Papageorge on Evans' Influence on Robert Frank (link)
Photo by Robert Frank
Papageorge is one of the good ones. He has a slight academic tic and gets lost in the extravagance of his rhetoric which just, won’t, let, you, breathe. But he has substantial and often unique things to say. Thankfully he doesn’t tend to the bilious prose of the academicians. It’s funny to think of him hanging out with Winogrand. Seems they’d be chalk and cheese, or jute and velvet.
He is eloquent on both Frank:
In Frank’s transforming vision of America, a car is a casket (45), a trolley a prison (41), a flag a shroud. As for us, we stand in odd groups and stare at some imposingly sad event beyond the frame of Frank’s camera, while he captures us and the event itself is forgotten. All events, in fact – the rodeo, the Fourth of July picnic, Yom Kippur, the graduation, the charity ball, the highway death, the funeral – serve only as reasons to gather and for Frank to condense us into a symbol. Even the few signs which he allows in his photographs are denied their usual meanings and instead point to the pictures’ new contents: a group of fans at a Hollywood premiere smile at a movie star under a sign that calls them “Squires;” some kids in a candy store, two of whom have their eyes strangely closed, crowd by a placard which says “Made Blinds;” a cowboy lounges in front of a “Dodge” truck. And, in this country where only newlyweds smile (City Hall, Reno, Nevada), the human face itself is drawn back as if it were a mask – severe, sad, and rapt.
Like most Romantic works of art, The Americans is marked by a lack of comprehensiveness: a continent is spanned, but its life compressed into a single grief. Yet, what is memorable about Frank’s book is not that it is passionate, or its form defiant, or its vision bitter – these are attributes of the book, not its structuring force: what shapes The Americans and gives it resonance is the transfiguring power of Frank’s eye. Although his feelings are inextricably wound into his perceptions, and threaten at every point to overwhelm them, Frank’s astonishing ability to draw the emblem from the fact serves him – by limiting him – in the same way that Evans’ rigorous acceptance of the prodigious descriptive energy of photography served the older artist. That Frank refused only to imply what he felt, but, instead, in a long series of exact symbols, precisely traced what he recognized, defines a genius as conscious and extraordinary as that which informs Evans’ American Photographs; that he divined in Evans’ work a vision cognate with his own furious sense of the truth, and – in a process embracing memory, intuition, guile, rapacity of sight, and love – transmuted it into the searing account of this country given by The Americans is, however, a creative miracle.
And Evans:
Lincoln Kirstein has said that Evans could wait days for the correct light to reveal his subject, a patience implied in some of his greatest work.13 For it is this obsession with light, as much as his employment of the view camera or the formal austerity of his style, that distinguishes Evans’ photographs. By defining both his subjects and photography itself through the use of this irradiating, informing light, Evans makes an identification between the two which is simple, direct, and profound. As we have seen, an effect of this identification is that the presence of the photographer is suppressed in his pictures, but this, of course, is at the heart of his strategy: if the artist is hidden, his choices will appear unprejudiced, equal in their gravity, and photography will be honored as the vehicle of their revelation.
Yet, if it can be said that Evans’ work is essentially denotative, and its ambition is to name irrefutably what it shows, it must be added that, almost paradoxically, through the concentrated descriptive power of photography, his pictures also claim those other trailing meanings that lie hidden in things. By being so vividly, immediately present – and so compassionately unmasked – these objects, facades, corners of towns and rooms, and human faces not only report what they are, but also suggest the improvised, heartfelt, and difficult histories that brought them to the moment Evans photographed them. When, for example, he frames two chairs in a black barber shop (42), the battered room they share is described not only as a dilapidated vanity, but also as a meeting place and, possibly, an improvised surgery (where a properly desperate man might go to have a tooth pulled or a bullet removed from a wound), meanings which reside in the detail of Evans’ picture as an etymology resides in a word.
But what was really interesting was his reference to Bloom’s anxiety of influence theories.
As Harold Bloom asks in The Anxiety of Influence, “what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?”15
Bloom’s question could be countered, if not answered, by T. S. Eliot’s direct propositions: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”16 Eliot’s position – according to which Frank may be called both a mature and a good poet – has the advantage of being closer than it seems Bloom’s is to the daily joys and emergencies of artistic practice, since it does not exclude the possibility of pleasure – whether the minor excitement of stealing something without fear of arrest, the deeper enhancement of loving a thing well enough to serve it, or the profound delight of making an object so free of previous authority that it can be called new.
Bloom’s assertion that how strong poets feel and overcome paternalistic anxiety feels true:
- The poet (the son) is initially inspired to write by reading a previous poet (the father).
- The son finds that the father has been exhaustive and with the advantage of years of mastery, has done a finer job of it.
- The son wilfully misreads and misunderstands the father and identifies faults, limitations, and oversights in the prior art to create a space within which he feels that he can contribute something unique.
I’ve felt this anxiety of influence (exacerbated recently by the ease of access to the past and the present through the web) for a while, starting from my initial readings of Nietzsche. And, as usual, Nietzsche was before me in feeling even this with his love of and then rejection of Schopenhauer and Wagner.
At that time I didn’t know how to work, I was a consumer, and so I never tried to create the wiggle room that I would’ve need to be in philosophy. In photography, as I do more, I feel more of a need to create my own space in the canon. But, I’m early on in the process: I’m only starting to know the masters. I know that the shadows of Winogrand and Frank and Klein sit darkly on my temples. And the spectres of Eggleston, Spender, and Sternfeld are looming behind them.
There is a fear that this stuff is a little too ‘meta’, too theoretical. That it should be taboo for me to think about how influence works. It’s interesting, sure, but how does it help me create better pictures? I guess it eases the way for how I relate to the masters. There may be less agony and anxiety in being trapped by the tyrannical density of the past. That’s not a bad thing.
Click on the link in the title.
Posted 2 years ago
