>The cover shows a fetching miss reclining nude with the traditional raised
>elbow, but a sheer curtain has dropped on top of her, hitting just at
>nipple level. Others include the lady starkers in an artistically draped
>armchair, bosom thoughtfully highlighted by razorblade, reading sheet
>music. The one wrapped in cellophane (urTotal Woman?) isn't here, but you
>can see her in the magazine ad for the photography school -- courses are
>appropriate, the copy says, "for retired businessmen."
Sounds a bits like esthetics... quoting Crawford (the Keepers of Light):
"[Mortensen] liked scenes of violence, torture, and especially [female]
nudes. His work was Pictorialism gone Hollywood: escapist, garish,
commercial, and thus innately surrealistic in the American vein."
I found at some school a collection of "Camera Craft" containing the famous
letters to the editor "debate" between Mortensen and Ansel Adams (i think
Willard Van Dyke kicked in too). Adams for "purism," Mortensen for
expression. Vicky Goldberg, in "Photography in Print," says, "the debate was
a draw, at least in retrospect..." I thought Mortensen was clearly the
winner, his logic made more sense.
Also in Goldberg's anthology is a lecture Paul Strand gave in 1923. It is a
demand for purism, and sounds exactly like Clement Greenberg in the 1960s.
"It [print manipulation] merely has nothing to do with photography, nothing
to do with painting, and is a product of a misconception of both. For this
is what these processes and materials do--oil and gum introduce a paint
feeling, a thing even more alien to photography than colour is in an
etching, and lord knows a coloured etching is enough of an abomination." [i
recall reading that while at UCSC and asking Professor Soussloff, in History
of Prints, if William Blake's colored etchings are, or to her knowledge were
ever, considered "abominations." She thought not.] The purist argument, i
feel, can be taken to a "reductio ad absurdum," and demand that photographs
be round (like lenses, not paper, window frames, paintings), and not printed
from negatives (adulterated)...
However, when we look at Mortensen's work: Kitsch!
The same can be said i think about a lot of stuff in Steiglitz' collection
(what's that one with the lady starker crashing a cymbal?).
I recall seeing a Mortensen book at the NY public library (back when you
could look at em, not just microfilm)(though it may have been somewhere
else, oh my brain... i do KNOW that Billy Cobham plays the drums on TV's
theme fron Hawaii 5-0... where was i?) that showed his wife Myredith as a
classical marble statue, complete with chips... Monsters and Madonnas i
think it was (i also recall- for sure at the NYPL- a book by Fritz Henle,
"Mr. Rolleiflex," that showed the four types of female breast, only one of
which was suitable for photography)
I hope this is interesting to somebody out there...
Mortensen's "The Pit and the Pendulum" (bromoil transfer, reproduced in
Keepers of Light) compares to Poe's story as the Hollywood version of "The
Fountainhead" (Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal??) compares to Rand's novel.
-------------------------
Plywood and Rhetoric
graphic design from both sides of the brain
plyboy@teleport.com
http://www.teleport.com/~plyboy
"Momma DID raise a fool"