Firstly, allow me to say that amazon doesn't have enough stars to account for my real feelings about this book.
When I opened "The Creation" the first time, it was to photos 22/23 at a small book store in Cherry Valley, NY in June, 1972. And my jaw dropped involuntarily. I couldn't believe that image 23 could have been made with a camera. To the beginning, the opening image across both pages, of the universe in an abalone shell - one of the iconic images of color 35mm photography - unworldly. My jaw stayed distended as I continued to leaf through the book, followed, of course, by my purchase.
Ernst Haas is my Number One photographic personal hero, and has been for nearly 40 years. No one's images are so satisfying to me on so many levels as Haas's. His photography is to me as Beethoven's music. It resonates in my visual processing system at a level close to primeval. It is satisfying at an intellectual level, visual architecture level, spiritual level, and something, somewhere more visceral. I never get tired of his images.
So, it is almost an emotional experience to receive finally this magnificent, long overdue book, and to experience, once again with many new images, some of what I felt with that first leafing through of "The Creation." For those of us in the Post War Baby Boom Generation (PWBBG) who became photographers as professionals or amateurs, I would guess that almost every one of us who chose color was inspired by EH, if not to take up photography in the first place, then it was his work that lit the real fire in our bellies.
The great majority of the images in this book have not been published before. The portfolio section is arranged in twelve parts, the logic for which escapes me, but it does give one'e eye moments of relief from concentrating on the images. And what images they are! Dozens of his straight abstracts and often incomprehensible multireflections. And so many other styles and categories. Looking through these, I see bits of many other photographers' works already seen or imagined in these images; it is uncanny. The curator of this selection, William Ewing, used the term "loose," as one of several adjectives, to describe the flavor of what he found in the Getty archives of some 200,000 images. But "loose" does not begin to describe the exactness of Haas's in-camera framing of these images. Many left me wondering what kind of mind was even capable of seeing such possibilities, let alone the technical acumen to record them as images.
EH invented small format color photography - at least in the sense that he was the first to show wildly new dimensions of what was possible, in seeing and making the image. His essays in Life magazine in 1953, the year after my birth, were breakthroughs; Life in his first essay on NY had until then never dedicated so many pages and so many images to a single article, and to follow the next week with a longer one, broke Life's practice, then, on two fronts. And it just kept on going. So many contemporaries and younger photographers' work show Haas's influences. There were over a dozen photoessays in Life and Look magazines, with essays or photos in many others, too.
His first book, "The Creation," may still hold the title of the best selling photography portfolio book ever, with over 350,000 sold world wide in the hardcover and paperback versions. An image from that book, of impala in an East African game reserve, was the first 35mm frame that Kodak made into a 20' x 30' - yup, that's feet - backlit transparency that graced their advertising space in New York's Grand Central Station for several years in the late 1970s to early 80s, if I remember correctly. Twenty feet by thirty feet from one Kodachome image! Amazing then, and still rather mind boggling now.
He was one of the most versatile photographers going: commercial, illustrative, books, teaching, exhibitions, and more. People by the millions loved his work, and those, unfortunately not I, who had the privilege of having spent personal time with him at the workshops he used to host, loved him.
And then he ran up against the critical elite. Anyone whose work was enjoyed by so many people across so many media obviously couldn't have been "serious," or "relevant," or "avant garde" enough. No, no. Starting with John Szarkowski, and followed by the likes of Sally Eauclaire and Max Kozloff, his work was progressively denigrated and sidelined through the 1970s and following decades. He always maintained a loyal following, but the effete ones with their noses in the air, brilliant as they were, trivialized his work. Fine of Szarkowski to have been one, as a recent book of his photography shows quite clearly that he fits with consistency an old stereotypical statement, that "Those who can't either teach or critique." Not to insult teachers, though. And his photography is competent. Several compilations of the most significant photographers by some criteria or other fail to include Haas - even of Life magazine photographers. Incredible, just plain incredible.
The publication of this book puts paid to any possible denigrative statement from any critic whomsoever. It opens for us more than ever before a window on Haas's deep intelligence, brilliancy of seeing - both compositionally and with underlying message, across every major artistic movement and style of his era and even before, at a spiritual level no one else could touch. The emergence of his private work, which, according to Prodger, Haas kept to himself, blows apart those earlier critical putdowns, showing he was ahead of or a deeper master of the work of any successor. He out banals Eggleston and outsees by many a mile the likes of Steven Shore and Joel Meyerowitz. If Haas had let these images be published or shown in his lifetime, the New Photography critics would have had to find someone else to beat up to make the space for their favorites.
Unlike the practitioners of Eauclaire's "New Color Photography," Haas loved black in his images. So many of his images are thick with black, the content revealing itself in contrasts, through rich, deep color. The New folks liked their images to be more evenly exposed, without the massive, deep shadows that Haas used so well.
Prodger's essay in the back is brilliant, detailed, and thorough. I have only a minor bone to pick, with a detail. "R" cameras didn't come into being until 1976 with the Leica R3. Earlier reflex Leicas were "Leicaflex" cameras, Standard, SL, and SL2, and I know that he used at least the SL and SL2 cameras. By the time of his untimely demise, he may well have been using R Leicas. Before the advent of Leica's reflex cameras, Haas used Leica rangefinder cameras and, apparently, Pentax Spotmatics with adapted Leica lenses for his color work.
I predict this book to sell out. Once again, Steidl shows that they are at the forefront of the finest photographic publications. Anyone photographer raised in the PWBBG will want this book. The only way it could be better is for Steidl to give us so much more of Ernst Haas, one of the finest, most significant photographers of the Twentieth Century.
