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Why I stopped writing about photography from Ag33 |
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Evans’ germinal American Photographs marked a departure from the past. It was the first self-aware book of photographs and proposed ground rules for how to pace and sequence a succession of pictures so that the overall impact adds up to greatly more than the sum of its parts - the parts themselves in many instances being individually remarkable. In particular, on this spontaneous visit I looked at one picture which I had seen and admired many times before. From a high viewpoint, one pedantically agonised over, it discovered a rainy street in Saratoga Springs, Pennsylvania in 1931. A row of black sedans parked at an oblique angle to the pavement receded into the distance. All areas of the sparkling monochrome picture were equally lucid and legible. Evans had planned the two-dimensional form of his picture, which built up as an interlocking of shapes, like the most resolved and purposeful abstractions of El Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy or Malevich. It is a dazzling rapprochement between a designing eye and the quotidian real world in which fact and effect enjoy glorious symbiosis. ‘Yes!’, I thought, before moving on. Like all the best works it is the better for not being accompanied by a laughably illiterate artist’s or curator’s statement. I left the gallery not only pleased by this revived acquaintance but doubly satisfied because there was no need to write about it and therefore trivialise an experience so purely visual and private. Between 1977 and 1994 I wrote approaching a 1000 pieces, mainly exhibition reviews, about historical and contemporary photographs for an assortment of newspapers and specialist art, antique and photography magazines. Not a single one of these efforts is in any way memorable now or merits revisiting; although when I wrote them I was probably conceited enough to believe that in the fullness of time a morocco-bound, four-volume anthology would eventually be published to general acclaim and a clutch of prizes by Yale University Press. Despite frequent requests I have resisted anthologising ‘the best’ because it would be an exercise only in self-advertisement and would involve wading through any quantity of hastily written material - which would assuredly make me wince with shame - in order to locate at best the passing acquaintance of an original idea. Next Page >> |
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