05 – AMERICAN MURAL PAINTING
Plato Rivellis: A photograph by the great American photographer Walker Evans. This particular photograph has puzzled many young viewers, possibly because they do not understand why it was taken.
Andreas Pagoulatos: Yes, the question that automatically comes to mind is why Walker Evans chose this building and not another that is much more interesting from an aesthetic point of view.
PR: What is Walker Evans doing in this photograph? I feel that he deliberately and provocatively wants to put us into the mystery of the photographic process. He tries to go beyond what Atget already did, whom Evans greatly admired, to make words like PERKINS, CONTRACTOR have a photographic meaning. To make a building with an ugly mound of dirt have a photographic meaning. To achieve this, he is forced to eliminate the meaning of the beauty of the real subject. If he had a very nice building in front of him, it would be much more problematic, perhaps even dangerous, to reject it to emphasize its photographic value. Here, therefore, he uses only dramatic oblique lighting and everything else is the negation of what one would expect. A small example, photography as a medium is two-dimensional, and it must reproduce a three-dimensional world. Here Evans, deliberately and obviously provocatively, makes the building like a Hollywood set, eliminates depth, background, making it just the facade. With this, he wants to play an intellectual game about what photography is and what photography can do. These photographs can often be approached in another way. Which also exists. Let's say that this is Evans's America. As Evans sees it.
AP: Yes, I would like to tell you that I have the feeling that the term mural painting, more than a common painting term, such as topography, fresco, etc., implies more the fact that we have a sequence, a series of photographs that when placed next to each other acquire a new meaning. And this correlation between the photographs is done in his own way every time, signifying. There, I think, corresponds to the work of Evans.
PR: By the word mural painting we mean, first of all, the personal work of each creator, that is, each one creates a mural painting if we present his photographs one by one next to each other, thus a meaning begins to emerge from all the photographs. By no means do I mean that each one does not have value. Then it would be a completely wrong approach, and secondly, that in a certain era and possibly in a specific and particular place, the work of many creators begins and marries. One is within the other, the other is next to the other, and they create a general image. When Winogrand, another great and later American, saw the work of Walker Evans, he said the following amazing phrase, now I understand that photography can be used intelligently. And he obviously used the English term Intelligent, which includes intellectual, intellect. And he added, Evans made an amazing America. Meaning, American mural painting. Looking at such a work, we see first, on the first level, the subject which is the image of an America mainly of the interwar period. There Evans worked more. If we think, however, we will conclude that America was many other versions and that here we see just an Evans version. It remains an objective fact but distilled through Evans's eyes. From there, after the photographer gives us the first stigma, he allows us to see how he did it, then the photographic values bounce back. This intelligence, the intellect, which Evans has and which not so many other photographers have, obviously inferior. So, we are talking about a very provocative climate of photography, which is stuck in reality, because Evans makes an incredibly correct, in quotes, record, but at the same time the viewer recognizes that what he sees is neither absolutely real nor of great importance. And here we must also note something else that concerns all photographers, what makes a photographer important; And what makes it personal; One word. Choice. The process of photography is a process of selection much more than it is a process of construction. Which is of the sculptor, the painter, and others. The first stage of selection is, I choose from the world the things that interest me. I become a collector. While at first I think I collect the things that interest me as subjects, that is, I say, .’ I like women, I will photograph women, or I like nature, I will photograph nature. Gradually I discover that things interest me and, and then mainly, from a photographic point of view. I may never have thought that there are ships and suddenly discover that ships have great value for me photographically. And then, the second stage, and equally important in photography, selection from what you have already shot. Because the photographic work does not end with the capture. The big part that one must see is also the selection from the many pieces of information, from the many opportunities, that you gave in the initial capture.
After the First World War, both in Europe and in America, the artistic trend of an objective observation dominated. The forms became more worked, cleaner, more descriptive, and sometimes more strict. However, the strictness of the form is at risk in the hands of an inexperienced artist of being transformed into a formalistic style game. Unless this strictness starts from the content and it is this content that imposes the necessary and not just suitable form. Something like this happened with the work of the great American Walker Evans. Evans collected his images drawing from American reality but also from the world of his own reality. This process was naturally not to satisfy his employers from the Farm Security Administration, the agency that had hired photographers after the economic crash of '29, '30 with the aim of capturing the tragic situation of the rural population. Evans's images captured a world of peculiar dignity, beauty, order, and sanctity. But also in other subjects of his as a faithful admirer of Atget whom he often managed and often managed to perceive visual value from insignificant objects with the unique equipment of the strictness of the form and the provocative use of the photographic medium itself.
America from the beginning of our century took the lead in photographic production and moreover with maturity and artistic thoughtfulness. Of all the great names of American photographers who supported a purely documentary but with elements of plastic beauty photography, and who distinguished themselves in the first period of the century, perhaps one should stop at those of Edward Weston and especially Paul Strand. Strand served all subjects and all forms over time with the same quality and fortunately with his unparalleled talent. It is worth noting that Strand had frequent contact with Europe, Italy, England, France where he also ended his days in 1963 but also with Africa, a contact that gives him an unusual cosmopolitan character for an American photographer. Strand's work contains a variety of subjects, from amazing portraits to a little more significant landscapes and a variety of forms from the slightly moved and atmospheric compositions to the absolutely clear and always epigrammatic depictions. His great power lies in his ability to highlight the photographic event of each of his images to the point that it always accompanies it in our memory. And so it transforms it into a point of reference and emotion.
AP: Is it easier for someone to photograph significant events, significant subjects; or on the contrary is it easier to photograph trivial, everyday, and I would say somewhat, how to put it, with specific dimensions, very everyday, whether phenomena or human relationships or architectural subjects;
PR: I have the impression that in all arts, But let's take painting mainly, Which has tradition and relation with photography, the cinema, the most important things are not composed of important events. That is, the great paintings do not have anything particularly nice particularly important. Constable's landscapes are not something terrible landscape. There are much nicer landscapes and the important subject often throws the creator out. A photographer who has a relationship with the immediacy of the real event, when faced with a very important subject can handle it but will want a lot of guts to overcome the weight that a subject has. It's like putting a background in a movie, thrilling music. There your image must withstand the thrilling music. So the photographer gradually as the importance of the photographic elements increases for him does not want, is not tempted by the very important elements of life. He wants to rewrite life and very important elements are not rewritten. So, what would I do if I were forced in front of an important subject; Either I wouldn't photograph it, it wouldn't excite me to photograph it, or I would simply be in a recording stance and would let the significance of the subject play on my photograph. And for this reason, the forms that we photographers use also have to do with the significance of the subject. A very constructed subject allows an extreme formalistic form. While if it is a subject that exists on its own very much then it puts you in the band.
AP: Do you think a photographer is justified when he precisely photographs people in some significant or insignificant moments?
PR: All young photographers have the question of what to do in front of photographing people. I often suspect that the reservation of young photographers is due more to whether they feel comfortable or not rather than whether they offend other people. And it is a fact that all people feel bad in front of the camera. If we ask someone to pose for us for a painting he will gladly do it while if we photograph him even if he has given us his permission he will feel strange. Perhaps because photography has this stopping of time that steals something from the personal flow of his life. Nevertheless, I believe that no one should have moral inhibitions in the sense that no one is offended by photographing them. If instead of photographing him you sketch him, couldn't one say that it does the same? What matters is the use of photography that will be made later. How will this person be presented. Therefore, I think that everyone has the right to photograph anything, his eye is free, the use of photography is discussed. But photographing people also has its limits and its limits are the significance of the event that the photographer has in front of him. To raise the camera when someone wants his help. But these already go beyond the artistic discussion and go to the discussion of human sensibilities. That is, if a person is pinned under a bus and a photographer passes by and takes a photo To have a good scoop as it is said, he is not just a bad person but certainly the worst photographer.
AP: Ethics in some way Therefore it is also included in the aesthetics of a photographer himself.
PR: Very correct observation. I would say that in general lines in extreme treatment, ethics is aesthetics.
AP: I would like to ask you something about Robert Frank. I have the feeling that in his work there is an osmosis between, in general lines, the European elements if you want and the American photographic elements. And on the other hand, we have a transition from them, The Americans, that's what the title of his main work was, and to us. That is, we could be the ones he shows, the Americans. Isn't it a very interesting phenomenon this shift, this displacement?
PR: Frank as you know was Swiss. He found himself in America but we immediately have the eye of an observer. That is, the subject he had in front of him, America of the 1950s was a subject of study. And he did it. But what is very interesting is that contemporary Americans struck him because they considered that his work offended Americans. This is a journalistic treatment of Frank's work. Who was anything but a journalist. Frank thinks he photographed America, in essence, like every genuine creator, he photographed himself. And so what we see may or may not be America. It may be an America of the '50s as Evans made an America of the '30s. In these two elements, a historian can see truths. He may find elements of McCarthyism in America of the '50s. But in reality, the people that Frank isolated were his own people, and that is why his work is significant. Otherwise, we would say a simple document. And I said the keyword now for photography. The world thinks that photography is a document. And this is challenged by every serious person who has a relationship with photography. Evans to whom I refer a lot today said there is no document. There is a documentary style.
The Swiss Robert Frank after a significant youthful photographic journey in various parts of the world found himself in America in the early 1950s. There he rooted, married, had children, and linked his name with American photography which became one of its brightest names. And he achieved this with one and only work that took him just two years to complete. The Americans which is nothing else than the result of his wanderings in his new homeland. Frank made good photography before the Americans. Sporadically he will write it and after them. Nonetheless, during this period his work that truly raised a storm of protests in America since most did not consider his reporting view integrated into the aesthetics of the beat generation along with the work of his friends (22:14) Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and thus became legendary. Frank's photographs overturn every hitherto known conception of street photography with the dynamic presence of the new formalistic elements, the skewed frames that so many influenced, the dark gray and full of grain shots but also with the sense of recording human loneliness and harsh ironic fate that far exceeds the occasional American ethnography to become beyond time contemplative observation of the human essence.
According to John Szarkowski for 25 years director of the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, In which and to which photography took so much, Garry Winogrand is the photographer who influenced more than anyone else his generation. After Walker Evans and Robert Frank whom he admired unreservedly he gave his own version of the mural painting of American cities. For Winogrand the unexpected coincidences are the norm and the ironic treatment of them joy, curiosity but also defense of his. With frenetic rhythms as if he knew that life would not leave him much margin since he died in 1984 at the age of 56, he photographed day and night leaving several thousand films unexposed with his death as if he wanted to immerse himself in the mysteries of the photographic process that interested him at least as much as the world he photographed. Winogrand amused feeling that we are all toys and players of this world. His frames provoked since they cared randomly while they were so tightly packed and complex. His subjects seemed indifferent at first encounter until the viewer's gaze discovered Winogrand's playful gaze which concocts the photographic event through the unexpected detail that no one knows if it is the reality that gave birth to it or the photographic metamorphosis that the magician photographer has provoked.
AP: The technique in Winogrand's photographs is simple. How does technique, simplicity connect with the aesthetic dimension of his work?
PR: The technique in photography, because it is simple, is related to the work each person does. For instance, Winogrand was as good a craftsman as Ansel Adams, who used a large camera for meticulously captured landscapes. Each one has the technique that suits his work. If the technique you use is more important or different from what your work requires, the technique will throw you out. As we mentioned earlier, the important issue will throw you out. The technique will throw you out. You must fight the technique that doesn’t suit you. In a correct photograph, there is always the right technique. And a good photographer cannot but be a good craftsman. Because we cannot say that someone is a good craftsman and a bad photographer. It’s one and the same. And we should also mention the differences in cameras. There are many types of cameras with various sizes of negatives. Every change of camera and every change of negative entails a change of process. With all cameras, we can say the same things. You can photograph large buildings and objects with a small camera and a street scene with a large camera. The process is what gives a different imprint to the photograph. Because if you have to use your time as a photographer differently with a large camera to end up with a shot, there is a delay of the gaze, the result is different from that with a camera that you move with in a nervous manner on the street, multiplying the shots to end up with a post hoc choice.
Thus, all technical means are of great importance in photography under the condition that they aim to influence the process and the content.
And one last technical issue that affects the essence of photography is printing. The question is often asked, is printing a secondary process or not? Obviously, if we put things in order, it is the least important process. Nonetheless, it plays some role, because within the whole sequence of distorting the real, or if you will, the metamorphosis, which is a nicer term, includes printing. The iteration of choices continues in printing. It's simply a process that may not be done by the photographer himself.