Don't Take His Kodachrome Away
The extraordinary parade of exhibitions of Magnum photographers continues with "Alex Webb: Istanbul" at Sepia International. The Magnum cooperative photo agency is celebrating its 60th anniversary by treating New Yorkers to a tutorial on how to do great things with a camera.
Mr. Webb (born 1952) is known for his work in color. He began shooting in color in 1979 and 10 years later, he won the Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography Award for his work with Kodachrome. In 1935, Godowsky and Leopold Mannes invented Kodachrome, patent number 1,997,493, which became the first really successful color film. Kodachrome produces positive transparencies (slides) that have brilliant, deeply saturated colors like stained glass windows. Like other color films, it tends to be slower than black and white, which means that in difficult lighting situations the photographer must choose between a fast shutter speed that will freeze the action, and a slow shutter speed that will allow greater depth of focus. In situations of intense light, the photographer must choose between an exposure that will be correct for the brightly lit areas but lose all detail in the shadows, and one that will open up the shadows but blow out the color.
Mr. Webb's success with Kodachrome is based in part on his ability to use the film's deficiencies to his advantage. For instance, in "Taksim" (2001), the right half of the image is a young man looking out at us from a telephone booth. The parts of his face and body that the sun is shining on appear to be the proper colors, but dark horizontal shadows stripe his figure, and the rear of the phone booth is lost in darkness, as if it was an infinitely deep recess. These ominous graphic gestures reinforce the troubled expression on the man's face. In the left half of the image, a man in the middle distance looks toward the booth; behind him is the side of a gray building on top of which, silhouetted against a dark blue sky, stands a man in uniform with a rifle.
This is not a tourist's Istanbul of picturesque mosques with delicate minarets, nor is it a photojournalist's Istanbul with readily explicated news events. Mr. Webb studied history and literature at Harvard University, and says his work is based on his understanding of literature, and particularly French literature. "Taksim" (all the pictures are named for neighborhoods in Istanbul) is illusive, ambiguous, and fraught with tension. Is the man in the booth under surveillance? Is he receding into the sinister darkness or emerging into the light? Did he reach the party he called? Or are all three men facing forward unsettled because the photographer is pointing his Leica in their direction?
The right half of "Yenikapi" (2004) is a closeup of the face of a young man or teenager. He looks at the photographer inquiringly, although the photographer chooses to ignore him or, at any rate, let his face be out of focus so the camera can concentrate on two surreal elements further away. In the middle distance, another man of about the same age hangs in the air on a slant holding onto a metal cable. To the right, the superstructure of a boat seems to be disappearing downward at the same angle beside a quay. The blurred face at the left has the olive complexion of the Levant, the boy in midair wears a white T-shirt and jeans, the parts of the boat we can see are red or white, and the background to all this is an intensely blue sky. This mélange taunts us to decipher its existential French narrative into a coherent Anglo-Saxon meaning.
Again in "Ayvansaray"(2001) Mr. Webb makes his color film work for him. It is twilight at a corner in a residential neighborhood. Our eyes are drawn first to a yellow-orange triangle, a window, in the upper left corner, and then follows a trail of similar rectangles down the street to the lights on the next block. The house on the corner seems to be covered with terrazzo, white and blue, and its texture contrasts with the light reflected off the damp cobblestones in the street to the right. There are three figures at the corner but we focus on the one in the middle, a young teenage boy with short-cropped black hair, who stands facing the camera: He is still, so his image is sharp, but the other two are walking, so their figures are blurred by the slow shutter speed.
Many of the Istanbul photographs, such as "Galatasaray" (2001), incorporate window reflections that superimpose inside and outside images onto each other, giving a feeling of human density. Another picture also titled "Taksim" (2001) was shot from inside into a mirror and out the window, so the spatial relations take a bit of doing to unravel, but the image organizes itself around the woman in black in the middle of a street. "Kasimpasa" (2005) isolates the figure of a man in a lush field of purple drapery and a square of orange. In "Sultanahmet"(2001) a little black haired boy and his cone of pink cotton candy stand out against buildings lit with a blue-green cast and a street lit orange.
Mr. Webb's Istanbul, for all its intense color, and all its bodies suspended in air, is a very plausible city. Instead of, or in addition to, social data, he gives us the atmosphere of this metropolis straddling Europe and Asia. And "Karakoy" (2001) is worth any MFA course in how to take pictures in color.
Until July 27 (148 W. 24th St., 11th floor, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-645-9444).
