Tod Papageorge: Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography

Tod Papageorge, Young Man and Ionic Capital, The Acropolis, Athens, 1984

CORE CURRICULUM

Writings on Photography by

Tod Papageorge

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: HALF A LIFE

The Snapshot

Eugène Atget: A Photographer’s Photographer

A Talk at Yale

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Two Lives

A Talk at Yale

Brassaï: Reflections on a Word

A Talk at Yale

Before the Gold Rush: Photography and Photographers at the Time of the Miracle

Interview with Tod Papageorge

by Richard B. Woodward

Was There a New York Look? The New York School: Photographs, 1936–1963

Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence

Garry Winogrand: Public Relations

Garry Winogrand

A Talk at the Museum of Modern Art

PLATES

An Unfinished Poem in Response to Susan Sontag’s On Photography

Interview with Tod Papageorge

by Mark Durden

Josef Koudelka

Aesthetics or Truth

Robert Adams—What We Bought: The New World

Speaking of Ravishment: An Interview with Tod Papageorge

by Alec Soth

A Tribute: Richard Benson

Words For Pictures

Yale School of Art Commencement Talk

REPRODUCTION CREDITS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: Half a Life

I wrote the earliest text in this book in 1974, just about half a life ago: Soon after accepting my first full-time position teaching photography—a one-year visiting appointment at M.I.T.—Jonathan Green, a colleague there, asked if I would contribute a short article to Aperture magazine (you may have heard of it) on the subject of the snapshot. After giving a lot of thought to it, I reluctantly agreed to try.

My credentials for the job seemed reasonable enough, given that I’d graduated with a degree in English literature from the University of New Hampshire in 1962, and had been sufficiently excited at the time by Shakespeare, Frost, and friends (including the contemporary Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath) to consider applying to the poetry wing of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for graduate work. But my understanding of what was required to produce a publishable piece of prose, even a dozen years later, was limited to the movie reviews I’d turned out weekly (or weakly) for the student newspaper during my last semester in school—a short paragraph per film, consisting of a string of five or six or even more puns and not much else. With that as a portfolio, to say nothing of my initial hesitation, I wasn’t at all surprised when I found myself nursing a dull headache a couple of hours after first sitting down at a desk with a fistful of sharpened pencils and a notebook.

Despite this beginning, I struggled honorably enough, day after day, to get the thing done, but through it all, found myself just as doggedly casting about for the simple key that, I had increasingly come to imagine, would unlock the secret to writing prose and lead me to an eloquent, graceful piece of composition. This search consisted of little more than collecting a few observations on writing such as Thomas Mann’s backbreaking, A writer is someone for whom writing is difficult, but I remained optimistic, and, it seems now, possibly clinically delusional. It was as if I hoped to become a secret sharer with Molière’s M. Jourdain, who suddenly discovered that he’d been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it, while I was actually experiencing the truth of Mann’s remark gnaw closer and closer to the bone as I filled one page after the next.

Inexperience played a part in this: the more I’ve written, the (marginally) easier it is for me to write, but, at that point, my efforts had been typically limited to a few lines of poetry, abruptly broken off. As I saw it then, I had a special problem with writing, one as unique to me as my astigmatism, but effectively uncorrectable without the application of expensive, exotic care (i.e., hiring someone to write for me). This problem, which, more than anything else, led me from poetry to photography, resided in my reflexive, or hardwired, predisposition to build anything I wrote from the module of the single word—or, occasionally, the syllable (presumably the source of my aptitude for punning)—rather than from the phrase or sentence or, unimaginable to me, the paragraph. It was as if I could find what I wanted to say only through a process of halting piecework, where the sound of the words seemed to direct the thought, keying it and then suggesting the next, not necessarily inevitable or logical, unfolding of it. Writing that essay, then, like many of the other texts in this book, was less a matter of undertaking a fairly straightforward prose journey from Maine to Mexico than putting together an intricate puzzle after painstakingly shaping each individual piece of it, one after the next.

Unsurprisingly, neither Mann nor Molière (or, for that matter, Maine or Mexico) appeared in a shower of light to guide me to the end of my assignment: I just stumbled through to the last sentence and turned the piece in. A bit later, as such things could happen then, I showed a copy of it to John Szarkowski (director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991), who read it with his feet crossed on his desk and a pipe at his mouth. Terrific! he finally said, after what seemed a long time (he was a careful reader); then, following a grand pause, and smiling over the pipe, But what’s it about?

A year after that, in 1977, Szarkowski invited me to curate an exhibition of Garry Winogrand’s photographs at MoMA, a project that required me to produce a catalog essay. I had no idea whether I’d be able to construct a prose argument, particularly a sustained one, for Winogrand’s photographs, but, once again, I plunged in, feeling even more hopeless about the probability of completing my assignment successfully than I had the year before. As I worked on the text, however, I discovered that I had observations to make about Winogrand and his photographs, and photography itself, which seemed to me new, even importantly new. This made the problem of articulating them especially demanding. For example, I found myself writing about the putative moral problem of photography, and was also put into a position where I finally had to describe in understandable language what I intuitively believed from the moment I first saw the two photographs made by Henri Cartier-Bresson that changed my life when I was still a student-poet—that, at their best, photography and poetry can share a near-blood relationship, a proposition easier to assert than to explain.

Whatever its problems, I can say that I learned more about how to write by completing the text on Winogrand than I did from any other piece included in this book. And, once it was published, it effectively confirmed—if not in my own mind, then in the small world of photographic commentary and criticism—my place on the relatively short list of people who might have something useful to say about the medium. I quickly came to feel ambivalent about this for the reasons I’ve tried to describe, but, as the simple, physical fact of Core Curriculum proves, not so ambivalent that I stopped writing.

I’d moved to New York in October 1965, after nine months in southern Spain and Paris, where I had my first extended chance to travel and work with the Leica I’d bought two years earlier in San Francisco: annus mirabilis, or miracle enough for me to concur with Herman Melville (whose birthday, like mine, is August 1, the very day I’m writing this sentence) that from my twenty-fifth year I date my life.

Looking at it now forty-five years later, I seem to have arrived not in New York but a sprawling open-air theater where I had immediate and full rights to the stage, and where stepping out of my front door was enough to set an exhilarating new show into motion—all at a time when the cost of film and rent and clothes and a bowl of rice didn’t amount to a hill of beans. That’s my memory of it anyway, a memory flush with being in the streets with a camera, where I saw more, and thought and learned more, in the quick stream that was the next few years than I have ever since.

Most of this thought and learning was spurred by the run of landmark exhibitions of photography being steadily mounted during this period at the Museum of Modern Art, and the critical writings of the man responsible for them, John Szarkowski. Kertész, Lange, Brassaï, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Arbus/Friedlander/Winogrand (New Documents), Atget, and on and on: straight photography straight up; the true thing; poetry caught in the pitch of the world!

That was my school, and what I brought to the classroom when I began to teach part-time in New York in 1969. It has also continued to shape my teaching at Yale, where I joined the faculty in 1978, just as it frames the core curriculum of this book. I should add, though, that all of this looking and reading grew out of my activity as a photographer, a fact that never allowed me to forget that those seductive, framed photographs lining the museum’s walls were the product of a demanding, difficult practice, one that I came to think of as comparable to the practice that musicians know. So, as I saw it then, and essentially still do, the most useful history of photography—at least for photographers, students or otherwise—would be a history of its strongest practitioners, and how the physical nature of their individual practices affected the look and meaning of their work. That, in any case, was the principle that directed the selection of the photographers included in this book (as catch-as-catch-can as that process was), and where I start from in writing about them.

Apart from "Before the Gold Rush," a general essay on the beginnings of photography and its technological and artistic evolutions, the book’s timeline begins in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century with Eugène Atget and ends in the late 1970s with Winogrand in and out of New York, Robert Adams around Denver, and Josef Koudelka somewhere between a loft in Paris and a sleeping bag on the road. So more than a third of the linear history of the medium, including all of nineteenth-century photography, is unconsidered here. My hope, however, is that overall the book will elicit in the reader a feeling related to the one I remember War and Peace (!) giving me: 1,100 pages of war, one hundred of peace, but a final sense that everything in the world has been included, even how to make strawberry jam. No jam here, of course, and only passing mentions of Weston, Levitt, Arbus, Friedlander, and many other remarkable photographers (including those of my own generation and following), but, I hope, enough of war and its fires for a campaign.

Speaking of war (a subject often alluded to in this book), it occurs to me that the seventy-five- to eighty-year period of photographic history loosely gathered here is the same span that saw three Athenian playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—create through the fifth century B.C., and the city-state’s long wars with Persia and Sparta, a corpus of poetic drama that, as fragmented and incomplete as it is, remains unequalled in the history of Western theater. A strained association to make, perhaps, even on the heels of a nod to War and Peace. But, if nothing else, this group of plays confirms the principle that a relatively brief period in the history of an artistic medium can come to define its affective, expressive limits—something that I believe the photographic work created through the period discussed in these texts will be seen as having accomplished in relation to the artistic history of photography.

Even more, it seems to me that those Greeks and many of these photographers were irresistibly borne to the compelling intensity of their work by the wars they lived through. Again, on the face of it, a wild speculation. But who can say that Atget (World War I), Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank (World War II), Garry Winogrand (Cuban missile crisis), Josef Koudelka (Russian invasion of Prague), and Robert Adams (Vietnam War) weren’t anguished by their individual experiences of these wars to a point that distinguishes their pictures from anything that came before, or even followed, them in photography? Or that the application of direct seeing, the core principle of the practice of straight photography (and, interestingly enough, a kind of seeing that the ancient Greeks had a specific word for in their language), may not have offered them a particularly powerful method for artistically consorting with a bloody-minded world?

To elaborate: Atget saw his beloved Paris bombed and his adoptive son killed during WWI; Robert Frank, a Jewish teenager in Switzerland, felt the larger Europe burning down around him, and must have often wondered whether the Swiss government’s stance of neutrality would hold through the war—and after, if Germany prevailed; Cartier-Bresson escaped three times from POW work camps, and, as a fugitive, slipped over a river into Free France only a few hours before German troops arrested and killed several of the men he had just been with; and Josef Koudelka survived the Russian tank invasion of Prague even as he went into the streets and created immediate history with his powerful photographs. Compared to those direct experiences, Garry Winogrand’s emotionally raw response to the Cuban missile crisis, and Robert Adams’s to the Vietnam War (which I describe in my essays on the two photographers), may initially seem cosseted, untested by circumstance. But there’s no doubting the strength of the work they produced out of their brushes with that American crisis, and, later, harsh war.

Surprisingly, the post-1950 photographs of Frank and Koudelka (who, by choice and circumstance, respectively, effectively elected to be exiles, and created much of their strongest work out of that election), as well as those of Winogrand and Adams, more clearly bear the mark of conflict and bad history than those produced in the decade after WWII by the older generation of masters. Cartier-Bresson, for example, who, during the war, suffered the most intense privations of all of the photographers mentioned here, turned that experience into a wondrously successful postwar career. And, while it could be said with some justification that this transformation came at the cost of the very thing—a wired tangle of Surrealism and the green fuse of sexual energy—that made his work of the early 1930s so radical and strikingly new, it could also be argued that he was simply trying to survive a difficult period in world-life as well as in his own individual circumstance, not unlike Walker Evans, who, with the war’s end, found himself working in the offices of Henry Luce’s publishing empire and eventually producing most of his new photographic work for the pages of Fortune magazine, the empire’s flagship institution. In any event, it seems to me that the war’s most obvious effect on the work of these great photographers was to force the direction of its poetic energies outward into the public sphere, as if that was the only possible space from which meanings useful, or simply recognizable, to a half-destroyed, politically unsettled world might be grasped.

For all of the rectitude of much of Cartier-Bresson’s postwar work, however (an expression of its increasingly formal visual structures), the larger truth is that following the war—when he photographed, among other momentous events, Gandhi’s death, the fall of the Kuomintang to the communists in China, and Moscow’s postwar rebirth—his fundamental subject for about a decade was conflict and revolutionary change. War was still in him and in his photographs, but now as history, not the soul-burning experience he had recently known. Only in his mid-1940s portraits of artists and writers—charged time and again by the photographer’s virtually feral awareness of his subjects’ uneasy reconciliation with whatever sorrows recent history had visited on them—does Cartier-Bresson consistently seem to be in existential evidence in his work of this period, much to the advantage of the pictures, among the greatest made in the history of portraiture.

As for Atget: well, as in everything else, Eugène Atget stands apart. His work after WWI constitutes one of the two or three greatest individual achievements in the history of artistic photography: any loss or pain that he experienced during the war is here transformed into a ceaseless impulse of creative discovery; any technical limitation imposed by his outmoded equipment corrected into poetic revelation; any confusion or hesitation caused by old age absorbed by the deep silence from which he worked. Only when Valentine Compagnon, his companion of forty years, dies in 1926, does a grief finally seize him, and he dies himself little more than a year after.

So here it is, a book shaped by a constitutional tic that, by hewing me to the single word (the basic unit of language) was also the inborn mechanism that led, or compelled, me to find in the visible instant (the basic unit of seeing) and the impersonal mechanism of the camera a way to another kind of poetry. From there, a new (photographic) practice, then insight informed by that practice, then back to the word, then the words in this book.

See?

—Tod Papageorge, July/August 2010

The Snapshot

On Christmas mornings my father was a photographer. I remember this because the picture-taking was attended by two high-standing lamps that had been pulled down from the attic to wash the tree and living room with enough light for a proper exposure. My sister and I, called to attention, stared ferociously at those awful bulbs, not understanding that even as we sat there, blooming from the ribbons and wrapping paper, we were part of a ceremony; that we were, in fact, its motive.

The camera stood on three legs and had a short bellows for a nose. My father gave it the kind of cautious attention he reserved for stray animals, an attention that was never disappointed, for what the camera returned was always a surprise and a perfect gift, coming back in a postdated, almost posthumous way as a package of square shining prints. My whole family studied these small pictures, and helped to paste and slip them, corner by corner, onto the wide black pages of scrapbooks. The hot lights, the collapsible box, and even Christmas were forgotten as we laughed at ourselves looking back.

For me, the word snapshot is tied in meaning to the family album, a book that brought to photography a new vernacular form. Like a child’s language, this form was locational in its description (You stand there!), and could express only what it already understood. This kind of knowledge is simple and strong, for it is from a sense of intermediate, communal naming that the family album takes its beauty. The graphic audacity that shocks us in frame after frame of these pictures—their haphazard balance and amputating edges—seems also to be the result of this same excited act, but more often is just the mechanical aftermark of an inaccurate viewfinder: For the most part, the family photographer attempted to make the picture’s subject its center, but if he or the camera missed, it was no large matter—when pasted in and titled with white ink, all the minor subversion and impingement cutting in from the corner of the frame could be ignored.

The eye that created the family album was the heart’s eye, and by its innocence, its very love-blindness, let Swerve and Fracture invade the domestic precincts to transform memento-portraits into flat, half-cocked photographs. If memory was confused by the camera’s report, the discrepancy was unremarked. The picture had been taken, and love answered.

It’s unarguable to say that every one of us has been moved by the beauty of what I have called snapshots, but for photographers they are like lightning or wild strawberries, sense affairs that strike but do not hold. They have a prototype—the nineteenth-century studio portrait—just as they are now being suggested as a prototype for the small-camera photography that developed in the 1930s. However, this is complicated by the fact that while there can be gestural correspondences of form between the two, practice tells me that sight and discipline have made a sure severing where ligature only might have been, and that album photography has had no more influence on the main tradition than any folk art appears to have had on its own particular medium. Parenthetically, I should say that, for me, men like Walker Evans (plate 8) and even Edward Weston (plate 7) have been closer to the direct celebrating spirit of our anonymous box camera photographers than Kertész, Cartier-Bresson, and later masters of 35 mm photography.

After I bought the Leica in 1928 I went completely crazy. I could finally express all that had been dormant; with this machine I could photograph everything I wanted.

—André Kertész, March 8, 1974

André Kertész, and then Henri Cartier-Bresson, were the first photographers to understand that the Leica was more than a fine toy. For Kertész, the camera was a key to those hours and corners that, before, had more or less eluded him; it justified his sense of what he had done, and extended it to what he had known should be done. Cartier-Bresson more nearly seized upon the process implicit in the Leica’s ease of handling—that it could trap and take the world at the speed of a pulse—for the film the camera used, a ribbon of thirty-six uncoiling frames, was sprung by a rapid shutter able to stop and stop again a face or body in its turning. Unlike the box camera’s, the Leica’s frame had