THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S SLANTED EYE: MARILYN PENN
http://politicalmavens.com/
THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S SLANTED EYE
With a tone of disingenuous naivete, Alana Newhouse reveals that Roman Vishniac, photographer of Eastern European Jewry before the holocaust, staged some of his photographs and creatively captioned others in order to slant the view of shtetl Jewry to reflect orthodox piety and old-fashioned poverty (A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac, Sunday Times Magazine, 4/5). Newhouse recounts this tale with the breathless demeanor of someone who has never heard that the iconic photo of marines planting the flag at Iwo Jima was staged. Ms. Newhouse must be similarly unaware of how often photographers, photo-journalists and film documentarians fabricate, distort, exaggerate, eliminate and obfuscate in order to make a point or propagandize.
When we see photographs of wars and disasters, they are usually taken by outsiders and at best, are telling half a story. There were many people in New Orleans who were not devastated by Katrina, yet the image that we retain of the city is one of total destruction that justified billions of dollars in aid, much of which still remains unaccounted for. Back in the days when Dorothea Lange, hired by the WPA, set out to document rural life during the depression, there was contemporary criticism of her excessive focus on the poor and disposessed and the same can be said for the photographs of Walker Evans and Eudora Welty.
Newhouse complains about the falsification of captions and the distortion inherent in Vishniac’s selection of photos and quotes Maya Benton, an art historian who undertook the study of his work while she was a graduate student at Harvard. “It’s as if we took pictures of homeless people in New York and then the city fell into the sea and fifty years from now, people looked at these photos and thought, That what New York was.†When Robert Frank set out to photograph America after the second World War, he took 28,000 pictures out of which he distilled 83 images for The Americans. He claimed that after coming to the U.S. he was confronted with racism for the first time in his life – a statement that can only be viewed with incredulity knowing that this Jewish man, born and raised in Switzerland until 1947, would had to have been deaf, dumb and blind to avoid knowing what was happening to Jews throughout Europe during the second World War. But the image of a bi-polar America, made up of white fat cats and downtrodden blacks had racial urgency that gave it greater significance and appeal to social justice in the fifties. I haven’t seen any critic call this bias or emphasis falsification.
Benton and Newhouse insist that American Jews imagine all of Eastern European Jewry to have lived like the shtetl characters in Fiddler on the Roof and that this sentimentalized nostalgia for the simple, close-knit village life has shortchanged the reality of the cosmopolitan existence of many secular Jews of the time. This is equivalent to suggesting that Americans base their knowledge of 19th century life in our country exclusively on Gone With The Wind and Huckleberry Finn; only a very ignorant person would draw broad conclusions from the work of a single author or artist. Vishniac was one photographer who portrayed the lives of the poorest, most vulnerable members of the Jewish community, people relatively unfamiliar to the American public. He presented them sympathetically, as Dorothea Lange presented her sharecroppers and farmers and Robert Frank presented his black nursemaids and chauffeurs. These photographs were not taken for the census and don’t need to be demographically correct. They are meant to capture the plight of people in extremis and in these works, along with those of many other photographers, the selection of images is edited to compel us to look closely at people we might otherwise disregard. Though it is instructive for Benton and Newhouse to reveal Vishniac’s manipulation of his material, this needs to be placed in the more sophisticated context of how documentary photographers choose to present their work.
Comments are closed.
