For anyone as disappointed by Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures (Farrar Straus and Giroux) as I was, I suggest picking up Robin Coste Lewis’s To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Knopf). Both books use family snapshots as prompts for recollections of intimate and communal history. But Malcolm’s memoir, subtitled “On Photography and Memory,” and with a picture of its author sighting through a camera on the cover, promises more than it delivers. Lewis’s book, which reproduces nearly 400 photographs of her extended Black family, found in a suitcase under her grandmother’s bed, just delivers. Malcolm, who spent the early years of her career at the New Yorker writing about photography, avoids it almost entirely in a series of brief essays inspired by grainy, uninteresting, and badly reproduced pictures of relatives, friends, and neighbors, only a few of whom she cares much about. A photograph of five-year-old Malcolm and her parents on the Prague train that delivered them from the Holocaust in 1939 opens a typically meticulous and restrained chapter. Her memories are “vague” and “pathetic,” she writes; her later investigation and summing up are deliberately, painfully unemotional. Portraits of her parents spark the strongest and most conflicted responses, but even these feel evasive. “The past in a country that issues no visas,” she writes. “We can only enter it illegally.” There are plenty of rewards here, but the insights Malcolm draws from the images in Still Pictures don’t involve photography.
Lewis doesn’t write about photography at all, but then she never claimed to. Instead, she uses a big, Bible-sized album of pictures – one of the best vernacular photo books in some time – as a vehicle for a multi-part poem that trails through its pages from start to finish, with a sequence of 30 brief pieces set at its center. The design doubles the work’s impact, with white type and black-and-white images on solid, flat-black pages. Still, the pleasure of spending time with the book wouldn’t count for much if Lewis’s poetry wasn’t so rich and evocative. “I am trying to make the dead/clap and shout,” she writes, and even if she rarely addresses individual images, she animates them and gives them all a striking presence and a visibility that feels like a triumph. “Pleasure is black,” she announces toward the end, but she’s already made that clear. Next to images of wedding parties, sports teams, a prom queen, a soldier, and children on summer lawns, her text is part dream, part memoir: a fable, a Bible story, a family history. An endless cycle of struggle, survival, loss, migration, metamorphosis, and rebirth. “We had every experience/except Death, ” Lewis writes. “More than once/we looked/Death/squarely in the face.”
Chronorama (Abrams), a knockout selection of photographs from the vast Condé Nast archives, makes an unfortunate first impression. For a book filled with terrific images, many of them unfamiliar or previously unpublished, why is one of the least interesting (by Helmut Newton) on the cover? Ignore it. A subhead promising “Photographic Treasures From the Twentieth Century” is hyperbolic but not misleading. Condé Nast titles, notably Vogue and Vanity Fair, have mined their archives so relentlessly it’s hard to believe there’s anything important or exciting left to see. On the evidence here, there’s plenty, all now absorbed into the Paris-based Pinault Collection. With more than 400 photographs by 185 photographers organized by decade (1910s to 1970s), the book is neatly structured but still overwhelming. Most previous Condé Nast picture books have reproduced images from the magazines; this one searched the archive itself for work that may never have appeared on a printed page. Greatest hits are avoided in favor of variations, out-takes, and other surprises by Condé Nast’s star performers (Steichen, Beaton, Horst, Hoyningen-Huene, Lee Miller, Penn) and key supporting players (William Klein, Duane Michals, Ugo Mulas, David Bailey, Bert Stern). Notably absent, except in a Penn portrait: Richard Avedon, who took all his Vogue work back to his own archives. Unlike previous anthologies, close attention has been given to images of people of color and to subjects outside of fashion and celebrity. The edit is sensitive and lively, full of witty juxtapositions (Penn’s leaping Willie Mays across from David Attie’s levitating model) and provocative pairings (Herbert Matter’s study of an elongated Modigliani sculpture next to Weegee’s stretched-out caricature of singer Johnnie Ray). The move from artifice to naturalism, from mannerism to modernism, is exemplified by the choice of material, but essays put it all into social and historical context. Penn is quoted calling his camera “part Stradivarius, part scalpel.” Not everyone here is as elegant or incisive, but the bar is set pretty damn high.
Best of 2016
Formed in 1963 by 11 photographers who recognized the necessity of “a forum to address the underrepresentation of African Americans in their field,” the Kamoinge Workshop gave its members a sense of solidarity and support in a period when black Americans were the frequent subject of mainstream media coverage but rarely its author.
The Shifting Borders of Photojournalism and Fine Art Photography
Disturbed by the lack of a visual record of Americ...
Roe Ethridge: It's Personal
At a time when youth and age seem to be blending i...
Image and Object: Erin Shirreff, Sara VanDerBeek, and Catherine Wagner
Three notable shows in Northern California this summer provide examples of how sculpture, and the idea of sculpture, are explored in photo-based work: Erin Shirreff, Sara VanDerBeek, and Catherine Wagner each make photo-based art and objects that are deeply informed by sculptural concerns.
Victor Burgin Revisits Photopath
The influential artist and writer reinstalls a landmark work for a new generation of viewers.
Roxana Marcoci
MoMA's senior photography curator talks about her cross-disciplinary approach to curatorial work, Wolfgang Tillmans, An-My Lê, and more.
Rebel with a Camera: Danny Lyon
I wanted to change history and preserve humanity.&...
Anne Havinga
How often does it happen that the job you dream of...
Interview: Michelle Dunn Marsh and Sylvia Plachy
Michelle Dunn Marsh, the founder of Minor Matters, the Seattle-based photography book publisher, has championed many photographers over the years.
Fazal Sheikh: Creating Common Ground
About 15 years ago, I came across Fazal Sheikh’s s...
Rosamond Purcell’s Cabinet of Curiosities
On the occasion of her first retrospective at the Addison Gallery, the photographer speaks to Lyle Rexer about photographing natural-history specimens in the “kingdom of the dead.”
Photo-Poetics: Works Both Allusive and Elusive
With nearly two billion images posted each day on ...