Authors: Clive James
In
Brett Weston: Photographs From Five Decades
there is more than enough clean-cut shapeliness to recall his father Edward’s predilection for ‘the
thing
itself
’. The air of dedication is once again monastic. ‘For Brett, the struggle has been a long, unhurried process of refining an uncompromising, inborn vision. He did not acquire
it: it was simply granted to him, like grace.’ There is no reason to doubt the intensity of Brett’s inborn vision. What niggles is the fact that a beach photographed by Brett Weston and
a beach photographed by Harry Callahan look like roughly similar stretches of the same stuff – sand.
Water’s Edge
collects the best of Callahan’s black and white Beach Series (always capitalized) from 1941 until now. The light, the sand patterns, the reeds,
and the frail water could not be more delicately caught. When they
are
more delicately caught, the result is the kind of abstraction that leaves you striving to admire. But generally
Callahan photographing is good at what Lichtenberg said was the most important thing about thinking – keeping the right distance from the subject. The text, a deeply rhythmless poetic
concoction by A. R. Ammons (‘I allow myself eddies of meaning’) is in the hallowed tradition of overwriting for which, with his accompanying prose to Walker Evans’s photographs in
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, James Agee unfortunately gave an eternal sanction. For crazy people, there is a deluxe limited edition priced at $1,500. Presumably it is bound in platinum.
Harry Callahan: Color
has some of the Beach Series in colour and a lot more besides: clapboard houses, billboards, store fronts and, most importantly, his wife Eleanor. Callahan composes
exceptionally pretty scenes but human beings keep stealing them.
The same applies to the old Czech master Sudek, who was born in 1896 and is apparently still alive. Not much of his work has been seen outside Czechoslovakia until now. Sonja Bullaty and Anna
Farova have compiled and introduced their monograph in a manner befitting his unarguable stature. The amber haze of the early prints proclaims his affinity with Steichen, whose symbolist nudes in
Steichen: The Master Prints 1895–1914
might have been signed by Sudek. The wily Czech’s still lifes and surrealist fantasies are enough to keep aestheticians happily chatting,
but once again the people, when they are allowed to appear, infallibly upstage the settings.
The same is doubly true for Lotte Jacobi, whose people are not, like Sudek’s, anonymous. Jacobi was also born in 1896. Kelly Wise’s book on her, called just
Lotte Jacobi
,
was published in the US in 1978 but English readers might like to note that it has only lately succeeded in crossing the Atlantic. In New York for ten years after World War II Jacobi busied herself
with abstract effects called ‘photogenics’. Like all art inspired by its own technique, they dated instantly and are now of little interest. But her portraits, mainly taken in pre-war
Germany, are of high value. The high value becomes especially high when the sitters are world famous, but there is no way around that. Weill, Lorre, Walter, Furtwängler, Piscator, Lang, Kraus,
Planck, Zuckmayer, Grosz, and many more are all preserved in
echt
condition. She did a whole, fascinating sequence of Einstein portraits both in Germany and in American exile. There are
also multiple portraits of Thomas Mann, Chagall, Frost, and Stieglitz. The cover girl is Lotte Lenya.
Jacobi also did a portrait of Moholy-Nagy. If Moholy-Nagy had done more portraits himself, Andreas Haus’s book on him,
Moholy-Nagy: Photographs and Photograms
, might have been of
more than historical interest. The volume is well kitted out for study by aestheticians, but even those up on Moholy-Nagy’s theories of perception could well find that the photograms no
longer thrill. Herr Haus speaks of Moholy-Nagy’s ‘attempt to solve his problems as a painter (the penetration of planes, the elimination of individual handwriting) by means of a new
technique . . .’ Unfortunately Moholy-Nagy’s chief problem as a painter, shortage of talent, could not be solved by technical innovation, despite an abundant output of compensatory
aesthetic sloganeering. Moholy-Nagy talked about ‘the hygiene of the optical’ and announced that ‘everyone will be compelled to see what is optically true.’ (I once heard
Pierre Boulez, at a lunch thrown for him in London by my newspaper the
Observer
, promise that the general public would be made familiar with contemporary music ‘by force’.)
Moholy-Nagy’s real contribution lay not in abstract doodling but in his knack for shooting reality from unexpected angles so as to reveal forms and textures previously unlooked for. Everybody
has since appropriated these technical advances, with the result that most of his once startling photographs are no longer immediately identifiable as being by him. Such is the fate of the
technical innovator.
But Moholy-Nagy’s people are vivid enough. From a balcony in Dessau (datelined ‘1926–1928’) a woman looks down at a pretty girl stretched smiling on a
parapet. Moholy-Nagy was a tireless organizer of forms but the most interesting form, that of the human being, comes ready made. Cecil Beaton, to his credit, never doubted that his career as a
photographer owed something to the human beings he was pointing his camera at.
Self-Portrait With Friends
, the selection from his diaries which appeared last year, now receives its
necessary supplement in the form of
Beaton
, a collection of his best portrait photographs, edited by James Danziger. Raphael, Berenson was fond of saying, shows us the classicism of our
yearnings. Beaton gave famous and fashionable people the look they would have liked to have. In many cases they had it already. Lady Oxford, photographed in 1927, may have been a battleaxe, but she
was a regal battleaxe. Beaton wasn’t a sentimentalist so much as a dandy who believed in glamour as a separate country. Until the fifties he was almost the only mainstream British
photographer the young aspirants could look to. (Bill Brandt was a drop-out.) From the technical viewpoint he was awesomely capable – he snatched candids in Hollywood that look as uncluttered
as the best official studio portraits.
Beyond technique he had a sense of occasion. At times this might have been indistinguishable from snobbery, but it served him better than the routine compulsion to record documentary truth. His
book
New York
(1938) is painfully weak when it goes up to Harlem. (‘These people are children.’) In
Far East
(1945) he is plainly more interested in Imperial Delhi
than in the air-raid casualties. In
Time Exposure
(1946) his ‘Bomb Victim’ is merely cute, whereas the portrait of John Gielgud ‘in a Restoration role’ slips
straight into immortality with no waiting. These books and several more lie behind the present compilation, which loses little from being deprived of the original text. (The ‘DeHavilland
fighter, 1941’ depicted on page 42 is, however, clearly a Spitfire, which was manufactured by Vickers Supermarine. How old is Mr Danziger? Eight?) Beaton was a social butterfly who wrote the
higher gossip. But the circles he moved in provided him with human subjects who were, in many cases, works of art ready made. With Beaton’s beautiful socialites, as with de Meyer’s, it
is hard to avoid the conclusion that they had no other reason for existence than getting into the picture. Beaton has, if anybody has, a clearly defined artistic personality. But once again the
self-expression is largely defined by the field of documentation. His exquisite drawings, which he left like thank-you notes in the grand houses, are far more characteristic than his
photographs.
Mainly by shading his eyes with a wide-brimmed hat and allowing his feet to take him in congenial directions, Beaton found the world seductive. He wasn’t out to shape
reality, even by photography, which he rated, perhaps jokingly, fifth among his interests. With Diana Vreeland seductiveness becomes Allure. In a folio called just that, Ms Vreeland collects some
of her favourite twentieth-century photographs. Equipped with a stream of semi-consciousness text emanating from DV herself, the book (which I see the latest number of
Manhattan Catalogue
calls ‘absolutely historic’, not just historic) has been thrown together with such abandon that some of the captions have landed on the wrong photographs – in my copy, at least.
The picture dubbed ‘Baron de Meyer /
The New Hat Called Violette Worn by the Honorable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes – Alex, 1924
’ should almost certainly be entitled
‘Louise Dahl-Wolfe /
Balenciaga’s white linen over-blouse,
1953
’ and vice versa. In later copies, I understand, such anomalies have been put right. The model for
the Balenciaga is, unless my eyes are giving out under the strain, Suzy Parker. Even at this late date, Ms Vreeland continues
Vogue
’s queenly habit of always crediting the
fashionable ladies but rarely the models. In effect this quirk has helped to glorify the photographers, who get kudos not only for the way they make the girl look but for the way she looks
anyway.
The most striking pictures in Vreeland’s book are by Anonymous, who snapped the British Royal women at George VI’s funeral. By the time these prints, probably duped off other prints,
have been blown up to fit the squash-court sized pages of
Allure
, there is not much left to say about authenticity. Yet aura – the many-layered immanence which Benjamin said
photography deprived things of – is present in large amounts, possibly because Allure has been banished.
Not that it stays banished for long. On most of Vreeland’s pages it seems fighting to get in somewhere. In the context of Vreeland’s unbridled prose, Eva Perón becomes a
figure of moral stature, since she cared how she looked to the bitter end. Vreeland is a place where appearance is everything. But the occasional big-name photographer manages to look timelessly
unfussy. Some of the cleanest plates in
Allure
’s pantheon are by George Hoyningen-Huene, this year the subject of a retrospective exhibition, called ‘Eye for Elegance’,
at the International Center of Photography in New York. The catalogue gives a taste of his work, although really he is too protean to sample. Among other activities, he set the standard for pre-war
French
Vogue
’s studio photography and was colour consultant on some of the best-looking Hollywood films of the fifties and early sixties, including Cukor’s wildly beautiful
Heller in Pink Tights
. No fashion photographer ever had a wider range. The shadows on his reclining swimsuit models are calculated to the centimetre, yet some of his celebrity portraits of
the thirties look natural enough to have been done today. His 1934 Gary Cooper, for example, seems to be lit by nothing except sunlight. The profile is almost lost in the background and every skin
blemish is left intact. Yet the result has aura to burn.
The Hollywood studio photographer retouched as a matter of course. In his splendidly produced
The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers
, John Kobal gives us
the rich benefit of his archival labours. Based in London, Kobal has built up a peerless collection of the original negatives. Kobal knows everything about how the studios marketed their property.
Some studios assessed the daily output of their photographers by the pound. The stars were expected to cooperate and the smarter of them realized that it was in their interests to do so. Lombard,
it seems, was particularly keen. Garbo was nervous, but Clarence Sinclair Bull never made the mistake of saying ‘hold it’ – he just lit her and waited. One key light, one top
light, and a long lens parked some way off so she wouldn’t notice. There are stories by and about, among others, Ruth Harriet Louise, Ernest Bachrach, Eugene Robert Richee, George Hurrell,
and Lazlo Willinger. Sternberg knew exactly how he wanted Dietrich to look but otherwise it was a conspiracy between the studio and the photographer, with the star in on it if she was powerful
enough. Before and after shots show how drastically Columbia rearranged the accoutrements of Rita Hayworth’s face. One of the after shots, by A. L. ‘Whitey’ Schaefer, is surely an
image for eternity.
But the studio photographers were not engaged in making something out of nothing, even though the lead used for retouching formed such a significant proportion of their daily poundage. The stars
might have been helped to realize their ideal selves, but the ideal self was not, and could not be, too far divorced from the real appearance. When the silver transcontinental trains pulled in at
Dearborn station in Chicago, a man called Len Lisovitch used to be lurking in wait. He was an amateur photographer who wanted the stars all to himself. Len collected, among others, Hedy Lamarr,
Betty Grable, Merle Oberon and Greer Garson. His candids of Hedy Lamarr are not decisively less enchanting than the portraits turned out with such labour by Laszlo Willinger at MGM. Admittedly
Lamarr had flawless skin and always photographed well as long as she was not allowed to become animated, but the point is hard to duck: the stars were already well on their way to being works of
art before the hot lights touched them. They were simply beautiful human beings – if there is anything simple about that.
In
Mrs. David Bailey
– called, in the UK,
Trouble and Strife
, cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife’ – David Bailey celebrates the
extraordinary beauty of his wife Marie Helvin. Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffey became such famous photographers in London during the sixties that they have been faced ever since with the
requirement to astonish. This book is not wholly free from the strained compulsion to dazzle, but it is still Bailey’s best effort since
Goodbye Baby and Amen
, mainly because Marie
Helvin is so bliss-provokingly lovely that she takes the sting out of the naughtiest poses Bailey can think up. There is an admiring prefatory note by J. H. Lartigue, who would have done at least
one thing Bailey hasn’t – caught her smiling.
Avoir pour amour une femme aussi belle, jolie, charmante et troublante que Marie, quelle inspiration pour un artiste
. At
eighty-four Lartigue still has an eye for a pretty foot.