Looking at Home From Out of Town: Photography at Yale

One reason to live in New York City is so that you can get out of town in the summer. I went to New Haven on the Metro-North Railroad — nearly a two-hour trip — to see two exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery, “From Any Angle: Photographs from the Collection of Doris Bry” and “Everyday Monuments: The Photographs of Jerome Liebling.” Both exhibitions had wonderful photographs of New York City, so relief was available before homesickness set in.As a young woman living in Cambridge, Mass., Ms. Bry read some remarks by Alfred Stieglitz that prompted her to see the 1946 memorial exhibition of his work at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The Stieglitz prints so touched her that she moved to New York and became an assistant to Georgia O’Keeffe, helping her in her role as executrix of Stieglitz’s estate. The work involved deciding which of many prints from the same negative would be given to which museum. Since every print varies in some way from every other print, Ms. Bry became adept at noticing and apprizing minute differences in print quality. Ms. Bry calls the collection of photographs she assembled over the years her “Inadvertent Collection” because she had no overarching scheme in making her selections. But one criterion virtually all of her pictures exemplify is that they are superb prints.“From Any Angle” is an exhibition of more than 70 magnificent images, but it especially celebrates photographs as physical objects. Although most of the prints are gelatin silver, many are platinum, which allows for even finer gradations of tone and a greater feeling of depth. Laura Gilpin’s “Shiprock” (1931) is a platinum print, and this cloudscape, centered on a prominent rock formation in Mesa Verde National Park, plays with changes in tone — some of them subtle, some of them dramatic — to give a touch of grandeur to this picture of the West. Carlos Richardson’s “Mist, Guilford, Vermont” (1978) is a palladium print; it has characteristics similar to platinum, and here provides a field of grass with great detail and a sense of texture. Eugène Atget’s “Cathédrale d’Amiens” (c. 1905) is an albumen print and the portrait of “Sir Richard Collinson” (1877) by Samuel Robert Lock and George C. Whitfield is a woodburytype: Each of these technologies effects the feel of the prints they produce.We live nowadays in an image-drenched environment, but most of the images come to us as newsprint, or impermanent pixels, or cheap one-hour prints. Even great pictures tend to be familiar from low-quality reproductions, so the surface beauty of the works in “From Any Angle” is a special treat, like hearing a concert in a live performance, not as a downloaded MP3. Irving Penn used a bleaching technique on “Nude No. 106” (1949-50) so that although the skin of his full-figured model retains the quality of flesh, it also has some of the appearance of marble, and hence classical sculpture. This was much more apparent when I viewed the actual print than it is now looking at a JPEG as I write.Among the pictures of New York City in the show are three by Berenice Abbott, including her classic “Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8” (1936), in a particularly crisp print, and “Jay Street No. 115, Fort Greene” (1936), a fine study of a working-class black family, and one of her few pictures taken in Brooklyn. I was unaware of Walker Evans’s “Is the Market Right?” (c. 1948), a picture of a rain-soaked city street at early dawn; it is simple, but quite atmospheric. Paul Strand’s “Wall Street” (1915), on the other hand, was very familiar, but seeing the actual platinum print, I noticed that although the long shadows of the pedestrians give the image a somber cast, the people themselves seem to be moving along at a sprightly pace, and only one man has his head bowed as if he is downcast.Ms. Bry’s collection may be inadvertent, but there is nothing slapdash about it. She chose well.* * *Jerome Liebling (b. 1924) was raised in Brooklyn, and not surprisingly, his early work was shot in New York. Six of the 43 pictures in “Everyday Monuments” were taken in the city in the late 1940s, and these early black-and-white photographs show the influence of the Photo League, where he studied with Paul Strand and Walter Rosenblum. “Butterfly Boy” and “Boy and Car, ” both taken in New York City (1949), are sympathetic studies of young black boys in the League tradition of the social documentary.Much of Mr. Liebling’s later work is presented as medium-format chromogenic prints. These include seven pictures from a project on 19th-century American authors in which personal objects associated with the authors stand in for the writers themselves. So “Fishing Hat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord, Massachusetts” (1984) is a metonymy for the Transcendentalist sage, and the little porcelain figures in “Harriet Beecher Stowe Home, Hartford, Connecticut” (1986) for the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” My favorite in the series is “Emily Dickinson’s White Dress, Amherst, Massachusetts” (1989), partly because I had already seen it, but more because Mr. Liebling cleverly caught a reflection of a window on the glass of the vitrine the dress is displayed in, and this creates an ethereal aura appropriate to the poet.But you can’t stay out of the city for long. Two black-and-white pictures titled “South Bronx,” taken in 1977, document the housing destruction of the time, and four personable color prints from the ’80s and ’90s chronicle the arrival of Russian immigrants to Brighton Beach in Mr. Liebling’s native borough, Brooklyn.Both until September 7 (1111 Chapel St. at York Street, New Haven, Conn., 203-432-0600).

Looking at Home From Out of Town: Photography at Yale

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