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| (Princeton University Press.) |
“I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, just recording not thinking. Recording. Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, and fixed.”
--Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories
“A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. All things are photographable.”
--Garry Winogrand
How sweet it is! When your three favourite modernist photographers get the huge exhibition and publication acclaim they all deserved separately but which is all the more illuminating and meaningful if read, studied, viewed and reviewed as an ensemble, as a hugely important creative constellation of innovative artists. Such is the joy that arrives spontaneously when one picks up this highly significant exhibition catalogue (artfully disguised as a gorgeously designed coffee table art book), Photography as a Way of Life: Minor White, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, published by Princeton University Press in conjunction with the Princeton University Art Museum. It is a well-earned testament to the achievements of three titans who literally defined the terms by which all photographers after them would be assessed. And the astute author/curator Brendan Fay is the ideal candidate for such a monumental undertaking: his eye and mind will help any reader or viewer, whether they are familiar with these artists or just seeing them for the very first time, come to a fulsome appreciation for what makes these photographic giants... well, so gigantic. White (1908-1976), Siskind (1903-1991) and Callahan (1912-1999), are exemplars of a certain kind of quiet seeing: an intimate and reverential attention to detail and ambience which they share in an elegant and austere manner. I often refer to them as the Vermeers of photography, and Fay’s book confirms it.
