Between Two Worlds

Lee Marmon - ca.1990 - photographer unknown

We went to the Albuquerque Museum this morning to see the Lee Marmon exhibit, Between Two Worlds. There is a small but representative selection of Marmon's work. The narrative commentary at the front of the exhibit is disappointing because it just parrots a tiring, contrived comparison of the work of Marmon to his predecessors, Edward Curtis and Charles Lummis.

There is no arguing the fact that Lee Marmon, a native son of the Laguna Pueblo, had easy access to his Native American subjects which made them comfortable in front of his camera. Contrary to the assertions made in the exhibit, however, there is very little real difference between his photographic approach and techniques and those of Curtis and Lummis.

The exhibit material implies that Curtis and Lummis were condescending toward their Native American subjects, and that they misrepresented them as members of a disappearing race. I  don't recall reading anything said by either that portrayed their subjects with any negativity. Curtis endured great hardship in documenting all the tribal groups he could find and never realized any significant income from his efforts.  Lummis lived in the Isleta Pueblo and clearly enjoyed the trust and affection of his neighbors.

As for the portrayal of the American Indians as in danger of disappearance toward the end of the 19th Century, I think we can cut Curtis and Lummis some slack. The indigenous people of the country had by that time been subjected to a couple centuries of genocidal warfare. Additionally, it has become increasing clear that well into the Twentieth Century there was a concerted effort undertaken jointly by the government and religious organizations to stamp out indigenous languages and cultures by ripping the children away from their families and confining them in prison-like boarding schools. (Marmon ran away from the Albuquerque Indian School.)

The charge that Curtis and Lummis posed their subjects, sometimes using artificial lighting, simply overlooks the realities of 19th Century photography.  Curtis and Lummis made their photographs on glass plates using large and cumbersome view cameras. Spontaneous snapshots of everyday life were not a practical option, though Lummis actually got pretty close to that with some of his cyanotypes. 

Marmon made most of his pictures of Pueblo people in outdoor settings and had no need for artificial lighting.  He did often use a somewhat cumbersome press camera, but it was loaded with film that was vastly more sensitive than those 19th Century glass plates of his predecessors. Marmon used flash for his commercial celebrity portrait work as was the custom in those days.

Curtis certainly did go to some lengths to portray his subjects mostly in traditional regalia which was not often seen outside ceremonial activities. But, guess what; most of Marmon's pictures of his people show them wearing traditional garb and jewelry which they clearly donned for the occasion. Not unsurprisingly, as the exhibit material points out, Marmon never had a negative thing to say about the photographic approaches of Curtis and Lummis. In fact, Marmon was doing his best to emulate the posing conventions of his day which were not all that different from the approaches of Curtis and Lummis.

It seems to me it should be possible to recognize what is unique and valuable in Marmon's accomplishments without trying to turn Curtis and Lummis into villainous antagonists in a way that Marmon himself never endorsed.

Photographers' Stories

I have always enjoyed reading biographies of photographers I admire, but my approach has been haphazard, depending on chance finds in local used bookstores.  I am aiming at taking a more deliberate course to such reading.  There are some great stories, and I also find that such study leads to a much better understanding of  the photographic work.

Here is what I've been reading recently:

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: the epic life and immortal photographs of Edward Curtis

by Timothy Egan.

Early in the Twentieth Century Curtis undertook a project to photograph representatives of nearly every surviving North American Indian tribe.  He systematically made portraits, portrayed scenes   of daily life and presented details of ceremonies not normally accessible to outsiders.  In addition to the photographs, Curtis made sound recordings using the primitive Edison equipment of the time, assembled dictionaries of the spoken languages, and even produced a feature-length film in the infancy of that technology.  Curtis was without academic credentials, yet his accomplishments surpassed those of most of the recognized ethnographers of the time.  During the decades-long undertaking Curtis documented over eighty tribes.  He had some prominent supporters and backers like Teddy Roosevelt and J. P. Morgan, but never included a salary for himself in the budgets for the production of his twenty-volume opus.
   I have been familiar with Curtis' work for some time, but I did not realize that it was essentially lost from view until two decades after the photographer's death when a huge cache  of it was discovered in the basement of a Boston bookstore.  Since then, of course, many new publications of the work have appeared such as Taschen's The North American Indian.  Egan reports that ".... the value of all work by Curtis has steadily risen.  A single photogravure of Chief Joseph, for example sold for $169,000 in 2010."

SUDEK
by Sonja Bullaty

I have been an admirer of the Czech photographer, Josef Sudek, for a long time.  My familiarity with his work has mostly been through the fine compilation of his work in the 1990 Aperture monograph, Joseph Sudek, Poet of Prague: A Photographer's Life.  Much like his contemporary, Alfred Stieglitz, Sudek started his photographic career with romantic pictorialist work.  Then, for a time, he  made still lifes with obvious references to Cubism.  He is best known, perhaps, for his lyrical portrayals of Prague and its surroundings.  Sudek lugged his large format equipment all around Prague, seemingly unhindered by the loss of his right arm in WWI.  He was, however, often restricted in his movements during the German and Russian occupations.  The result was a long series of especially fine work done in his home and garden.  In part of that intimate phase, Sudek was assisted by Sonja Bullaty, a survivor of German concentration camps whose whole family had been swallowed by the Holocaust.  I was pleased recently to find a copy of  Bullaty's book on Sudek at an estate sale.  She worked for Sudek for a relatively short time, but was a lifetime friend, and instrumental in introducing his work to the West after her emigration to the U.S.

Brassaï: letters to my parents

I approach collections of letters with some trepidation, but Brassaï's letters written to his parents during his time in the 'Twenties in Germany and France are tremendously entertaining.  Brassaï (real name: Gyula Halász) initially aspired to be a painter and a journalist and made a living of a sort from those activities in Berlin and Paris for a decade before he took up photography.  During much of those early years his parents provided some regular support, but he was reduced at times to stealing food and was often at the precipice of homelessness, the iconic starving artist in pre-war Paris.  What kept him going was supreme confidence in his talent and abilities, and an ego of a size that rivaled that of the Eiffel Tower.   Brassaï seemed to know everyone in the art world of any consequence.  Once Brassaï took up photography Henry Miller named him "the Eye of Paris".
   Brassaï's social skills served him well throughout his career, but his photographs made at night on the streets of Paris and in dimly lit interiors show him also to be a skillful and innovative technician.  He seems to have done most of that work with a Voigtländer plate camera and whatever slow film was available at the time.  He talks in the letters about planning to get a Leica, but I don't know if that was accomplished.  He also talks of a darkroom and it seems likely he did his own processing and printing.