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New York: Capital of Photography

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New York: Capital of Photography is one of those rare books that takes on a difficult subject and carries it off so well that more is achieved than any reader could normally expect.

The subject is New York City in the 20th century. How did the most prominent and highly respected photographers look at and capture the Big Apple? That's the subject here. The only photographers that you might have expected to be in the book that aren't are Diane Arbus, Roy DeCarava and Robert Frank -- due to disputes with Ms. Arbus's daughter and the latter two photographers. So it?s quite complete.

I am a photography fan, and was familiar with most of the photographers covered in the book. But I found the book built on my previous understanding of their work by exposing me to works that I had not seen before and by carefully explaining those works. Some may be disappointed that many iconographic works are not included here . . . but many of those are referenced in Max Kozloff's essay. So you'll see them indirectly in your mind.

The plates capture many different focuses for photography, different styles, varieties of techniques and equipment, and different philosophies about the purpose of photography. As such, they present a catalog of the whole field of photography in the last century. That catalog is more valuable because it concentrates on one subject . . . in many different dimensions.

Frankly, how do you capture New York on film? You can't. Most photographers tried to capture tiny elements that express universal truths. Some succeeded in timeless ways while others created time-limited archives of the past.

As wonderful as the photographs are, the essay by Max Kozloff is what sets this book apart from other photography books. It's as though he gives you a personal tour of the show and answers your questions about the photographers and the plates in as much detail as you want. Almost every plate is discussed and some figures are added for context as well. Seeing the collection through his eyes was like suddenly being loaned an advanced degree in photography studies. Enlivened by this education, I'm sure my eye will always notice more about fine photography when I see it displayed in the future.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of this field. In addition, I strongly urge New Yorkers to get copies. The sights captured here will trigger many important memories.

As I finished this wonderful volume, I thought about how fortunate photography students would be if their teachers used this book as a source . . . and then assigned the students to photograph New York.

This has to be my favorite book on New York photographers after Jane Livingstone's brilliant study The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963. The 101 photos capture the feel of the city over the decades of the last century and especially the street ambience of the thirties to the sixties.

The book is a record of an exhibition of the photos organized by the New York Jewish Museum in 2002. Most of the fifty-nine photographers who exhibited were Jewish. NYC is, after all, their city and perhaps no other metropolis has generated such an amazing number of talented, creative camera folk. The book's contents clearly show this.

The first seventy-eight pages have a wonderful essay, by Max Kozloff, about all these photographers and the various influences that showed up in their work. Here and there a bit of editing wouldn't have gone amiss though, as in this example:
'They almost describe an arc, wherein a material triumphalism is aestheticized to an apex of etherealization, then rounds over to an accounting of the social and human costs of "progress", and finally descends to the pathos of life and the solitude of observation'.
Hmmmm!
Karen Levitov's Introduction, over seven pages also adds to the book's overall comprehension. The back pages provide useful biographies to all the photographers followed by a good bibliography (with ten references to Kozloff's writing). There is a slight editorial lapse in not providing, in the Index, any reference to 101 images.

As to the photos I found them enormously varied in content and style. The first, by the Byron Company, is from 1913 and shows Indians and teepees on the roof of the Hotel McAlpin. A wonderful shot by Ruth Orkin taken on the canopy to the Hotel Astoria in Times Square on V-E Day and includes what looks like a TV camera. Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Lewis Hine, Edward Steichen, Helen Levitt, Bruce Davidson, Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott, Andreas Feininger and many others are all represented.

The book's production is as you would expect for a photo book, one photo to a page with generous margins and thankfully the comprehensive captions are on the same page. The paper is a good matt art for the 117 duotones printed with a 175 screen. I was made aware of an interesting point while with Morris Engel's 1937 photo of a Harlem merchant (plate twenty-one) looking out of a small window of his street stall. The photos show plenty of detail: small packets and bric-a-brac; strip ads for products; bottles and jars etcetera. This same photo also appears, about the same size, in a 1972 Time/Life book on documentary photography but the print used was darker and shows a lot more detail that was obviously included on the original negative. It was also a duotone but although it was printed with a 150 screen it had stronger second black plate to punch out the detail. This does raise the point that photos in art books can have a look that varies depending on the quality of the original print supplied to the printer. A reader could have a different interpretation of a photographer's creativity depending on how their work is presented on the page.

+++LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

Had really no time to finalize the book so far, however, quick overview: as always, one of the most original authors on photography (along with Ian Jeffrey), Max Kozloff exploits the depth of the medium with exceptional originality and taste. I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the medium of photography as such as well as to those interested in excellent criticism of nowadays.

Kozloff is one of those writers about a visual art whose words contain actual content, satisfying to one of analytical mind. He is a genius at conveying solid information about the various levels of meaning in photographic images. To wit, (1) where the image is brilliantly structured, but does not convey any particular "meaning;" (2) where a viewer or the photographer recognized a semantic meaning in the image, after the image was taken, but where there was no such meaning either in the actual situation nor in the photographer's mind when he/she took the picture; (3) where the photographer is skilled at previsualizing the image and looks for situations, juxtapositions, gestures, or expressions intended to communicate a premeditated message.

This is a brilliant piece of critical writing with a superbly chosen set of images to bolster the argument.

However, this reviewer has a serious bone to pick with the author.

"The description of N.Y. photography in this book has been guided by two questions: how have photographers reacted to their city, and how has the city, at successive historical moments, affected their reactions?" (page 69). Beyond this, it appears that the majority of photographers who made Kozloff's cut were Jewish, not by that as a qualifier, but by who did the photographing. And several remarks throughout the essay's development allow a reader to infer that Kozloff values images that apparently or intentionally reveal social justice and other liberal elite agendas. I.e., images of minority, "oppressed," downtrodden, or persons otherwise not having been successful in an industrial-capitalist sense of success.

OK. Fair enough. Now to reveal my pet peeve. Kozloff deigns to mention one of this nation's most significant photographers of the 20th century in the following manner: "Ernst Haas tried out color...." That is it. Point final. The sum total of his contribution to photography and to his photography of New York.

Whew. I wonder what there was in Kozloff's and Haas's relationship to deserve this kind of categorization of insignificance. It is as if Kozloff is of that critical cadre that relegates Haas's work to the dustbin of significance except for his "relevant" work on the return of prisoners of war to Vienna. Note, too, that Haas's faith background was Jewish, so he would not have been outside of Kozloff's majority. And he photographed a great deal in New York, both in B&W and color; there are over 600 images on the Getty site, about evenly of the two types, in the Haas archive.

Another photographer friend of mine reminded me that he had seen another quote of Kozloff's characterizing Haas as "the Paganini of Kodachrome." While that may sound positive, it hardly carries information about Haas's importance using Kodachrome, and can easily be interpreted as a putdown. An encyclopedic book on photography a few years ago in the entry on Haas stated that once he started using color, that his entire remaining decades of work amount to "pretty pictures." The evidence is not inconsistent with Kozloff's agreeing with that opinion.

If one examines the B&W work on Getty, there are several images that should be able to make the "socially relevant" cut. As for color, Haas almost single handedly created modern small format color photographing. His contribution is so significant in this regard that "Life" magazine, in two successive issues in 1953, published the longest photo essays of anyone's work to that date on - guess which subject? - New York. In other words, each of the essays was unprecedented on its own, and to have two essays in successive issues of similar length broke all bounds.

He later had other two-issue essays on movement, essays on Paris and Venice, as well as numerous essays in "Look" and other magazines. Books, too. Evidently, unfortunately for Haas to have been included in Kozloff's Panopoly of the Significant, much, but hardly all, of Haas's work reveals his having perceived beauty in his world. Beauty is the dark opposite of "relevant" with its emphasis on showing that which may be arbitrarily characterized as being wrong with this world. Haas saw plenty of the wrong, but overwhelmed that message with the one that there is still a huge quantity of beauty in what is right with this same world.

Now in his color oeuvre, there are also candidates that should have satisfied Kozloff's requirements for relevance.

I would like Kozloff to explain his position on Haas's photography and contribution to photography. Perhaps he can redeem himself by working with Alexander and Victoria Haas, Ernst's children, in bringing to publication a major retrospective of this much loved photographer, teacher, and philosopher of life. He does not nor ever did deserve the treatment he has gotten from the critical elite.