Dressing Up The Photo Album

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Few things are harder to assemble than the posthumous work of a much-loved friend for a world of strangers. We want others to see and to value our friend and her work as we did. Out of those heaps of sketches or negatives or drafts of poems we struggle to find what is most characteristic as well as most convincing. Sometimes we’d like to add a few improving touches but that wouldn’t be right. Often we’d like to tuck away what’s weak or unrealized. But it’s too late for second thoughts or last-minute revisions. Others will judge the work differently than we judge. They will see it as it is without according it the forgiveness of affection.

In selecting a representative sample of the work of Molly Malone Cook, her friend and companion of 40 years, the poet Mary Oliver faced this painful task. “Our World,” (Beacon Press, 91 pages, $24.95), with text by Ms. Oliver, presents 48 black-and-white images which the late Cook, who died of cancer in 2005, took while travelling through Europe and America from the early 1950s to the late 1960s. Cook was evidently an accomplished printer as well as photographer and the images have been beautifully reproduced.

Cook began her photographic career as a street photographer. In this early phase — there are other as yet unpublished color photographs — the influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank is particularly noticeable. We sense Cook striving to capture images that are at once spontaneous and emblematic, as Mr. Frank so brilliantly did, but her eye was more hesitant than his. In several of her candid compositions, we sense that Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” has just passed or not yet arrived. In “Wine Tasting, New York City, 1950s,” a rather louche young lounge lizard samples a vintage directly beneath a poster reading “Tasting Ends Here.” This should be visually witty but doesn’t quite work. It seems merely happenstance; the finished image fails to cohere.

In other photographs this hesitancy comes through as strength, as conscious refusal to strain after effect. In her portrait “Mike Janapolis, Owner of the Mayflower Café” (in Provincetown, Mass.), taken sometime in the 1960s, the white-aproned proprietor sits behind his lunch counter and studies a newspaper; the soft light from a window falls on his bowed head, touching his neatly-trimmed hair and making his reading glasses glow; even the half-empty ketchup bottle at his elbow is filled with a faint gleam. By being deliberately undramatic, the portrait conveys the quiet pleasure of a moment of solitude in the midst of a busy day.

Her strongest image, unusual for this lover of human interest, is a simple shot of a row of hats and jackets in an Amish schoolroom of the 1950s. The crumpled hat brims and dangling sleeves, all carefully aligned on their appointed hooks, tell us all we need to know about their owners, who never appear in the frame. As such photographs show, the modesty of her best work was really an intense form of honesty. Though Cook’s work varies in quality — some of the images seem little more than album photos — the real problem with “Our World” lies in Ms. Oliver’s text. She tells us much about her rambles around Cape Cod where she forages for cranberries or startles long-suffering herons at their ponds. Even the least remarkable event becomes portentous in her eyes. When seagulls fly by and squawk while she is collecting mussels, she describes them as “crying out praises of their cold and wind-ruled lives.” Well, maybe; more likely they’d spotted some especially ripe scrap of offal and were dive-bombing for it. Here, as in her poetry, Ms. Oliver is always stalking awe; she loves to contrive a hush of calculated wonder. Only one of her poems, mercifully, is included in the accompanying text (which gathers letters, journal entries, and various musings together in no discernible order); the poem describes a walk in the snow where Ms. Oliver ponders “the lovely meaninglessness/of time.” (She is clearly not big on punctuality.) When she does get home she can’t resist turning the snow on her overcoat into something at once ponderous and prettified: “my shoulders/covered with stars.”

In a photo which Cook took of Jean Cocteau dining in Venice in May 1954 — one of her several fine portraits of celebrities — we glimpse the photographer silhouetted in an oval mirror on the wall behind the French poet. Her own face is hidden by her upheld camera but we sense that she controls the composition. In this selection of Cook’s work, so admirable in intention, she herself remains something of a shadow in a mirror. But perhaps, given her honesty of eye, we come to know her best by seeing the world as it once appeared to her through the discretion of her lens.

eormsby@nysun.com


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