Much as I might wish it were otherwise, in considering the Museum of Modern Art’s latest photography exhibit and catalogue New Japanese Photography it proves impossible to discuss the photographs themselves without simultaneously analyzing the show and book. […]
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Errol Morris’s position is, I think, quite clearly against the idea that the Burroughs family owned an alarm clock. He does not accept his own third option as credible, any more than James Curtis does. How on earth both Morris and Curtis managed to convince themselves of this, against all the efforts of Occam’s Razor, is something of a mystery itself. Nevertheless, the situation is even worse than that. […] A photographic image is a transformation of reality; when selected with consciousness and an intention beyond the recording of surface, it is inevitably a remaking of an event into the photographer’s own image, and thus an assumption of godhead. […] Herman Emmet’s models, I know, are Agee-Evans and W. Eugene Smith, among others. This work emerges from that lineage, extends the thrust of those seminal efforts, and deserves to stand in their company. But it certainly is not of interest exclusively to those concerned with serious photography, who may well prove to be only a small segment of its audience. […] Errol Sawyer’s mosaic city, built out of dozens of metropolitan fragments from various locales, does not resolve as a bleak or grim vision of the human condition. It feels alive, reasonably congenial, never malevolent, even inviting — evoking not only the loneliness that can lurk within urban existence but also that sense of solitude, welcome for some, paradoxically enhanced by the proximity of millions of other souls. […] |
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