Resurgence: The Christophers

Michaela Cole and Ian McKellan in The Christophers. (Photo: Department M.)

There isn’t a sentimental moment in Ian McKellen’s portrayal of the artist Julian Sklar in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. Julian is a painter in the sunset of his life who hasn’t made any new work in twenty years; he’s long since faded from celebrity, but a mystique remains around an unfinished series known as “the Christophers,” which he abandoned when he broke up with the lover to whom they were dedicated. His dreadful children (amusingly sketched by James Corden and Jessica Gunning), with whom he has apparently had no relationship for years, terrified that at his death they will be left without any inheritance, hire a young artist named Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) to forge finished versions of the paintings if indeed they exist at all, or to create them if they don’t. They persuade her to apply for the job of their dad’s new assistant in order to gain entrée to his studio. But though Lori has a history with Sklar that he is unaware of and that should definitely encourage her to take his children’s side – as a nineteen-year-old aspiring painter, she endured a withering critique by him on a TV show – her response to the young Sklars’ mission turns out to be very complicated. So is Ed Solomon’s intriguing screenplay, which weighs the questions of legacy and ownership in the arts and the bearing of the personal on the artistic as no movie has since Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours in 2008.

I Am a Camera: Three Historic Photographers

(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.