Mastery and Dissolution, the Aesthetic and the Unthinkable

Of the three shows currently on view at the International Center for Photography, two simply should not be missed: a career-spanning retrospective of André Kertész, one of the greatest photographers of the 20^th Century, and “El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers,” a re-hanging of the powerful group show from 1983 chronicling the human toll of that country’s civil war characterized by death squads and thousands of killed or “disappeared.” These two shows, along with a solid, loosely arranged group of Modernist photos from Daniel Cowin’s private collection, form an especially vivid portrayal of tensions in the project of 20^th Century photography and—when seen concurrently—putting into focus important and disconcerting questions about the conjunctions between witness, aestheticism, and art.

Form, More than Form

In moving through the 116 chronologically hung images making up the Kertész retrospective, one is struck consistently by his formal and compositional mastery, to such an extent that it can be difficult to dig into any single image to find moments of puncta (“sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also cast of the dice” as Barthes has termed it); one keeps saying to oneself, “ahhh…” at the simple stadium (so artful that you might think of it mise en scene though it seems so much less arranged, so much less goal-oriented, than in the cinema), arrested by the cast of light, a portrait’s near-naked vulnerability, or an aerial view taken from a virtually omniscient eye that yet retains a hint of humanity. Seeing this rush of masterful images feels like sitting down to the collected works of a great poet: Donne, Dickinson, Auden, Stevens. Where to even begin?

The show gives a sense that Kertész spanned the entire history of contemporary photography. Though Eastman may have invented flexible film in 1884, it’s hard to know when the invention made its way to Budapest; Kertész received his first camera in 1912 and even his earliest photos—tiny 2”-3” sepia images of World War I soldiers, nighttime scenes, and family members—displays stunning control of framing, detail, and timing. Refreshingly, and perhaps reassuringly for a photographer just beginning a career, Kertész’s early self-portraits (e.g. one in uniform from 1915) are not nearly as assured as his portraits from the same period, though the contrapasto of his stance and the hint of an overhang in the upper-left of the frame are fascinating.

Wonderful early images include the cast shadow of two figures on a barn at night, four soldiers framed horizontally on a latrine bench in Gologary, Poland, and especially the image “Soldier With Cello” (1914-18) a vertically framed image of a soldier sitting on a chair by a building playing his instrument, shown in standard outdoor lighting with strong contrast and fast falloff from the soldier’s figure to the ground. The soldier’s gaze, body, and the cello itself form a powerful graphic vector from lower-right to upper-left, and bring a whiff of drawingroom elegance to this military moment. Yet the puncta, for me, is the way the cello’s endpin digs directly into the mud in front of the soldier’s chair, as counterpoint to this same elegance, the way the music simply must have been floating above the muck, and the inevitable return to the drudgery of muster and terror of the battlefield.

Kertész’s postwar work shows increasing experimentation and formal boldness, including moves into urban space. “Street Scene, Budapest” (1919) creates mood and context through careful composition of the studium and from the formal elements of composition and light—magnetism of the sides of the picture frame work to create a literal framing, with a tree to the left and building masonry to the right (the latter reminiscent of the overhang in the 1915 portrait), while these same frame sets up play within conventions of figure and ground. The horizontally framed rainswept road forms an angled vector while figures with umbrellas set across the frame virtually blur into another graphic vector across the image and along the road; even the trees play a game of scale.

A series of his brother Jeno from this period is both more personal and more allegorically experimental. A pair of images, “Jeno Kertész as Icarus” and “Jeno Kertész with Wings” are more playful and act largely at the level of stadium. The former especially partakes of two of Barthes’ four types of the photographer’s surprises—arresting an image that the normal eye cannot and an air of the trouvaille or lucky find; perhaps more importantly I like this image (fond, forgettable) which is why I know the studium is at work. This horizontal image shows a tiny, nude body in mid-flight, arched backwards and silhouetted, centered even and taking up a very small screen area. The man who flys is bursting with energy, a classical painting staged for the lens one Budapest afternoon when the light was just right. The latter portrait is even more whimsical and theatrical, Jeno wearing with elaborate paper and wood wings running down the beach jumping over a had buried in the sand (a pre-surrealist frisson?); an arresting image, but any prick I feel comes from the strange building in the background frame right at the meeting of sand and sky. What, one wonders, is going on in there in the face of this whimsy? (Barthes is right to like Kertész but mistrust his whimsy.)

To complete the series, an image of Jeno as wild man, bare chested, bursting enormous, arms outstretched, neck held out through tall grass, filling the frame, lit with natural light. Look at his exuberant gaze, the index semi-Z, the closure to rectangle of his eyes, mouth, and nose, the ringed clarity of those raging eyes.

The show moves chronologically from Kertész’s beginnings in Budapest, to Paris in 1925 where he met the major artists of the day but bonded mostly with the Hungarian émigré community (notably Brassaï, né Gyula Halasz), and then on to his move to New York in 1936 where he lived until his death in 1985. There are almost too many strong photographs to mention, and it would be too easy to spend paragraphs and paragraphs on each. Especially noteworthy are a wonderful double-self-portrait with his then girlfriend and later wife Eresezébet, both laying on grass and facing the camera, she darkened and facing the camera, he hiding his face, the background of trees and grass more vividly lighted than the foreground. Images from his time in Paris and New York are more familiar hit you with their brilliance one after the other—bam, bam, bam: chairs in Luxembourg Gardens, street scenes by the Seine, winter shots of Washington Square Park, images from roofs, a reflection in a punctured plate glass window (the hole creating a complete void in the studium void), multiple (unchronological) images of recontextualized public signage, an amazing image of umbrellas in Tokyo, formed into a colonial organism snaking into an intersection and guided by a shining white arrow, the magnetism of the frame’s bottom pulling them onward.

Especially wonderful are four Polaroids taken in the photographer’s waning years, three from 1980 and one from 1984. About this new kind of photography, Kertész said “nothing comes out the way you want” and they, finally, do not show the kind of mastery of the other images. Yet the appearance of color for the first time in the show is startling and leveling, and shows the artist’s dotage, an injection of humanity that otherwise seems to wane with the march of excellence through all the years. The one self portrait in this group being, not surprisingly, especially haunting, “That could be my Pop Pop.”

For me, the most glaring weakness of the show comes not from curatorial choice but something from Kertész himself, all studium and all trickery. As he gained notoriety, Kertész developed a series of images he titled “displacements,” as if taken in circus mirrors. These are sight gags, and though they may give shivers they are cold shivers, and no different than the amusing black humor of Frank Gehry installing circus mirrors in the exit hallway leading from the Condé Nast cafeteria, forcing all of those Nastie girls to see warped versions of themselves before heading back to the offices of Allure and Vogue, the obvious riff on outside vs. inside beauty.

Finally, though, let’s look to shivers of the best sort. Since I think of Kertész making his his name in Paris in the ‘20s and early ‘30s, I’ll end there with everything full of becoming. One of his most famous images is the “Satiric Dancer,” (1926) the Hungarian dancer Magda Förstner (is the umlaut echt-Hungarian or a bohemian add-on, like the ï in Brassaï?) laid out as in a cocktail dress and collar on a divan, framed vertically and small, about 3”x4”. Her arms are all angles and her gestalt forms closure into a triangle with the nude, headless classic three-quarter male bust to the upper-left and the framed photo of the nude female bust on the upper-right. Sure, love the cock of her legs and heels (pin-up meets Fritz Lang), the angles of her arms and especially her left hand hovering over the floor, the iterative evocation of nudity that helps you project that image onto her still-clothed figure. But puncta? The abandon, the playfulness, the joy of her smile. I’m not making history, I’m not contorted, I’m playing here, with you, this afternoon. It’s not anything serious.

Finally, “Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe” (1926). Because of the wonderful composition? Because of the precision of Mondrian’s paintings, the evolution of them from organic to geometric? Because both pairs of glasses, the bowl, the pipe, seem to have just been used or are about to be? Because they seem to have been handmade and perhaps just last week at the shop around the corner?

Or because a print of this particular image hung in my basement when I was growing up. Because it was what being an artist looked like, divined only from the traces, concrete, tangible, left behind.

You Can’t Go On, You’ll Go On

After an hour with Kertész, it’s easy to forget there’s anything but form, shape, and light. It’s easy to feel comfortable with the aesthetic fortress of Modernism-and-after, and to believe that ideas, aesthetics, composition, reflection, and elegance don’t just delight but also matter and perhaps nourish.

Yet in the face of the images in “El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers,” images both of formal brilliance and of death, mourning, and broken families, a broken nation, I am now struck with shivers of sadness and anger, and strangely also with burning questions and a kind of excitement, too.

Barthes’ typology makes mention of the political, yet I don’t feel in the images that Barthes himself chooses (the most personal one of his mother he will not show us) the political, revolutionary power he cites, the power that we deflect to the aesthetic when it becomes too impressive (Camera Lucida, p. 36). Powerful in this case meaning so strong and so wrong that once we look it in the face we feel we must act.

Ezra Pound, in The ABC of Reading and elsewhere, writes of judgment as coming from comparison, a specific way of saying that meaning is contextual. But what to make of the instinct that there is so much vital force in the images of El Salvador in this exhibition with their sadness, their undeniable shock—the shock of witness—coupled with their beautiful, formal, elegant, and even messy composition, the zenith of journalistic photography, maybe made beautiful as a way to catch the eye of the world, but perhaps only because that’s the only way skilled photographers could make meaning from the horrors seen through the view finder: the sanity of craft.

The search for a science of puncta is likely akin to trying to pin Barthes down on any specific point: futile because ill conceived, a campaign on the wrong ground (wrong country). Yet adding the question of content changes the equation (Do I like this image? Should or must I care about this image?).

We are faced with a challenge at the edges of human experience. Surely love lies at the edge, but much moreso the extremes of inhumanity. Love—personal or broad, quiet or brash—does not ask for our help or need our involvement. Yet at the extremes of human cruelty we are asked to act simply by our status as human, as onlookers who are now informed, like a missionary’s line to a potential convert, “now that you’ve heard the word, you must heed it or else.”

And what of the ethics of finding beauty, or something very much like but beyond beauty—in these images of bodies on lava beaches, or reflections of mourning families, of timber strewn across a road? The sadness in my thinking through the studium and the puncta here is that we all wish for a world that does not offer, but that this level of inhumanity reaches beyond the normal, natural existential horrors of the human condition to approach a level of violence (of reproach) somehow supra-natural. Does the nature of the horror overpower the possibility of the puncta or render it irrelevant or even immoral? Can the puncta live beyond “should”?

Alisdair MacLeish wrote in “Ars Poetica,” “A poem should not mean, but be.” Can we say the same for a photograph? I believe Barthes when he claims that photography is the first art form to show the referent fully there. I can come along with him that the closest analogue to photography is the theater.

I break from him when he claims that all photography shows a mask, and theatrically a death mask. For if this were true, all photographs would have the human wrenching power of these.

They do not, and equating that “death” to these images from El Salvador approaches the duplicity of the theoretical. Those other beautiful images, yes they are useful, yes they are valuable, yes they nourish.

But they do not have these lessons.

These lessons and those.

Essential, both.

All shows run through November 27, 2005 at International Center of Photography, 1133 Sixth Avenue at 43^rd Street (212-857-0001)