Photography in sharp focus
by Paula Harper
Miami Art Scene


The Miami News

Photography fans should run, not walk, to ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries, where Virginia Miller has assembled an important exhibition of nearly a hundred 19th and 20th Century photographs and rotogravures. On view are an impressive number of famous images by famous photographers-—the familiar landmarks of the art-—along with some surprises from the old masters of this relatively new discipline.

The show documents the history of the medium through well-chosen examples. A vintage calotype by William Henry Fox Talbot shows us how Heriot's Hospital in Edinburgh looked around 1840, in a ghostly paper print. Fox Talbot is probably the most significant of the pioneer photographers, as he developed the technique of making a negative from which many positive prints could be taken.

The 19th Century portion of the show includes other gems, among them a portrait, "3 Girls," by the great English woman photographer of the mid-century, Julia Margaret Cameron. Cameron, as usual, catches her sitters close-up in a melting light that softens their faces, gilds their hair and suggests the tender fragility of their romantic Victorian souls.

The versatile "Nadar"-—caricaturist and portrait photographer to French celebrities--is represented by a view of the catacombs of Paris taken in 1862, more astounding for Nadar's enterprise in getting enough light into the underground passageway than for its merit as a composition. The 19th Century passion for photographs of exotic places and people is recalled by Roger Fenton's "Two Gentlemen in Eastern Costume" from the late 1850s.

Frederick Evan's detailed view of one of the portals of Bourges Cathedral in 1896 reminds us of the importance of photography to the history of architectural monuments. The mute magic of mundane scenes close to home was the obsession of Eugene Atget. His tranquil image of a butcher's stall at the old Paris food market. Les Halles, was made in 1897. Les Halles has been wiped out of history, replaced by the Beaubourg museum of art, and Atget's photograph takes on an extra value in preserving the details of a vanished past.

Late 19th Century artists and scientists took a keen interest in analyzing and recording movement. This interest shows up in Eadweard Muybridge's remarkable sequences of the movements of a little girl running and a naked, athletic fellow throwing a weight. Both are plates from his eccentric and enormously influential book of 1887 called "Animal Locomotion." The 20th Century continues this interest-—the technically advanced update on movement is seen in Harold Edgerton's stroboscopic stop-action photograph that freezes a bullet in flight.

The roster of 20th Century photographers in the exhibition includes all the great names-—Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Andre Kertesz, Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Steichen, Minor White, Brassai, Arnold Newman, Bill Brandt among them. The younger group includes Aaron Siskind, Irving Penn, Harry Callahan, Diane Arbus. There are many memorable images-—Adam's aspens trembling in the silver light; Newman's craggy O'Keeffe squinting against the desert glare; the elecric rhythms of Callahan's "Multiple Exposure Tree;" Manuel Alvarez Bravo's fluent light falling on cactus and silken flesh; Steichen's vision of Matisse intently regarding his clay model of a female nude, his glasses glinting, his sculptor's tool poised; Arbus' grim, curious confrontation with Carole Doda, the topless dancer, and her sad, proud silicone breasts; the gay, confident "Exotic Dancer" of Kertesz, posing with kinky abandon, all abstract elbows and knees. The list goes on and on, as they say. Best to see for yourself.

Dr. Paula Harper, a professor of modern art history on the faculty of the University of Miami, covers the art scene for The Miami News.

top