Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment at the International Center of Photography

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment

International Center of Photography 

New York City May 23, 2018 – Sep 02, 2018

Reviewed by Ed Voves

This summer, the International Center of Photography (ICP), located in lower Manhattan, is presenting an exhibition of one of the twentieth's century greatest photographers: Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004). His name has become synonymous to the English-speaking world with the expression "the Decisive Moment."

Cartier-Bresson might well have become a great film director rather than a  renowned "still" photographer, for he briefly worked for one of the legends of the cinema. In 1936, Jean Renoir hired the promising young photographer to serve as second assistant director for his film, Une partie de campagne (A Day in the Country). Except for a handful of short films, however, Cartier-Bresson was destined to be the master of a Leica 35 mm camera rather than a director's clip-board. 

To modern-day art lovers, Une partie de campagne brings to mind recollections of the Impressionist paintings of Renoir's father, such as Luncheon of the Boating Party. But there is another point of comparison. Not long after the filming was completed, a year or so  later, Cartier-Bresson revisited this theme. His photo, Sunday on the Banks of the Seine, shows a group of working-class people enjoying a glass of wine and last few nibbles of a picnic lunch overlooking a quiet river scene.

There the similarities end. Sunday on the Banks of the Seine (some prints refer to the river as the Marne) is not just a photo homage to a great film. It is a great work in its own right. It shows a "peak" experience in life and art: the decisive moment.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sunday on the Banks of the Seine, 1938

What is so "decisive" about this moment? There are five ordinary people finishing-up lunch. One of them, evidently a young woman, is almost unseen except for a wave of hair just visible in front of the cloth-capped gent. There's a row boat tied up to a fishing pier on which we can see two empty seats and a couple of dangling fishing poles. Nothing much is happening here.

Everything is happening here. Cartier-Bresson has captured one of the rarest occasions in human life: a moment of true contentment and real joy. Breathe in the country air. Drink a  glass of red wine. Eat that last bit of cheese. Savor the joie de vivre.

Then the fleeting moment is gone. Yet the memory of happiness remains, nurturing our souls, fortifying our hearts to survive the dark times.

The five people in this photo almost certainly were alive during the terrible spring of 1940, when Hitler's blitzkreig devastated France. I wonder if any of them remembered this sunny aftenoon during the grim Nazi Occupation? Cartier-Bresson was captured by the Germans, though he later escaped in 1943 to join the Resistance. Did he think of this picture as he planned his breakout from behind the barbed wire of the stalag?

Cartier-Bresson certainly remembered this brilliantly-composed photograph in 1952. That year, he published a large format collection of his photos. His American publisher, Simon and Schuster, entitled the book, The Decisive Moment. Those three words would define Cartier-Bresson for the remainder of his life.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018)  Reading a first edition copy of The Decisive Moment 

Paging through the phenomenal book, in its first edition, is a unique experience. Although a faithful, high-quality facsimile of The Decisive Moment was published in 2015, I think it is fair to say that they don't make books like this anymore.

One could also make the carping criticism that great photographers like Cartier-Bresson are not around either. That would be both untrue and unfair.There a quite a number of outstanding "lensmen" and "lenswomen" still at work. The disturbing fact about contemporary photography is that the media heirarchy no longer rewards the kind of intiative and independence exemplified by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

As the ICP exhibition text notes, the French edition of Cartier-Bresson's book (with a cover designed by Henri Matisse) had a different title. It was called  Images à la Sauvette or “images on the run.” This was entirely appropriate given Cartier-Bresson's roving, globe-trotting picture taking. There was added irony, however, in that Images à la Sauvette literally defines one of his earliest masterpieces, Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932.

Cartier-Bresson used  his 35mm Leica camera to record the extraordinary image of a man leaping over an enormous pool of water. In the background is the Gare St. Lazare railway station in Paris. In 1873, Eduard Manet had immortalized the station, shrouded by steam, as the object of a little girl's curiosity. Here the mystery of Manet's "cathedral of progress" is revealed and deflated. It's just a mundane warehouse.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932

Or so it seems. In a delicious stroke of irony, Cartier-Bresson shows a circus company advertisement hanging from the iron fence. The name of the circus, Railowsky, and a silhouette of an acrobat, are reflected in the water. In that mirrored image, the sense of magic returns. From being a pedestrian trying to keep his shoes dry, the leaping man is transformed into a real acrobat performing in the three-ring circus of life.

How did Cartier-Bresson manage to take this incredible photo? It wasn't posed or staged. Nor was it the result of luck. In the introduction to The Decisive Moment, Cartier-Bresson wrote about the experience of discovering the Leica 35 mm camera in 1932 and his experiments in creating his "decisive moment" style:

I had just discovered the Leica. it became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it. I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to "trap" life - to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

Cartier-Bresson soon became an absolute master of encompassing entire universes of action and feeling in a single frame. And these photos speak for themselves.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Downtown, Manhattan, New York, United States, 1947

Long scholarly articles could be written analyzing Cartier-Bresson's amazing photo of a man and a cat sitting, face-to-face, in a New York City ally in 1947. What's going on here? Is this a  glimpse of the soul-crushing anonymity of modern urban life?  Or does this photo record an act of caring by a sensitive human for a stray cat - or vice versa?

Does it matter which explanation is correct - or maybe another one we haven't considered? What matters is that this photo recorded a raw, unpredictable moment of life.

Looking at this, and Cartier-Bresson's other photos, we soon comprehend his "secret" for taking a "decisive moment" picture. The "secret" was always to being ready to open his heart and mind, as well as his eyes, to the scene that was "in the process of unrolling itself" before him.

But when to snap the picture? Cartier-Bresson explained:

In photography there is a new kind of plasticity, product of the instantaneous lines made by movements of the subject. We work in unison with movement as though it were a presentiment of the way in which life unfolds. But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.

To "seize this moment," Cartier-Bresson co-founded the Magnum Photo Agency in 1947. Fascinated by Oriental philosophy, he went to Asia where he photographed world-altering events like the Communist takeover of China in 1949. The juxtaposition of the timely, newsworthy, event, with timeless moments of apparent harmony was a notable feature of his work in Asia.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Last Days of the Kuomintang, Shanghai, China, 1948

When we look at this desperate scene of people trying to redeem their savings during  the Shanghai bank collapse in 1948, the "decisiveness" of the event is readily apparent. But the "decisiveness" of Rice Field, Sumatra, Indonesia, is there as well. Photographed not long after the more dramatic Shanghai picture, it shows an Asian nation which had just achieved independence from Dutch colonial rule. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Rice Field, Sumatra, Indonesia, 1949

The "timeless" quality of Rice Field, Sumatra, Indonesia invites further reflection. Working in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Cartier-Bresson recorded scenes of human life, little changed for thousands of years. When we open the pages of The Decisive Moment, published sixty-six years ago, we might almost be looking at photos taken in biblical times, of the people and flocks of Abraham or Moses on their journeys to the Promised Land.

As it turns out, the subject of Egypt, 1950 is as fascinating as any scene of an Old Testament patriarch gathering his followers for a trek to Canaan. In the caption to this double-spread photo, Cartier-Bresson explained that the scene was:

A village market held on graveyard county across the Nile at Luxor. The people are called “rats of the grave,” for they  are continually  digging and finding new graves to raise their meager income.

The grave diggers in Egypt,1950 explained to Cartier-Bresson that they refused to live in government-subsidized villages because they were concerned that the burial site they were digging-up for artifacts to sell might be "pillaged" by "invaders."

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Henri Cartier-Bresson's photo, Egypt,1950

What an amazing photo! Looking at Egypt,1950 brings to mind the saying "you can't make this stuff up!" Now, nearly seventy years later, it would be much more difficult to find such scene. 

However, Egypt,1950 is still a timely photo. Ever timely in fact. It is an astonishing look at the combination of courage and folly, tenacity and self-immolation that is human nature. Any photographer might - with luck - take one or two photos of this caliber in a lifetime. But Cartier-Bresson spent most of his lifetime taking such pictures.

Most of his lifetime. The emphasis is on most because Cartier-Bresson began to distance himself from photography toward the end of his life. Cartier-Bresson had trained as an artist during the 1920's before taking up the camera. As he grew older, Cartier-Bresson spent more time drawing than taking photos. By the 1990's, he had largely shifted his focus entirely to sketching. 

David Hockney was introduced to Cartier-Bresson during the years as he drifted away from photography. In his book-long conversation with Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message, Hockney made a very perceptive comment on Cartier-Bresson:  

Cartier-Bresson's era was the technological epoch between the invention of the 35 mm and the beginning of the era when computers began to have an effect around 1980. He was the master of that period: a fantastic eye.He began when the Leica was invented, and he gave it up a little before Photoshop was invented.

Does this mean that the "decisive moment" in photography has passed? Hockney believes that a "pictorial crisis" is taking place in photography and in film. While agreeing with Hockney on the crisis in contemporary cinema, I am more hopeful regarding street photography.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment, 1952

I believe that the deep-rooted humanity that we see on display in the ICP's Cartier-Bresson exhibit continues to hold true. Photography can still achieve "decisive" moments, regardless of the type of camera used. If the heart and mind of the photographer remain open, the camera lens will be open too.

But don't take my word as proof. Go look at Cartier-Bresson's magnificent snapshots of humanity in action and in repose. The ICP exhibit is on view until September 2, 2018. 

Follow the lead of the protagonist in Behind the Gare St. Lazare. Run, don't walk.

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved                                                                Photos courtesy of the International Center of Photography, New York City, & Anne Lloyd.

Introductory Image:
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952), cover. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952), p. 19-20, Sunday on the Banks of the Seine, France, 1938.  © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Ed Voves reading a first edition copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952)

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952), p. 39, Behind the Gare St. Lazare, Place de l'Europe, Paris, France, 1932. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952), p. 57, Downtown, Manhattan, New York, United States, 1947. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952), p. 127-128, The Last Days of the Kuomintang, Shanghai, China, December 1948-January 1949. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952), p. 119-120, Rice Field, Sumatra, Indonesia, 1949. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Henri Cartier-Bresson's photo, Egypt,1950, from The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952)

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952), p. 39-40.  Images shown are the 1932 photos, Behind the Gare St. Lazare, Place de l'Europe, Paris, France (left) and Allées du Prado, Marseille. The copy of The Decisive Moment, held by Ed Voves, is part of the Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Art Eyewitness Book Review: Berenice Abbott by Julia Van Haaften

Berenice Abbott: a Life in Photography

by Julia Van Haaften

W.W. Norton, 656 pages, $45

Reviewed by Ed Voves

No good deed goes unpunished. If you find that "truism" hard to accept, read the new biography of Berenice Abbott by Julia Van Haaften. Abbott (1898-1991) was no stranger to misfortune.

Consider Berenice Abbott's 1928 photo of James Joyce. It is one of the greatest portrait photographs every taken. Yet Abbot was referred to as a "girl" photographer when she was in her forties over a decade later. Had she been a man, Abbott would have been compared to Gainsborough or Ingres.

The year before taking Joyce's photo, Abbott captured the image of the reclusive French photographer, Eugène Atget. 

Eugène Atget, 1927

Photo by Berenice Abbott
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Soon after, Atget died and his vast photo archive was in danger of being discarded. Though short of funds, Abbott saved the treasure of Atget's genius, bulky glass photographic plates and all, for posterity. In recognition of this incalculable act of preservation, Abbott was condescendingly categorized as a student or acolyte of Atget - for the rest of her life.

Recognition of her incredible skill and artistic vision did not improve when Abbott returned to the U.S. from France in 1929. She pioneered the type of documentary photos that were to become a government-subsidized art form during the New Deal years. Yet, Abbott was dumped from the W.P.A. payroll (along with most of the other photographers on staff) when Congress cut funding in 1939 for this remarkable cultural initiative.

Not content to rest on the laurels of her wonderful Changing New York book (1939) which showcased her Depression-era photos, Abbott launched a new career photographing scientific subjects during the 1940's. 

After pioneering new technical methods and creating a distinguished body of scientific photos, Abbott was hired by the Physical Sciences Study Committee (PSSC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958. America was reeling from the shock of the Soviet Sputnik satellite launch. The PSSC planned a series of textbooks to interest America's young people in the sciences. After supplying brilliant images for the project, Abbott was not even credited in one of the textbooks. The quality of photo reproduction was execrable and her contract was not renewed. Abbott was "too artsey" according to one of the PSSC bureaucrats.

Even the Museum of Modern Art managed to botch the retrospective it mounted of Abbott's photos in 1970.

Despite this catalog of woe, the tone of this account of Abbott's life is anything but bitter. Solidly-researched, filled with perceptive insights into Abbott's character and career, this biography is truly definitive. Abbott may have been unlucky and unappreciated in life. But she could not have asked for a better biographer than Julia Van Haaften.

This superb, much-needed book is founded upon a crucial decision by Van Haaften. Her theme was Abbott's life and she refrained from a "life and times" treatment. The temptation to take this approach must have been very difficult for Van Haaften to resist.

How easy it would have been to use Abbott's life as a framework for yet another retelling of the saga of Modernism. The Ohio-born Abbott was a "poster girl" for the mid-Western students who flocked to the "Village" during World War I. She lived the ex-pat life in 1920's Paris and was a charter member of the New York scene during the 1930's and 1940's. Abbott knew everybody.

Berenice Abbott, New York, November 1937
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten

Thankfully, Van Haaften's narrative focuses tightly on Abbott. That is not to say that the book lacks character details about other artists or relevant social commentary. At issue here is the centrality of Berenice Abbott to American art. Abbott, except very briefly as a photo assistant to Man Ray during the early 1920's, was a major, independent artist. She was nobody's "girl."  

"I'm not a nice girl," Abbott told a New York City official who warned her against taking pictures of the "skid row" at the Bowery. "I'm a photographer."

As a photographer, Abbott excelled in capturing the "spirit of the place" in the same way that William Hazlitt's incomparable essays had conveyed the "spirit of the age" one hundred years before. Unblinking realism was matched by her aptitude to catch the ineffable spark of individuality in her portraits of the Paris literati and her neighborhood scenes in New York City.

In the photos that Abbott began to take of New York City during the 1930's, she was concerned to record the great changes in the cityscape since she had left for Paris in 1921. Abbott certainly documented the "change" in New York, but she also captured the unchanging emotional dynamic of New Yorkers as well.

Broad Street looking toward Wall Street, Manhattan, July 16,1936

Photo by Berenice Abbott

Even with only one solitary pedestrian in the classic photo above, we sense and see - in our mind's eye - the generations of New Yorkers who built and maintain this fabulous city. We see this because Abbott saw it with her mind's eye as she composed this magnificent image of the canyons of lower Manhattan.

Van Haaftan writes very movingly about Abbott's ability to present image and spirit together in a single photo. Van Haaftan, in her introductory remarks, highlights Night View, New York (1932) to show how Abbott solved this "artistic paradox." She quotes Abbott's own words on the necessity for photographers to summon "a creative emotion." 

Unless you see the subject first, you won't be able to force the camera ...to see the picture for you. But if you have seen the picture with your flexible human vision, then you will be on the road to creating with the camera, a vision equivalent to your own.

Abbott succeeded so well in matching heightened perception with exacting practice behind the camera that it is easy to overlook the sheer magnitude of her achievement. This happened to me recently with the very photo which Van Haaftan uses as an exemplar of Abbott's skill and spirituality, Night View, New York.

     

Anne Lloyd, (Photo (2018) Gallery view of the Modern Times, American Art exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, showing Night View, New York by Berenice Abbott

The Philadelphia Museum of Art included their print of Night View, New York in the current exhibit, Modern Times, American Art, 1910-1950. I was impressed at seeing Abbott’s famous photo in the Philadelphia exhibit. I was not over-awed, perhaps because of the visual overload of taking in all of the storied works in Modern Times, American Art. The second time I visited the exhibit, it was a different story.

When I entered the gallery of Modern Times, American Art, I was immediately struck by Night View, New York. The photo beckoned from across the room. Night View, New York stands out on its own. You just have to be able to see “the subject first” as Abbott said and, thanks to Van Haaftan's insights, I am now able to do so.

From atop the Empire State Building, Abbott created this incredible photographic image. The photo shoot took place on the shortest day of the year in December 1932. Abbott had chosen the date and time with strategic skill. The evening darkness having descended while the offices in nearby buildings were still open for business, Abbott was able to capture an entire constellation of electric lights, visible evidence of thousands of people at work. 

Anne Lloyd, (Photo (2018) Berenice Abbott's Night View, New York, 1932 (detail)

Considerable expertise was involved in staging this photographic coup. Abbott carefully made a fifteen minute-long exposure to capture this one single, dazzling moment. She positioned her camera looking north from the Empire State Building. We see the classical columns of the Greenwich Savings Bank (1352 Broadway), which still stands, renamed The Haier Building. The old Sixth Avenue El runs through Abbott's photo and if you look closely you can make out the rails on the elevated platform. The El was demolished a few years after Abbott took this photo, replaced by the subway and midtown automobile congestion.

It's amazing to think that this photo was taken nearly nine decades ago. The fifteen minutes that Abbott devoted to taking this photo produced an immortal masterpiece dealing with a lot more than the laws of optics or New York City architecture.

If you view Night View, New York with "your flexible human vision" it is possible to peer through the glare of each of those glimmering lights into the offices and into the lives of those long-ago New Yorkers. That is only a slight exaggeration because the sharpness of Abbott's exposure does indeed permit a degree of detail that reaches almost to the doors and windows of the offices surrounding the Empire State Building. 

Anne Lloyd, (Photo (2018) Berenice Abbott's Night View, New York, 1932 (detail)

I asked my wife Anne to get as sharp a copy as possible of Night View, New York. With that, we could illustrate the way that a flexible human vision can serve both the photographer and the viewer of the photograph as both focus ever more intently into the human drama before them.

Adjust the setting of your flexible human vision and you will be able to look inside and with insight - inside the lighted offices, insight into the people who make cities live . Time will be no barrier. Bernice Abbott's Night View, New York is a masterwork for the ages.

Anne Lloyd, (Photo (2018) Berenice Abbott's Night View, New York, 1932 (detail)

For Abbott, the late 1920's through the the early 1940's were peak years of creativity.  These were tough years, too. Except for a couple of years when she was drawing a W.P.A. paycheck, Abbott lived the precarious life of a free lance photographer. She earned a few bucks from selling prints from the Atget archive, but these she had to share with her avaricious business partner, Julian Levy.

Levy, of course, was one of the prime movers of Modernism in the U.S. In most accounts, Levy is a heroic figure. To Abbott, he was an ally who needed watching and she was wise to do so, as he eventually tried to seize control of the Atget archive. Levy was not the only Modernist "hero" with whom Abbott had issues. Paul Strand and Edward Steichen likewise crossed swords with her. 

Abbott was a photographer, as she brusquely told the New York City official. But she remained a woman "poaching" in a mostly male preserve. Abbott was also a left-wing "fellow traveler," if not an avowed Marxist, and a lesbian. Society had a lot of "issues" with her.

Van Haaftan's chapters on Abbott's sexuality and her left-wing politics match the high quality of the earlier episodes from her Paris and New York years. 

Abbott's long partnership with Elizabeth McCausland (1899-1965) is treated with sensitivity and insight. A mid-Westerner like Abbott, McCausland was an academic scholar, professionally and emotionally. Along with personal love, McCausland devoted much needed organizational support to Abbott's photographic career. McCausland's dense academic writing style, however, did little to help Abbott reach out to popular audiences in the exhibits they worked on together.

It was good thing that Abbott was so independent and so at odds with the male movers and shakers of American left-wing "cadres." Van Haaftan documents the FBI's "interest" in Abbott, but they felt that they lacked sufficient grounds to take action against her. Thus, Abbott's "deeds" of political activism went unpunished.

Portrait of Berenice Abbott, Monson, Maine, August 1989

 Photo by Yousuf Karsh 

Van Haaften knew Abbott in her later years and states that she remained supportive of the Soviet Union and its political agenda. It is rather disconcerting to think that a person of Abbott's vision and innate sympathy for the persecuted could have maintained support for a totalitarian regime whose crimes against humanity could not be ignored by the 1980's.

I think the answer to this puzzling failure is that Abbott's emotional world remained that of the 1920's and 1930's. She was the least "artsey," that is doctrinaire, photographer of all the major camera artists of her era. Yet politically, she never quite moved on from the left-wing activism that had rebelled against the Sacco-Vanzetti verdicts, the Scottsboro trials and the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. 

It is clear from Van Haaftan's wonderful book that Abbott, despite some character quirks, was a warm and generous human being. This is very apparent in the support Abbott devoted to Todd Webb whose post-World War II photos of New York carried on the tradition of street and neighborhood photography which Abbott had pioneered during the 1930's.

Berenice Abbott may have passed the baton to new generations of American photographers but she never ceased to be a remarkable artist in her own right. Moreover, she maintained her open-eyed, pragmatic "hands-on" approach to photography.

"In the search for art the subject gets lost," Abbott declared. "In the search for a subject one finds art."

As long as she lived, Berenice Abbott viewed the world with the flexible human vision that had enabled her to photograph Night View, New York. This was how she looked at the glittering Manhattan skyline on a cold December evening long ago. This is why the photo Abbott created in 1932 still seems as if she took it yesterday.

 ***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 
Photos courtesy of W.W. Norton, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Anne Lloyd

Introductory Image: Berenice Abbott: a Life in Photography. 2018 (book cover ) Courtesy W.W. Norton

Berenice Abbott, (American, 1898-1991) Eugène Atget , 1927. Gelatin silver print, image and sheet: 9 1/16 × 6 3/4 inches (23 × 17.1 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, # 1968-162-38 Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Zigrosser, 1968

Carl Van Vechten (American, 1880-1964) Berenice Abbott, New York, November 1937.  B&W print, 25.3 x 18.6 cm. Beinecke Library, Yale University. # 20293377.  Yale  University, Van Vechten Trust

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Broad Street looking toward Wall Street, Manhattan, July 16,1936. Silver Print, 8x10 in. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs collection. # 1219154. New York Public Library

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Gallery view of the Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950 exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, showing Berenice Abbott’s photograph, New York at Night, 1932

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Detail views of Berenice Abbott’s photograph, New York at Night, 1932. Gelatin silver print, Image and sheet: 13 3/8 × 10 5/8 inches (34 × 27 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, #1984-151-1. Gift of Theodore T. Newbold in memory of Lee Witkin, 1984

Yousuf Karsh (Canadian, 1908-2002) Portrait of Berenice Abbott, Monson, Maine, August 1989. Silver print.  Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. # 92PH024. New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Gift of the photographer © Yousuf Karsh

Art Eyewitness Book Review: I See A City: Todd Webb's New York

I See a City: Todd Webb's New York 

Essays by Sean Corcoran & Daniel Okrent - Edited by Betsy Evans Hunt

Thames & Hudson/$45/176 pages 

   Photos ©2017 Todd Webb Archive    
           

Reviewed by Ed Voves

New York City is  ever-changing, always new. Freshly-minted every morning, the Big City is already evolving by nightfall into the next day's New York.

New York City is a classic illustration of the statement by the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (544 BC) who declared "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

Occasionally, even New York City takes a "breather" before plunging back into the river of change. 

In 1945, after a decade and half of economic depression and global war, a curious equilibrium occurred. This pause allowed a photographer named Todd Webb to immortalize the "rough-at-the edges" neighborhoods of Manhattan - Morningside Heights, Fulton Fish Market, the Bowery, Harlem. Careworn but proud, old New York posed for Webb for a brief moment before the incredible burst of modernist building of the 1950's-1960's transformed the city forever.

Webb's photographic journey through old New York is the subject of a brilliant book published by Thames & Hudson, I See A City: Todd Webb's New York. An exhibition of Webb's photos was presented last year at the Museum of the City of New York.

Todd Webb, The Battery, 1946

©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Todd Webb (1905-2000) came to New York after being discharged from the U.S. Navy in World War II. Webb had been a Navy photographer in the Pacific during the war. Before that he had led an adventurous life, filed with ups-and-downs. A stock broker wiped-out by the Wall Street crash in 1929, Webb prospected for gold in Panama, served as a forest ranger and took a crash course in photography with Ansel Adams.

Webb saved much of his wartime Navy pay and headed to New York in 1945. His plan was to photograph the daily life of New Yorkers and their neighborhood surroundings. This was New York before air conditioning, electric clothes dryers, television (except in some restaurants) - and the ruthless "development" schemes of Robert Moses.

Webb began with a series of photos of special relevance to himself - "welcome home" signs for New York men returning from military service in World War II. Implicit in these photos is the acknowledgment of the GIs who did not make it back. Webb recognized this in his daily journal, excerpts of which are included in the introductory essays of I See A City.

            

Todd Webb, East 7th Street (Welcome Home McSorley Boys),1946         

©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Webb succeeded brilliantly in documenting work-a-day New York, but his motivating idea was not original. Credit Berenice Abbott for that. Abbott (1898–1991) documented New York City for the Depression-era Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939. Her photos, shown at the New York World's Fair in 1939 and the companion book, Changing New York, set American photography on a new path.

Webb took a momentous step in his art career before venturing forth with his 5x7 Deardorff large-format camera and tripod. En route to basic training in 1942, Webb stopped in New York and managed to meet Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), the elder statesman of American photography. Stieglitz could be quite disagreeable but he and Webb got along. In 1945, Webb was welcomed back to Stieglitz's gallery, An American Place, and until Stieglitz died in July 1946, consulted regularly with the "grand old man." 

It was through Webb's relationship with Stieglitz that he met Berenice Abbott. Webb and Abbott established an artistic friendship of enduring value. Abbott was a generous person, as well as one of America's greatest photographers. She was responsible for ensuring that the pioneering photo work of Eugene Atget was preserved and made known to a wide audience.

Webb was obviously inspired by Abbott. Some of his images of old New York directly correspond to Abbott's. In 1946, Webb photographed Under the El, Third Avenue, 1946. A decade earlier, Webb had taken one of the most artfully composed photos in the history of the medium, Under the El at the Battery. Both photos deal with the same topic, urban life under the iron superstructure of one of New York's elevated transit lines.

Todd Webb, Under the El, Third Avenue, 1946 

©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

The differences between Abbott and Webb are crucial to the understanding of the latter's work. Sean Corcoran, whose perceptive essay on Webb, is included in I See A City, notes that the way the two photographers "approached their subjects was quite different. Webb focused more on capturing the last vestiges of old New York and was not nearly as interested as Abbott in the juxtaposition of the old and the new."

The horse-drawn cart clattering past the parked cars is the key to Webb's fixation with the past in Under the El, Third Avenue. In many of Webb's photos there is a small detail like this that gives special relevance to the entire picture. 

If you study one of my favorite photos by Webb, 125th Street, September, 1946, it won't take you long to spot the key object. The young girl and her baby sister are sharing a snowcone, a paper cup filled with chopped ice and a squirt of fruit syrup. This precursor to water ice became a popular summer treat during the 1930's. But the snowcone isn't what your eyes fix upon. It's the shoes.

Todd Webb, 125th Street, September,1946

 ©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Webb did not have an overt political agenda in taking his photos. But the prominence of these scuffed, battered hand-me-down shoes asserts the hard lives of these children's family and community. The shortages of material goods in the U.S. continued for only a short time after the war, but inflation in 1946 soared to a staggering level, 18.1%. The nation's poor, especially African-Americans, had to keep on "making-do." The shoes that the toddler wears were likely worn by her big sister. But the sneakers worn by this older child are unlikely to have survived much longer.

Children figure in quite a number of Webb's greatest photos from the post-war years. Webb was not a "decisive moment" photographer like Henri Cartier-Bresson. Since Webb's bulky Deardorff camera took quite a bit of time to set-up, it is remarkable that he was able to achieve the degree of spontaneity that he did get.

In the case of one of Webb's most beloved pictures, LaSalle Street at Amsterdam Avenue,1946, the circle of children dancing around a sprinkler pipe looks like a posed shot. One of the girls looks over her shoulder, to see if Webb is taking the photo. In contrast, the book also includes two other, more natural, pictures of the same children, standing around, dripping wet, or hoping around in the sprinkler. 

Todd Webb, LaSalle Street at Amsterdam Avenue, 1946

 ©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Further reflection makes me think that, if the dancing picture was posed, it was probably the children themselves who decided to form a circle and put on a show for Webb. Yet they don't look like they are "showing-off." Webb lived nearby and the children would have known and trusted him. This photo, as a result doesn't look "staged" in a contrived, artificial way. They are kids being kids, though they know an adult is watching.

Webb's greatest photo, however, was staged in a very deliberate and calculated way. This was Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Street. Webb took eight separate pictures,  documenting an entire city block. He had to ensure that he photographed an entire car or let traffic pass and then take the picture. The eight separate frames were developed into a single image.

This spectacular photo is too big to present in a blog like Art Eyewitness.A similar one frame picture of Sixth Ave does give an idea of the panoramic, eight frame version. The effort that went into creating these life-pulsing images of modern day city life was extraordinary - and so is the effect of looking at it. 

Todd Webb, Sixth Avenue South, August,1946

 ©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Despite the brilliance of the Sixth Ave photos, Webb came closest to perfection with the close-ups he took of roast peanut sellers, harried pedestrians, little boys petting a cat, a cloth-capped Jewish shop owner on Hester Street. Yet, Webb could not resist the gravity-defying impulse of ascending to the observation deck on the Empire State Building on a clear evening in 1946 to capture spectacular images of the city by night.

Here we see New York not as a world unto itself but as an image of the World in microcosm. Look at each of the lights, glimmering and glittering in the New York night. Think of each of those lights as a human life, a human soul destined to live in the City of God! 

Todd Webb, From the Empire State Building Looking South, 1946

 ©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Inspiring thoughts like this often evaporate in the harsh reality of life after sun-up. The real world has little use for enchantment. 

Todd Webb's images of the daily, hum-drum humanity of New York City folk in the aftermath of World War II, however, do more than document a passing moment in the Big Apple's history. Webb's photos, splendidly displayed in I See A City, reinforce the conviction that the human spirit shall endure however much the architecture of the City of Man changes.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved                                                                                                                                                

Images: Courtesy of the Todd Webb Archive, ©2017 Todd Webb Archive, 61 Pleasant St., #104A, Portland, ME, 04101  http://www.toddwebbarchive.com/

Special thanks to Sam Walker, Archivist of the Todd Webb Archive and Andrea Smith (Andrea Smith Public Relations) 

Introductory Image: I See a City: Todd Webb's New York, 2017 (cover) Image courtesy: Thames & Hudson


Todd Webb (American, 1905-2000) The Battery, 1946. Photograph, black and white. ©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Todd Webb (American, 1905-2000) East 7th Street (Welcome Home McSorley Boys),1946. Photograph, black and white. ©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Todd Webb (American, 1905-2000) Under the El, Third Avenue, 1946. Photograph, black and white. ©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Todd Webb (American, 1905-2000) 125th Street, September,1946. Photograph, black and white. ©2017 Todd Webb Archive 

Todd Webb (American, 1905-2000) LaSalle Street at Amsterdam Avenue, 1946. Photograph, black and white. ©2017 Todd Webb Archive

Todd Webb (American, 1905-2000)  Sixth Avenue, South,1946. Photograph, black and white. ©2017 Todd Webb Archive

Todd Webb (American, 1905-2000)  From the Empire State Building Looking South, 1946. Photograph, black and white. ©2017 Todd Webb Archive