THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050676
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BILL RUEHLMANN, BOOK COLUMNIST
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
PHOTOGRAPHY SPEAKS II
70 Photographers on Their Art
BROOKS JOHNSON
Aperture, Inc./The Chrysler Museum. 150 pp. $19.95.
We live in a time so incessantly bombarded by imagery that we become oblivious to it.
An essential book for anyone who wants to learn to observe as well as to see is Photography Speaks II: 70 Photographers on Their Art, by Brooks Johnson.
Image: ``Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter,'' Gettyburg, Pa., 1863, by Alexander Gardner. The black-and-white albumin print is a picture of a dead man. The artist claimed, in his Photographic Sketch Book of the War, to have happened upon the scene:
``The Confederate soldier had built up, between two huge rocks, a stone wall, from the crevices of which he had directed his shots, and, in comparative security, picked off our officers. The side of the rock on the left shows, by the little white spots, how our sharpshooters and infantry had endeavored to dislodge him. The trees in the vicinity were splintered and their branches cut off, while the front of the wall looked as if just recovering from an attack of geological small-pox.''
Affecting enough. But it is useful to know the truth. Johnson, 41, curator of photography at Norfolk's Chrysler Museum, notes:
``To make this photograph Gardner dragged the dead soldier into position, propped up his head and added the rifle for effect. His uniform reveals that he was not a sharpshooter, nor was the rifle of the type used by sharpshooters. Gardner then fabricated the accompanying text to create a more dramatic and poignant story.''
Still affecting, but in a different way. Gardner's bias was with the Union. He edited death - and our response to it.
``While the photograph can and does speak,'' Johnson says, ``it is the ventriloquist who presents the image that ultimately controls the message.''
Photography Speaks II is a self-contained sequel to the curator's equally involving Photography Speaks of seven years ago. It seeks to pay homage to artists who span the century-and-a-half history of photography with lovingly reproduced pictures from the Chrysler collection, accompanied by the artists' own assessments of what they were trying to accomplish in their work. The new book is an amazingly compact and accessible skeleton key to an entire art form.
Image: ``Dallas, Texas,'' 1985, by Len Jenshel. The color chromogenic print is a picture of a pool room. The artist had been shooting in and about the city during the making of director David Byrne's ``True Stories,'' a film comedy about the fragile edge of objective reality:
``As I traveled and photographed around suburban Dallas, I could hear myself saying, `commercial or video'; `Hollywood or Dallas'; `real or unreal.' Consciously and playfully, I sought to blur that very fine line between worlds - for isn't that what photography does so well? The photograph reproduced here
Affecting and outre. ``Dallas'' becomes an image of an image. It is but a short cerebral hop from there to the contemporary campaign commercial, which offers an image of an image of an image.
Johnson demonstrates how profoundly the past is prologue to our sophisticated visual era. The stereograph has given way to the gelatin-silver digital print. Enter a power beyond the revelation of worlds. Today, we have the capacity to invent them.
``Photographers,'' Johnson reports, ``can now create fantastic landscapes of scenes that have never existed and portraits of people who have never lived.''
That means audiences these days not only have to be hip to appreciate what they witness, they must also be savvy enough to withstand it. Informing us thrillingly about art and its relationship to life, Photography Speaks II provides a portable teaching gallery that becomes at once a celebration and a warning. It is the eye in the mirror. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communications professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Alexander Gardner's Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter
by CNB