Post-Traumatic Shock: Bill Viola's Recent Work
1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
ResumoYesterday was the 4th of July in New York City. I spent most of the day in Central Park, watching the parade, the flora and fauna of the most racially diversified city in the world. Those of us who live here accept that diversity; we accept the fact that here the human species is a hybrid, its beauty comprised of many colors and shapes whose origins are indistinguishable and irrelevant. We agree, in other words, to see human evolution as a street fair, as something that happens before us each time we accept the blending of genetics and culture that is the New York experience: something ongoing, spontaneous and constantly in a state of self-creation. Given this definition, New York's supremacy as a modernist center of street photography is of course not surprising. But this town is a smorgasbord: the clear and delineated genealogical orders of more homogenous cultures are nowhere to be found in this urban sprawl, where one city block exhibits more nationalities and mixtures thereof than entire countries in the Old World. WeeGee and Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt and Lisette Model, Robert Frank and William Klein, Roy de Carava and Walter Rosenblum have all tried, in various ways, to make sense of this unruly human comedy on film, to frame and arrest its intractable flux. Ex-street photographer Joel Meyerowitz and critic, historian and curator Colin Westerbeck, in their new book Bystander: A History of Street Photography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), tell us the story of these rubberneckers from the Big Apple, and place them in the context of their counterparts worldwide. Not surprisingly, most of the major street photographers - whether artists, photo-journalists, social reformers or amateurs - have been spawned (born or trained as artists) in either New York or those cities where the streets, by virtue either of politics or sociability, have taken on a life of their own. And all of the best known imagemakers in this tradition - Robert Doisneau and J. H. Lartigue, Jacob Riis and Alice Austen, Ray Metzker and Andre Kertesz, M. Alvarez Bravo and the Seeberger Brothers, Charles Negre and John Thomson, as well as lesser-known snapshooters like Chusseau Flaviens and Count Giuseppe Primoli - are represented here in this long-awaited book. The text, mainly written by Westerbeck after many years of ongoing conversations with Meyerowitz, chronicles the stories of these artists and their relationships to the street life they loved. Beginning with an introductory chapter placing the origins of modern street theatre in the chaos of the French Revolution, the book discusses the barricades and their legacy in the cafes, department stores and public forums of nineteenth-century Paris. This chapter is brief, and Westerbeck's sources are writers Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Fournel, Gustave Flaubert and artist Constantin Guys rather than their more obvious counterparts, the Impressionists. Painters, in fact, are strangely absent from this tale, which moves rather abruptly from general information about public and private life in the heyday of early Parisian modernism to more precise discussions of individual photographers or movements (like the Farm Security Administration of the Depression era and the postwar Chicago school). Interspersed with Westerbeck's well-researched and well-written commentaries (sometimes small within the text, sometimes large in separate portfolio sections) are numerous photographs, mainly in black and white, both classic images and quirky additions to the canon, that delight the eye with a selection of frozen moments wrested from the narrative flow of the human sideshow. Bystanders comes off essentially as a coffee table textbook, as an attempt to generalize about a particular aspect of the photographic tradition that is vast, influential and as yet undefined: the foundation upon which all subsequent discussions of this topic will be built. One can haggle about individual points or sections: the chapter on William Klein, for instance, called An American in Paris, is accompanied almost exclusively by pictures of New York, and some of Westerbeck's comments about the photographs (his concurrence that Klein abused his negatives . …
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