired by Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit. Unlike Brassaï, though, Brandt provided his own lighting, setting up complicated arrangements of portable tungsten floodlamps. He claimed he owned enough electrical cable to run the length of Salisbury Cathedral.

Policeman in a Dockland Alley, Bermondsey, 1938

Everything changed in 1939—for Brandt, for all Londoners, for all the British and all the Europeans and, eventually, for the entire world. That was the year the Second World War began—the year Londoners learned the term ‘blackout.’ His study of London during the blackout and the Blitz made Brandt famous—and rightly so. It’s a terrific work of photojournalism. The images he made during this period are fascinating and important as historical documents. As noted earlier, though, this salon is focused on Brandt’s non-journalistic photography.

After the war, Brandt’s photographic style shifted. “I think I gradually lost my enthusiasm for reportage,” he wrote. “My main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast. Whatever the reason, the poetic trend of photography, which had already excited me in my early Paris days, began to fascinate me again.”

He turned to landscapes and to nudes, he began to explore the limits of formal portraiture. His approach to portraiture was a fairly radical departure from what was then in style. He accepted commissions to photograph famous men and women, but he had no interest in celebrating them. His portraits weren’t meant to flatter, or to reveal the subject’s ‘true nature,’ or even to document the person’s physical appearance. His portraits seem to suggest that famous people are as essentially unknowable as ordinary people.

Francis Bacon, 1963

He didn’t like for his subjects to smile. “When you take [a photograph of] someone smiling, they look stupid,” he said. He preferred his subjects to be looking off into the distance, largely devoid of expression, disinterested in the world around them. He encouraged that lack of connection with the world at large by refusing to connect with the subject; he avoided speaking to them, or even looking at them (other than through the viewfinder of his Hasselblad).

In his notion of portraiture the background is often as important as the subject (which makes sense, given his immense interest in landscape photography). He planned his locations with more care than he gave to his subjects. For example, Brandt had settled on a site for a portrait of Alfred Hitchcock (“It was to have been at Charing Cross Underground Station; there is an amazingly long empty corridor that looks as if it goes right under the river.”) even though he was never commissioned to shoot Hitchcock’s portrait. He commonly used a wide angle lens for his formal portraiture, and shot from waist level. The result was an image of oddly angled horizons, and a distorted perspective that one critic describes as “an atmosphere of mental precariousness.”

He printed those images in a stark, high contrast aesthetic that was anything but flattering. One of his subjects said everybody Brandt photographed looked as if they’d been sentenced to death. And yet everybody considered it something of an honor to have a portrait by Bill Brandt.

Paul Scofield, 1981

A number of art critics have advanced theories about Brandt’s work. They suggest his almost pathological reluctance to admit to his German heritage, his experiences as a bullied child, his years spent being treated for tuberculosis, his ongoing struggle with asthma, his antipathy for his father who sent him to boarding school—all these emotional traumas, they say, present themselves in Brandt’s work.

I don’t know—maybe it’s true. It’s certainly interesting to think about, and it certainly can shape our understanding of the man and his work. But how much does it matter?

His biographer, Paul Delaney, described Brandt as “a man who loved secrets, and needed them.” Certainly, almost everybody he photographed seems to have a secret—though whether that secret is inherent in the subject or planted there by Brandt, it’s impossible to tell. And, again, how much does it matter?

What matters is that Bill Brandt—whatever his secrets, whatever his traumas, whatever his motivations—took extraordinary photographs. What matters is that he didn’t limit himself to any genre of photography, but tried his hand at everything he found interesting.

“Everything is allowed,” Brandt once wrote, “and everything should be tried.” I’m willing to let Brandt keep his secrets; I’m just glad he tried everything and let us see the results.