Photography books for the holiday season
By Stephen Wolgast | Book Review
“Women”
By National Geographic
National Geographic, $50
A tour of the world comes from National Geographic and its magisterial book “Women,” published on the occasion of the magazine’s first female editor in chief, Susan Goldberg. Across more than 500 pages, the lives of women from virtually everywhere on Earth are illustrated from the magazine's Image Collection archive.
Jodi Cobb found a family in Madras, India, that pays off a debt by hauling bricks (previous page). On their heads. It’s dusty, dirty work for the three women — where are the men? — one of whom manages to balance upward of 20 of them as she starts her journey. Brilliant sunlight in a cloudless sky emphasizes the heat and brings out the shades of clay.
Eight ballerinas at the Paris Opera face away from Alfred Eisenstaedt’s camera as they listen to a ballet master give advice at a break during a rehearsal for “Swan Lake,” their legs suggesting grace, even though they’re at rest.
While many subjects are unnamed and often otherworldly, others appear for their power. Erika Larsen’s portrait series includes Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, who describes the challenges of child care as a working mother. There’s fierce Roxane Gay, the social critic and author of “Black Panther: World of Wakanda,” staring down the camera. And a book from National Geographic about women simply wouldn’t be complete with a portrait of Jane Goodall, lovingly posed in a London garden.
The span of Geographic’s vision reliably expands our own. Across time and distance, and seen through the eyes of some of the most creative women, the photographs show us how women survive, struggle or succeed no matter the circumstances of their lives. ■
“Attention Servicemember”
By Ben Brody
Red Hook Editions, $40
Combat photography is about as far as a journalist can go from a studio.
Most of what we see in images from war makes the pulse race either because the scenes of weapons and explosions are exciting or because the scenes of destruction and anguish are infuriating.
Ben Brody takes those notions and punctures them. In “Attention Servicemember,” his pictures from Iraq and Afghanistan lay bare the waste of war and soldiers’ monotony.
Excitement crops up too, as in his photograph of a captain on his radio in an anise field while above, two helicopters wash dust across the scene as they fly in and out. Out of the frame, the sun is near the horizon, giving the sky those layers of orange, pink, white and blue that make any photo more dramatic. It’s the kind of tableau that gets armchair soldiers going.
The frame fits our expectations for a war photograph so perfectly, in fact, that it’s been appropriated in all sorts of ways. There’s no copyright on it because he took it as a government employee, so it’s been used to sell batteries and vape pens and more.
How it’s used depends on how the viewer sees the image, Brody writes. “It’s a decorative wallpaper, it’s patriotic, it’s a war crime, it’s disinformation.”
In the book he explains how photos like it are just what the Army is looking for, based on criteria he refers to as doctrine. “The doctrine was to photograph the war in a way that justified its existence and exaggerated its accomplishments.” It wasn’t a written code, but an understanding gained by watching which photos the public affairs officers approved. “Photograph the bombs, the guns and the helicopters for all their ravenous beauty, but don’t photograph the obscenity of what they did to human bodies.”
Brody demonstrates that too, pictures that make clear the horrible outcome of firing missiles, mortars and bullets.
His thoroughly honest and straightforward commentary seeps into your head. He grew a lot of marijuana and joined the Army without terribly high hopes. He was 22 in 2002 and, having failed his only class in photojournalism, figured that the Army was the best way to improve his photo skills. Brody’s descriptions of serving in a war zone explain rules that are often mindless and plenty of ways he got around them.
Like his writing, his photos don’t bother with a story that would meet official approval, but it’s an informed insider’s take on the absurdity of war. ■
“Magnum Streetwise: The Ultimate Collection of Street Photography”
Edited by Stephen McLaren
Thames & Hudson, $40
Maybe you like your street photography with fewer frocks and more grit.
If that’s you, then a collection of scenes from dozens of Magnum photographers is probably up your alley, particularly when that alley is occupied by three masked military police in Rio de Janeiro with a woman sliding between them so she can get home with her groceries. Since the photo is one of David Alan Harvey’s, you know that the light is even and the colors pop.
You may prefer getting out of the alley and into the Roxy Club in London, where Peter Marlow found three young fans of punk contorting themselves to the music of Adam Ant.
If you have a taste for the unfamiliar, you’ll follow the Chilean photographer Sergio Larraín to Sicily, where a hillside substitutes for a street, or to Pisac, Peru, where the narrow streets aren’t paved and the women go barefoot.
It’s impossible to describe even a fraction of the variety of hundreds and hundreds of photos in “Magnum Streetwise.” It’s a book that serves as both a tutorial on unconstructed moments and a memorial to the masters of the genre and their little peeks into street life that tell stories bigger than the frames they fill. ■
“Bill Cunningham: On the Street — Five Decades of Iconic Photography”
By The New York Times; Photography edited by Tiina Loite Potter, $60
No street photographer captured more joy than Bill Cunningham. His subject was self-expression — not his, but his New Yorkers’ and their clothes. Although he worked in the world of fashion, it wasn’t simply the latest tats that turned his eye. Bill — that’s what everyone called him — was interested in style and its interpretations.
From his vantage point at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, Bill watched the world go by, waiting for a coat worn just so, or a skirt cut that highlighted a new pattern, or comfort-defying shoes that made a statement. He didn’t care if you were a tourist or a New York native, if you were wearing a thousand-dollar belt or a Boy Scout uniform.
He looked at how you wore it, and he looked for what you wore that had debuted 20 years earlier but was making a comeback, reinterpreted by a new generation.
That’s where his genius lay. Bill could make the connection between old and new and between new and what’s next, and explain it to the readers of Styles section in The New York Times, whose pages he filled from 1978 until just before his death in 2016 at age 87.
For those of us who usually find fashion mind-boggling or simply odd, he deciphered trends to explain how they came about, such as in the 1990s when he shared a set of photos of pedestrians wearing a flannel shirts tied around their waists. Making the connection to musicians breaking into the mainstream at the time, he called it “the ultimate deconstructed hip-hop look.”
You’ll smile at the outfits he captured, and chuckle a bit too, in this compilation that stars ordinary people as the arbiters of taste.
“The best fashion show is definitely on the street,” Bill said. “Always has been. Always will be.” ■
“Avedon: Behind the Scenes 1964-1980”
By Gideon Lewin
PowerHouse, $75
Fresh from art school in California, Gideon Lewin went to New York in 1964 to look for a job in photography. Arriving at his third interview, this one on East 58th Street, he exited the elevator onto a dark hallway on the fourth floor.
“As I got out, the studio door opened and a tall, beautiful woman came out, all made-up, with long, dark eyelashes, bright-red lips, and her hair pulled back,” he writes of his first encounter with a supermodel. “It was Wilhelmina. ‘Wow,’ I said to myself as she smiled. I knew I had come to the right place.”
So began his 16-year stint working with Richard Avedon, first as his studio assistant, then studio manager. Lewin helped create the lighting that Avedon's photos are famous for. When published in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, they were recognized for their groundbreaking creativity. A 1970 exhibition in the Minneapolis Institute of Art would become the first of many.
The photos you find in Lewin’s book are his own, depicting life beyond the seamless white paper, of assistants setting up shots, art directors reviewing contact sheets, and after the work is done of everyone blowing off steam with an in-studio dance party, with Avedon’s exuberance filling the room as he grooves with a model.
A photographer himself who entered the field when fashion photography was becoming an art unto itself, Lewin describes Avedon glowingly, saying that he had never met someone so totally committed to photography. “He was outgoing, a bundle of energy continuously in motion,” Lewin writes. “He understood beautiful light, and he would light up when he saw a great print.”
Here’s a book that shows Avedon creating the work you know already — probably from some of the very prints Lewin made in Avedon’s darkroom. ■
