Quick Communication: The Celebrity Photography of Albert Watson

As much as some deride celebrity journalism, the uncanny mystique of stars and our fascination with them isn't easily dismissed. Celebrity photographers, like Albert Watson, have also created iconic images that can nail an epoch and those who shape it. Back in 2012, Deirdre Kelly spoke to Watson for Critics at Large.

A Conversation with Photographer Albert Watson

Jack Nicholson, from Albert Watson's Icons series, 1998 (All photos courtesy of the IZZY Gallery)

New York City-based celebrity photographer Albert Watson is a master of his profession. His images have appeared on more than a hundred Vogue covers and countless other publications from Rolling Stone to Time Magazine, many of them featuring now iconic portraits of rock stars, including David Bowie and Eric Clapton, in addition to Hollywood actors like jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood and other notable high-profile personalities, including Steve Jobs, Mike Tyson, Kate Moss, Sade and Christy Turlington. Exhibited in art galleries and museums around the world, among them the Museum of Modern Art in Milan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, Watson recently made his Canadian debut at Toronto’s IZZY Gallery (106 Yorkville Ave; izzygallery.com) with a retrospective show called ARCHIVE, which closes on December 27. Aged 70 and with a career spanning 40 years, Watson is one of the few internationally acclaimed photographers still working exclusively in film, processing it himself in his dark room. All of his hand-processed images now hanging in Izzy Sulejmani’s gallery are for sale, enabling collectors as well as fans of Watson’s work to own something by one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time, according to Photo District News. “Photography is quick communication,” he told critic Deirdre Kelly during a recent visit to his New York City office lined with some of the images for which Watson is celebrated. “People easily get it.”

Here’s more of their conversation.
  

Photographer Albert Watson (Photo by Gloria Ro)

dk: These are wonderful digs you’ve got here in TriBeCa, close to the Hudson River and flooded with natural light. I am assuming this is where you work?

aw: We don’t shoot here, no. I no longer have a studio of my own. We had a huge one in the West Village from 1987 to 2008, about 26,000 square feet. But I sold it to a hedge fund guy. Now, we don’t actually have a studio. We don’t need one. About 25 or 30 years ago, light in a space was fairly important. But nowadays you can replicate the light in a studio with technology. The business has changed, which is why we moved here. We’re now much more focused on supplying work for galleries and museums – fine art work and producing prints and making platinum prints. We make all our prints in the office and rent studios when we need them. Everyone told me that I would miss having my own studio. But I’ve spent my whole life working in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Milan and other centres, including Toronto, and I’ve become quite used to photographing in other people’s studios. Where I work doesn’t have to be my own space.

City Life

You can learn much about the character and personality of a city by its representation in photography and film. Amanda Shubert reviewed an exhibition last fall that looked at New York through the visual arts in Critics at Large.

Urban Poetry: Film and Photo in New York at the Art Institute of Chicago

Louis Faurer. Times Square USA, 1950

In 1900, the Philadelphia-born painter Robert Henri moved to New York City to teach at the New York School of Art, where he encouraged his students to go out into the city streets with their sketchbooks and record what they saw there. Henri’s ‘quick sketch’ – a fast impression of urban life that could be worked up later into a print or a painting – sparked an era of American realist art as gritty and grimy and flush with everyday spectacles and stories as the city itself. Film and Photo in New York, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through November 25, looks at the work of six New York City photographers between 1920 and 1950 who took Henri’s quick sketch to a new level by using a camera, instead of a pencil and paper, to record their urban vignettes. Pioneers of street photography, each of these artists – Paul Strand, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt, Morris Engel, Weegee and Robert Frank – created images that were investigations of New York City as a dynamic, unruly, always-evolving subject, a kind of playground for the eye where a momentary glimpse could tap into a richly complex social experience. They also each experimented with film as a way of extending those investigations. The Art Institute’s exhibition looks at the way these artists approached the snapshot and the moving image as two ways of recording urban life.

Helen Levitt. New York, 1940

It’s a novel idea to examine this period of street photography by looking at how photographers used the burgeoning possibilities of film to elaborate on or enhance what they could do with still images, and the Art Institute certainly has the collection to support this topic. (All the works in the exhibition are drawn from the permanent collection, which includes a number of works that are on view for the first time.) The comparisons here are fascinating. Take, for example, the fiendishly accomplished and oft-neglected Louis Faurer, whose nocturnal photographs of Times Square are lit fantastically by the ambient light of billboard advertisements. The pictures have an almost surreal sheen, and, saturated with fragments of text from neon signs and theater marquees that create ironic and often funny counterpoints, they work kind of like found poems. By photographing the heart of Manhattan’s theater district, Faurer shows us a city that is itself marvelously and garishly theatrical – it’s always performing itself. (In this way they recall the New York City paintings and prints of the Depression-era satirist Reginald Marsh.) Meanwhile, the film by Faurer included in the exhibition, Time Capsule, a silent documentary shot in the 1960s, splices together movie footage of Times Square to provide a dazzling glance into the kinetic swirl of the city. Faurer’s flash impressions of the myriad incandescent bulbs that shoot the street full of light gives you the sense of a city vibrating with life. The subject is the same as in the photographs, but the movie camera allows Faurer to go even further in recording experiences in the process of unfolding, and to convey the sense of the artist folded into them, one among the crowd.

The Man Who Loved Women

Deirdre Kelly is usually the dance critic for Critics at Large. But last summer she turned her attention to one of her favourite painters, Gustav Klimt, and reviewed an exhibition of his work in New York.

Klimt Revealed: 150 Anniversary Exhibition in New York City

"Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," Gustav Klimt, 1907. Oil, silver, and gold on canvas.

It quite literally was a dark and stormy afternoon when I slipped recently into New York’s Neue Galerie, seeking shelter from a sudden summer downpour. I had never before ventured through the ornate doors of this tiny museum devoted to German and Austrian art, even though I had walked past the former 19th century mansion where the Neue Galerie is housed – close by the Metropolitan Museum of Art – countless times. I was again heading to the Met this past July when the clouds burst open, making me change my plans. I am glad that I did.

On show was the Gustav Klimt 150th Anniversary exhibition (until Monday, Aug. 27), the only large-scale tribute to the Viennese painter, born July 14, 1862, in North America. In Austria, tributes to the Symbolist painter known as one of the founders of the Vienna Secession movement, a uniquely Austrian interpretation of art nouveau, are more pronounced. There, several internationally acclaimed museums, among them the Albertina, the Belvedere, the Kunsthistorisches, the Leopold and the Wien Museum, continue to honour the painter with various exhibitions highlighting different aspects of Klimt’s artistic legacy. The Neue Galerie show is smaller, if not more intimate than these others, showcasing just 12 items in a multi-media show that includes the cufflinks made for the artist by the Austrian architect Josef Hoffman in 1906.

Iconoclast

When culture critic Robert Hughes' tragic death occurred last summer, it went as unnoticed as Shlomo Schwartzberg's smart appraisal in Critics at Large.

Robert Hughes: Another Iconoclast Departs

Robert Hughes (1938-2012)

I first encountered the writings of the late art critic Robert Hughes, who recently died after a long illness at age 74, when he wrote for TIME magazine. As a long time subscriber to the magazine, I’d always paid attention to film, book and music and theatre critics, in TIME and elsewhere, but I had never really read or liked art criticism until Hughes came on the scene. Reading someone discoursing on artists I was mostly unfamiliar with – I wasn’t one for art galleries in my younger years – I sensed two salient points about him. One is that he didn’t suffer fools, or in his case bad art and bad artists, gladly, just like my other favourite curmudgeons, Harlan Ellison and the late Christopher Hitchens; and two, he brought the very highest standards of criticism to his writing. TIME has generally had critics a cut or two above the bland norm – currently Lev Grossman on books, James Poniewozik on television and Richard Zoglin on theatre fulfill that function adequately – but Hughes was something new. He was scathing – his critiques of artists like Julian Schnabel or Jeff Koons, whom he delightfully called 'The Princeling of Kitsch,' made an indelible impression on me. (Many years later I saw an exhibit by artist/ photographer Jeff Wall, a similarly themed modern figure, in Chicago and though I couldn’t entirely dismiss his oeuvre, I did feel that I was being confronted by a fraud. I suspect subconsciously Hughes’ trenchant criticism of modern art was percolating in the back of my mind.) But it wasn’t until I read his eye-opening book Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (Oxford University Press, 1993) – detailing the then corrosive effects of political correctness on the political and artistic climate in the United States – that I fully realized how gutsy, vital and important Hughes was to the current discourse on culture and politics among intelligent and open-minded people.

Visual Music: The Work of Jasper Johns

Sometimes when mounting an exhibition, its best for the gallery to leave it in the hands of people who are truly passionate about the artist's work. This is what Amanda Shubert discovered when she visited the Jasper Johns exhibit last summer at the Harvard Art University and wrote about it in Critics at Large.  

Ghost in the Machine: Jasper Johns at the Harvard Art Museums

Cicada (1979)

Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum this summer is a testament to the kind of close looking that small exhibitions make possible. With only twenty-one objects spread out in two galleries, the exhibition focuses in on the way Jasper Johns turns a technique from the printmaker’s arsenal – crosshatching – into a motif in his prints, and the resonant meanings that motif opens up. It’s a view of Johns’ oeuvre that you can drink in endlessly. The exhibition came out of an undergraduate seminar at Harvard in the History of Art and Architecture department, and it’s no surprise – the galleries crackle with the excitement of fresh discoveries.

Jasper Johns fills his paintings and prints with familiar symbols like numbers, letters and flags to strip them of their familiar significance and discover within them both a new range of meanings and a new way of making meaning, not by denotation but through allusions that take you into a rich and imaginative landscape. The crosshatch prints, from the 1960s and 1970s, work no differently. The crosshatch is a set of intersecting parallel lines used in engravings as early as the Renaissance to create the illusion of three dimensions through the modeling of shadow and light. By extracting and enlarging the crosshatch and turning it into a figure, rather than one of the miniscule forms out of which a figure is composed, Johns explores the culture of reproduction and mass production. The exhibition also includes works by Johns that relate to the crosshatch prints by engaging “the logic of print” in other ways, such as text, newsprint collage and letterpress.

an example of the crosshatch technique in engraving

Johns’ crosshatch works are love letters to printmaking: the riddle of process, with its precise calculations, and the sensuous variations and synthetic possibilities you can get out of different media. Scent (1976) uses a crosshatch scheme in purple, green and orange, but the sheet is divided into three sections, and in each Johns uses a different media – lithograph, linocut and woodcut – each with its distinct process and effects, modulating the continuous pattern. Cicada (1979), a screenprint, includes strips of newspaper in its crosshatch pattern, and the design is worked out to look as though it were applied by a cylindrical seal, rolled on so that the pattern could continue beyond the frame of the print. Here, Johns’ screenprint, a contemporary technique, evokes a long history of printmaking, from Mesopotamian seals (the pattern) to engraving (the crosshatch motif) to printing presses (the newsprint collage).

Transfixing Surfaces

In the first major exhibition since Roy Lichtenstein's death in 1997, some 130 of the artist's greatest paintings from all periods of his career are being presented along with a selection of related drawings and sculptures at the National Art Gallery in Washington. When the show was in Chicago last summer, Anna-Claire Stinebring reviewed it for Critics at Large.

Masters of Surface: Roy Lichtenstein in Chicago, Mad Men on TV

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/07/masters-of-surface-roy-lichtenstein-in.html

“Masterpiece,” Roy Lichtenstein, 1962. Oil on canvas

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Anna-Claire Stinebring, to our group.

Viewing Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective now up at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 3, I had the distinct sense that Lichtenstein’s art has, in some sense, come full circle. The AIC has chosen to primarily advertise with the cartoon strip and ad-inspired paintings (distressed blondes, impossibly serene explosions) that make “Lichtenstein” and “Pop” seem synonymous, but which are only one subset of the artist’s prolific career, as a visit to the galleries reveals. This publicity choice is reasonable – these paintings, all from the 1960s, are iconic and captivating. But it raises this question: by being inundated with reproductions of Lichtenstein’s images until they resemble their slick source material, do we now see Lichtenstein’s paintings through that snazzy consumer lens? What lesson are we as viewers taking away from the retrospective if, drawn in by the AIC banners of stunned and stunning women, we take pictures of his comic strip beauties and make them the wallpaper on our iPhones?

Maybe the simple contours of his women meet a current desire for simplicity, something vaguely recession-related. But reproducing Lichtenstein in this way diminishes the power of the way he’s laboriously and shrewdly reworked these pop-culture images. This body of work, completed in the 1960s, blew open modern art by rejecting the premium placed on originality and instead taking advertisements and comic strip frames as his starting point. Lichtenstein tweaked them and repainted them on a larger-than-life scale, in a flat, droll style without commentary. He recreated the comic-book coloring technique of Ben-Day dots by hand – a laborious undertaking – and worked to conceal his brushstrokes. It’s important to separate a museum’s publicity department from curatorial, of course. This fetishizing of the comic book material goes beyond the ad campaign and museum store. It’s in evidence in the galleries, where, when I visited, a preponderance of young women in polka-dotted dresses (some even with cat-eye glasses or cherry-red lipstick) ogled Lichtenstein’s pretty women with their Ben-Day dot polka-dotted faces.

Soul Mates

We often talk about the quest in life to find a soul mate, but when it's two artists who seek that spiritual bonding, it adds other dimensions that most of us don't ever consider, as Susan Green did in reviewing Patti Smith's memoir about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

The Way They Were: Patti Smith's Just Kids

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/01/way-they-were-just-kids.html

In a burst of youthful enthusiasm during the late 1970s, Rickie Lee Jones once famously  proclaimed the sensibility she shared with boyfriend and fellow musician Tom Waits: ”We’re living on the jazz side of life.” A decade earlier, another couple in their 20s had a similarly bohemian, improvisational relationship that was devoted as much to art as to romance. If not more so. Singer Patti Smith has now chronicled the years she spent with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Just Kids (HarperCollins, 2010), a riveting memoir that recently won America’s National Book Award.

Based in Los Angeles, Jones and Waits may have been the West Coast counterparts of Smith and Mapplethorpe, who called New York home. Smith describes the dynamic metropolis and extraordinary times in stunning detail: “Nothing was more wonderful to me than Coney Island. with its gritty innocence. It was our kind of place: the fading arcades, the peeling signs of bygone days, cotton candy and Kewpie dolls on a stick...” The focus for all four of them was on the demimondes of their respective cities, along with almost everywhere they visited in between. It’s an aesthetic that’s edgy and suffused with pain.

Master of the Cool Pose

It's easy for a good critic to perceive what is obvious about an artist's sensibility from first glance. But what about when you take a longer gaze in order to get beneath the painter's pose? Amanda Shubert, in her fascinating and penetrating review of Alex Katz's work in Critics at Large, discovers what she calls "a man with an unquenchable thirst for the substance of beauty, vitality and allure..."

Beyond the Pose: Alex Katz Prints at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/07/beyond-pose-alex-katz-prints-at-museum.html#comment-form

"Self-Portrait," Alex Katz, 1978. Aquatint. 

Alex Katz is probably best known as the master of the cool pose.  His close-cropped portraits of family and friends, with their bright, flat hues and glints of sunlight, tap into the glamorous simplicity of billboard advertisements and the allure of movie stills, both of which were aggressively visible when Katz burst onto the New York art scene in the early 1960s. Alex Katz Prints at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, jointly organized with Vienna’s Albertina and on view through July 29, opens with a witty self-portrait in which the artist appears in a snappy white jacket like a Hollywood movie star sporting one of those vague, effortless million dollar smiles.  The thing is, when you get close to the prints, you don’t see the master of cool at all: you see a man with an unquenchable thirst for the substance of beauty, vitality and allure that realistic images can both fleetingly disclose and at the same time never quite contain.  The delicious contradiction of his work – intimacy and impersonality, quietism and desire – is all there in the sensuality of his technique, and the MFA’s enjoyably overstuffed retrospective allows you to get a glimpse of the dynamic fusion within the cool, deliberate Pop Art style. (No reproduction will show it to you in quite this way.)  The disappointment is that beyond putting the art on the walls the curators don’t give you much to go on in looking beyond the surface.

The 3rd I

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Sometimes making art is more than a matter of choice. It can be a necessity. Susan Green wrote about one such artist, Wafaa Bilal, for whom making art is essential. So much so, he makes himself into the work.

Looking Within and Without: An Experimental Artist

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/02/looking-within-and-without-experimental_15.html

The back of Wafaa Bilal’s head, for The 3rd I.

The tiny digital camera has been removed from the back of Wafaa Bilal’s skull.

Let’s allow that image sink in for a moment.

OK. The 44-year-old Iraqi, an assistant professor of art at New York University, is a creative provocateur. For an entire month in 2007, for example, visitors to his website were able to splatter him with a remote-controlled paint gun and watch as he tried to dodge the yellow-colored attacks while sequestered in a small room at a Chicago gallery. The piece was titled Domestic Tension. In the anti-Arab fervor still sweeping the country after 9/11, many strangers gleefully wielded this symbolic Internet weapon of personal destruction.

But Bilal’s latest project, called The 3rd I, surely ranks even higher on any pushing-the-cultural-envelope meter. At the end of 2010, he had a waterproof titanium plate inserted in his head. That made it possible to magnetically attach a camera that could transmit photos minute-by-minute to the notebook computer he carried at all times, a process the world could observe online. (On campus, he agreed to protect the privacy of students and faculty with a lens cap.) But, recently, his body began rejecting part of the apparatus, which caused constant suffering despite the steroids and antibiotics he took in hopes of solving the problem.

The Artist as Celebrity

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

One of the many ways a sharp critic can illuminate a subversive artist's work in a retrospective, as Amanda Shubert did in the Cindy Sherman show at MoMA from earlier this year, is to examine how (and if) they can keep that subversion alive over the course of a long successful career.

 

Disappearing Act: Cindy Sherman at MoMA

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/05/disappearing-act-cindy-sherman-at-moma.html

"Untitled #92" - Cindy Sherman, from Centerfolds, 1981, chromogenic color print

The Cindy Sherman retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, organized by Associate Curator Eva Respini and on view through June 11, surveys 35 years of work by a master of postmodern photography. Throughout her career, Sherman has steadily mined photographic portraiture for its feminist subversions of how we look and what we take for truth. Her pictures are performances: with the exception of two mid-career series, all of her photographs are portraits of herself in disguise, reflections on gender and stereotype, voyeurism and fantasy, in the era of Hollywood and mass culture. From her groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills, the series that launched her career in the late 1970s, to her 2008 society portraits, Sherman has distinguished herself as a kind of ventriloquist of image and identity, for whom popular and consumer culture are not the subject of her works but the raw material of her perpetual self-transformation.

Bearing Witness

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

History is not only made by people who deliberately set forth to change it, or those who claim to be part of it. There are those on the sidelines who assume they are merely watching history when, in fact, they soon come to see they were an important part of their time. When Paul Fusco photographed the people lining the railway tracks that followed Robert Kennedy's funeral train from New York to Washington in June 1968, little did those individuals realize that some forty years later filmmaker Jennifer Stoddart (1000 Pictures: RFK's Last Journey) would find some of them. They would then tell their story of that day and what became of them since.

Jennifer Stoddart's film will be screened at Ryerson University on Sunday, June 3 as part of the Silver Screens Arts Festival. Critics at Large's Kevin Courrier will be introducing the movie and speaking to the director afterwards. For information and tickets please consult the schedule here. 

Walking into History: Jennifer Stoddart & Paul Fusco's 1000 Pictures: RFK's Last Journey

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/06/walking-into-history-jennifer-stoddart.html

Photo by Paul Fusco.

When Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, while campaigning to be the Democratic Party's choice for President, you could feel the air going out of the culture. At the time, I was a Grade 8 student about to write my final exams. But when I woke the morning after the California primary to find out that he had both won and was mortally wounded by an assassin, I walked to school and promptly failed every one. Getting into high school just didn't seem to matter anymore. JFK's assassination might have been a seismic shock to the system in 1963, but this was a murder that curdled


and darkened the nation.

Even though I was a Canadian, I was fervently following RFK's campaign as if caught up in the passion of a political dream, the quixotic idea that one could remake a country. Since Martin Luther King Jr. had just been murdered that spring, it seemed even more urgent that those ideals be realized through Robert Kennedy. Kennedy seemed to galvanize the nation by imagining a country built on the inclusion of its citizens; where rich and poor, black and white and Mexican-Americans could share in its possibilities. They would line the streets daily during that campaign clamoring to shake his hand while stepping forward as if they were walking into history, wanting to be a part of its making. There was a true sense, even with the horrible war going on in Vietnam, that the country could still be truly remade into something resembling the ideals set forth in its founding documents. In the absolute worst of times, you felt a keen sense of anticipation. But RFK's death seemed to kill any desire to hope for anything better.

Bloodlines

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day. 

Most of us come to discover unknown aspects of our family heritage through relatives we've never met. But for Susan Green, it was discovered through a documentary film she reviewed for Critics at Large.  

Family Legacies: Jeremiah Zagar's In a Dream

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/06/family-legacies-jeremiah-zagars-in.html

Is it just my imagination or have families that are not crazy become as rare as the northern hairy-nosed wombat? Environmentalists believe only about 113 of these marsupials still exist in Australia. Dysfunctional homo sapiens, on the other hand, now number in the billions worldwide. The word ‘dysfunction’ is relative, of course. But when it comes to my relatives, there’s madness aplenty running through our intermingled bloodlines.

So, somehow it did not surprise me to learn that a distant cousin I’ve never met -- Jeremiah Zagar -- made a documentary titled In a Dream that chronicles the meltdown of his nuclear family. My maternal grandmother was a half-sister of his maternal grandfather, ancestors who both died before we were born. In the 20th century, the entire clan left Poland (just a few steps ahead of the Nazis, who would obliterate their Jewish shtetl) and landed in America. Later, my immediate kin remained in New York while his settled in Pennsylvania.

And that’s where the cinematic story unfolds, amid the amazing mosaics that Jeremiah’s dad, Isaiah, has fashioned on the outside walls of more than 100 buildings. Tourists from all over the world come to admire 40,000 square feet of these murals, collectively known as as the Philadelphia Magic Gardens, crafted from shards of pottery, tile, mirror and colored glass. Jeremiah’s wrenching portrait of the artist as a tormented man witnesses his parents’ marriage unraveling, his father’s subsequent crisis of creativity and his older brother Ezekiel’s drug addiction. The complexity of the human psyche is, as usual, beyond understanding. When Isaiah reveals he’s having an affair, his wife Julia orders him to move out. The guy then falls apart, before finally realizing she has been the glue holding him together even more firmly than the cement that binds the bits of beautiful detritus in his Magic Garden.

All that Jazz

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Paul Hoeffler was known as a great jazz photographer who often caught the musicians seemingly in flight performing the music they loved. When he died of bone cancer, David Churchill wrote a lovely tribute which was as much a testament to their friendship as it was an appraisal of his best work.

Remembering Paul Hoeffler: Master Photographer

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/07/remembering-paul-hoeffler-master.html

Paul Hoeffler

On this, the fifth anniversary of his death, I thought it was appropriate to write about my friend, photographer Paul Hoeffler. Between 1997 and 2005, I was privileged to get to know Paul, a man many would consider – to use that old saw – a photographer's photographer. Not only was he a brilliant photographer, but he was also known as one of the best printers around. He could take images and in his darkroom create works of art out of less than perfect material. I got to know Paul through my job at the LCBO, Ontario's government-run alcohol retail outlet. By the time we met, I'd been working in the liquor trade for 15 years and Paul had been a professional photographer for 40. In my capacity as a Product Consultant, he came to me looking for advice. A conversation started – it was always easy to talk to him – and we quickly moved beyond customer/retailer relationship into a friendship. Within our friendship, we had an unspoken rule: he taught me about jazz music and photography and I taught him about wine (I got the better end of that deal).

Jimmy Smith

In the 1950s, Paul was in the right place at the right time. Going to school during the day at the Rochester Institute of Technology studying photography, he spent his nights at many of the jazz clubs around the city. Using his blunt charm (he suffered neither fools nor crude behaviour gladly), he managed to win the trust and respect of many of the greatest jazz artists of the day during their concert tours through his town. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Jimmy Smith, Oscar Peterson, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong and Dizzie Gillespie, amongst others, all gave him unprecedented access in Rochester and elsewhere after he left school. In the Rochester days, the photographs weren't only because of his complete love of the music and musicians, it was also his school work assignment. That access is something, Paul told me, that is impossible today. Their music inspired him to capture, visually, what they did musically. For example, the shot of Jimmy Smith, taken from below as he plays the organ (I use the present tense here on purpose, because so many of Paul's photos feels like the action is happening right now), his cigarette smoke languidly leaves the frame, could only be achieved if the subject trusts the photographer.

Bringing Light to Darkness

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

We often take pictures to preserve a piece of history either of the people we love, or the events we become part of that we want to remember. There are some photographers, however, who take pictures of things we'd like to forget but need to remember and address. Susan Green's probing piece on photographer Lewis Hine is about one of those people.  

A Witness to Shame: The Visual Legacy of Lewis Hine

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/05/witness-to-shame-visual-legacy-of-lewis.html 

Addie Card, just a slip of a girl when Lewis Hine snapped an iconic portrait of her in 1910, told him she was 12. But the investigative photojournalist, hired to document then-legal child labor in America, learned the barefoot waif’s actual age – ten – from others employed at the same Vermont cotton mill. Even more of a shock, she had started toiling there as an eight-year-old. In his accompanying text, he described the motherless-fatherless kid as an “anemic little spinner.”

May 1910: Addie Card at a cotton mill in North Pownal, Vermont

The Jazz Side of Life

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Artistic partnerships, even friendships, are often based on soul-mates looking within someone else for the missing pieces in themselves. The alchemy they can conjure up usually leads to some daring art in the process, something Susan Green duly acknowledged in this particular book review.

The Way They Were: Patti Smith's Just Kids

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/01/way-they-were-just-kids.html

In a burst of youthful enthusiasm during the late 1970s, Rickie Lee Jones once famously  proclaimed the sensibility she shared with boyfriend and fellow musician Tom Waits: ”We’re living on the jazz side of life.” A decade earlier, another couple in their 20s had a similarly bohemian, improvisational relationship that was devoted as much to art as to romance. If not more so. Singer Patti Smith has now chronicled the years she spent with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Just Kids (HarperCollins, 2010), a riveting memoir that recently won America’s National Book Award.

Based in Los Angeles, Jones and Waits may have been the West Coast counterparts of Smith and Mapplethorpe, who called New York home. Smith describes the dynamic metropolis and extraordinary times in stunning detail: “Nothing was more wonderful to me than Coney Island. with its gritty innocence. It was our kind of place: the fading arcades, the peeling signs of bygone days, cotton candy and Kewpie dolls on a stick...” The focus for all four of them was on the demimondes of their respective cities, along with almost everywhere they visited in between. It’s an aesthetic that’s edgy and suffused with pain.