SEASON’S READINGS : More Spirit

The big news in photography this year is the Robert Frank retrospective that opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington on Oct. 2, and comes to the Lannan Foundation in March of 1996 at the conclusion of a five-venue world tour. Arguably the greatest photographer of the 20th Century, Frank is best known for “The Americans,” his collection of documentary photography published in 1958, a gravely beautiful essay on America as seen through the eyes of an immigrant (Frank came to the U.S. from his native Switzerland in 1947). However, as is illustrated in Robert Frank: Moving Out, the splendid catalogue for the National exhibition, Frank has given us so much more.

Now 70, Frank has said that he’s tried to make art with “less taste, more spirit”; he’s rarely fallen short of that in any of the less known work he’s made in the 36 years since his career was established with the “The Americans.” There’s so much love in his pictures. Intimate but never invasive, they celebrate the holiness of the commonplace, and nod with respect to the profound loneliness that afflicts us all. His pictures always feel true, yet they’re never cruel--what an amazing achievement.

Rejecting the idea of the singular masterpiece, Frank developed a cumulative, sequential approach to photography that’s very much in keeping with his work as a filmmaker. Indeed, there’s virtually no separation between Frank’s photography and his auteurist films (he’s completed more than 25 of those), and he developed both art-forms in tandem beginning in 1941.

Scorning the conventional photo essay form that reigned supreme in the 50s when Life Magazine was in its heyday, Frank devised a narrative structure revolving around irrational juxtapositions that make inexplicable sense. His brilliant technical innovations, however, run a far second to the moving emotional content of his work. A Jew who grew up in Europe in the ‘30s and ‘40s in the shadow of Hitler, Frank learned the concepts of mercy and compassion firsthand and at a young age; that sacred knowledge is at the heart of his gift as an artist.

Dorothea Lange was 29 years older than Frank, but her work came from essentially the same place. One of the best known photographers of the Farm Security Administration, a U.S. government agency formed in the ‘30s to document the effects of the Depression, Lange was in fact fired from the FSA for being “uncooperative.” Surprising facts like this turn up repeatedly in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, a refreshingly balanced book written by photographer Imogen Cunningham’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Partridge.

As a child Partridge knew Lange, who was a close friend of her family’s, so the portrait she paints of the artist (who died in 1965) is warmly personal, as might be expected. What makes her writing special, however, is its objectivity. Lange was by all accounts a difficult woman, and Partridge tells it like it was, but her love for Lange and respect for her work temper the less-than-flattering revelations she wisely includes. Partridge’s fascinating profile is complemented by dozens of wonderful pictures; many you’ll have seen before and will greet as old friends, while the lesser-known images Partridge has selected for inclusion deserve to be seen.

Lange’s firing by the FSA’s Roy Stryker is nothing compared to the scandal chronicled in Eakins and the Photograph: Works by Thomas Eakins and His Circle in the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Eakins, of course, is one of America’s great realist painters and is regarded by many art historians as our first modern artist. What most people don’t know about Eakins is that he was also an avid photographer who shot hundreds of pictures between the years 1880 and 1900. Out of sight for nearly a century, his photographs finally surfaced in 1985 when his friend and former student, Charles Bregler, donated them to the Pennsylvania Academy.

It was in Pennsylvania that Eakins’ photographs got him into trouble, leading as they did to his dismissal as an instructor at the Academy in 1886. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Eakins was a scientifically minded artist who strove for accuracy and realism in his work. Inspired to investigate photography after seeing the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge (whom he collaborated with on studies in animal locomotion in 1884-85), Eakins introduced photography to his students as a valuable tool in the pursuit of painting.

The way he introduced it was by organizing nude photo expeditions; he and his classes spent afternoons in the country where everyone--Eakins included--stripped and photographed each other. He had his students pose nude for one another in class, and exhibited nude photographs of himself and his wife at the Academy. Eakins’ firing came in the wake of the passing of the Comstock Law of 1873, an anti-obscenity ruling that triggered a dramatic acceleration in censorship; nonetheless, those naked field trips seem a bit outre, even by today’s standards.

The photographs, though, are remarkable--they have the casualness of snapshots and feel amazingly modern. They don’t, however, have an erotic charge, perhaps because Eakins’ nude sitters rarely reveal any trace of emotion. Much has been made by some critics of the homoerotic content of Eakins’ photographs, but the subject never comes up in this books’ overly polite essays. Rather, the text makes the case that Eakins found an intrinsic purity in the human form, and was the kind of nature boy who would’ve joined a nudist colony in the ‘50s.

Eadweard Muybridge pops up again in A History of Women Photographers, where he’s quoted as saying that “the tedium of processing photographic plates makes the job best suited to women and chinks.” Unfortunate comments like that make it clear why books like this need to exist. Actually, books as boring as this one don’t need to exist; it’s a valuable research tool, yes, but nothing you’ll enjoy reading. Thoroughly researched by author Naomi Rosenblum, who trots out all the facts she corralled in neat, chronological order, it’s the kind of dry, predictable book that makes you long for some crackpot revisionist theory. Women have yet to be accorded their rightful place in art history; well-intentioned though it is, drab books like this stand little chance of changing that.

Speaking of change, that’s essentially the subject of Deborah Turbeville’s Newport Remembered, a haunting eulogy to the gilded world of America’s turn-of-the century millionaires who summered in homes so splendid they verged on parody. Juxtaposing images of old Newport mansions that continue to be maintained as though a horse-drawn carriage were about to approach, opposite pictures of the ruins of abandoned homes that read as visual metaphors for broken dreams, Turbeville’s book has a cloistered, claustrophobic beauty well suited to the subject at hand.

Also of note are Weston’s Westons: California and the West, and Weston’s Westons: Portraits and Nudes, separate volumes that serve as the catalogue for an exhibition of works by Edward Weston organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it opened in July. The plates are gorgeous, the text is informative, and both books include images that are rarely seen.

ROBERT FRANK MOVING OUT by Robert Frank (Scalo/The National Gallery of Art: $60; 335 pp.) DOROTHEA LANGE A Visual Life edited by Elizabeth Partridge (Smithsonian Institution Press: $55, cloth, $24.95 paper; 168 pp.)

EAKINS AND THE PHOTOGRAPH Works by Thomas Eakins and His Circle in the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts edited by Susan Danly and Cheryl Leibold (Smithsonian/Pennsylvania Academy: $85; 235 pp.)

A HISTORY OF WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS by Naomi Rosenblum (Abbeville: $60; 356 pp.)

NEWPORT REMEMBERED by Deborah Turbeville (Abrams: $49.95; 172 pp.)

WESTON’S WESTONS California and the West and WESTON’S WESTONS Portraits and Nudes edited by Karen E. Quinn and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. (Bulfinch: $60; 146 and 139 pp., respectively.)