Remember the Seventies? Platforms and polyester, disco funk and Vietnam fallout, Nixon Resigns! And the summer of Son of Sam (aka David Berkowitz). It was also the time when a new generation of American photographers took to the streets and hit the road in search of an America that was putting itself on display as never before. Inspired by Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, they cast a hip, cool eye on the phantasmagoria of the emerging Me Generation. But Charles H. Traub had something most of them didn\u2019t: a formal Bauhaus rigor acquired at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and a desire not just to record the strange new world but to celebrate it. Two exhibitions in New York allow viewers to experience Traub\u2019s joy at taking pictures: one of black-and-white work from the 1970s at Gitterman Gallery (on view through December 2), and another of color nudes from the early 1980s at Daniel Cooney Fine Art (from November 16 to January 6). \u201cChicago was a lakefront town,\u201d recalls Traub, who currently directs the graduate photography program at New York\u2019s School of Visual Arts, \u201cand when people\u2019s inhibitions went down and they felt comfortable putting their bodies out there on the beach, it was like Rio. I loved the humor of it.\u201d For the images on the cover, Traub used a square-format camera with a lens shade that was too small, so that it rounded off the edges of the frame in his prints. The effect is like looking at an old-fashioned TV screen, with a succession of random images popping up in front of you: a headless man in a Hawaiian shirt, a fire hydrant, a woman in a fur coat trying to look glamorous, a stone lawn deer, plaid pants, a running dive off a short pier. The look is casual but the formalism is consistent and sly. And unlike television, the longer you look, the more you see. \u201cCharlie doesn\u2019t pretend to give us a God\u2019s-eye view,\u201d says Tom Gitterman. \u201cThese are personal. They say, \u2018See it with me.\u2019 People are not a means to an end. He loves them.\u201d That engagement is even more obvious in a series of color nudes at Cooney Fine Art. Decades before Justine Kurland and other contemporary photographers tried it, Traub advertised for subjects willing to take off their clothes in front of the camera. The result is an extended essay in, as Traub puts it, \u201cthe uncomfortable moment after people reveal themselves and before they begin to pose.\u201d According to Daniel Cooney, \u201cIt overturned the idea that nudes were studied subjects, and that they had to be beautiful and formal.\u201d These nudes are guarded, awkward, and intensely vulnerable. Adds Traub, \u201cThis was a time when \u2018voyeur\u2019 was not a dirty word. It encompassed a human transaction, based on people\u2019s desire to be looked at, and the photographer\u2019s unquenchable desire to look.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remember the Seventies? Platforms and polyester, disco funk and Vietnam fallout, Nixon Resigns! And the summer of Son of Sam (aka David Berkowitz). It was also the time when a new generation of American photographers took to the streets and hit the road in search of an America that was putting itself on display as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2946,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"6560,6439,6835,6629,1651,7072,6450,6704,21617,6521,7133,7212","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[158],"tags":[5721,5722,5100],"issues":[148],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6432"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6432"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20716,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6432\/revisions\/20716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6432"},{"taxonomy":"issues","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issues?post=6432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}