The passing of an angry man.

Since first encountering his work as a teenager, I have always thought it must have been awful to be Robert Frank. I mean, how could anyone go through life so angry with so much contempt for the country which opened its arms to him? He was free to leave, after all. All he saw in America was the bad, the way those who chose not to compete and improve themselves were self-imposed failures. That’s not the America that this penniless immigrant (actually, less than penniless, as I borrowed $4,000 from my US employer on arrival) found in 1977. And what I found was a nation with abundant optimism and opportunities galore for those who cared to sign the front of a check, not the back. For those who put their hands to work rather than parading with them outstretched, palm up, America was paradise.

I wrote about Frank’s work a long time ago here and yes, while you should have his book ‘The Americans’ on your shelf, its content should be viewed with considerable skepticism.

Frank just died and the New York Times, predictably, eulogized him.

Bringing the message home.

Roy Emerson Stryker

FDR’s cousin Teddy Roosevelt saw to it that through Jacob Riis’s pictures of the poor of New York the awful poverty of the lower classes was brought into Americans’ homes. FDR did something similar in appointing Roy Stryker, a Columbia trained economist and amateur photographer, to head the Farm Security Administration in 1935. The goal was to document and expose the plight of the poor in ‘fly over country’ to the affluent, coastal masses, and Stryker did so with aplomb.

The photographers he hired to execute this massive task read like a who’s who of the best reportage picture makers of the era: Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano (no relation to FDR), Gordon Parks, John Collier and Carl Mydans. Each went on to fame and fortune and if I was forced to make choices I would have to single out Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott.

In the same way that a pre-television age saw FDR come into Americans’ living rooms through the medium of his Fireside Chats on the radio, the work of Stryker’s team of photographers brought the images of the Depression into their homes along with the daily paper. FDR never managed to turn the economy around from the Great Depression which arguably started with the Wall Street crash of 1929 but he showed that he was trying mightily hard. The Japanese solved the problem, putting Americans back to work on December 7, 1941. It was called Pearl Harbor and the economy took off on the back of government military spending that the isolationists had prevented for over a decade. Yes, they were Republicans, as cruel and grasping then as now.

The FSA was eventually folded into the War Department and Stryker moved on. But his accomplishment remains one of the most fertile in documentary photography.

Putting lipstick on a pig.

On of the more frustrating aspects of being a mechanical engineering student in London in the 1970s was that the sobriquet ‘engineer’ was applied equally to those highly educated as to those with a vocabulary of a dozen words or so. The ‘engineer’ who designed turbine blades for Rolls Royce Aircraft was described with the same noun as the moron bashing spikes into railroad ties.

Thus it is today with photography. Anyone who can post an image to Instagram is a ‘photographer’ even if the best thing that could happen for world civilization would be to keep his finger from the button for the benefit of future generations. Irving Penn and Joe Instagram are now one and the same.

But the Instagram generation could have been seen coming 50 years earlier, and was never better foretold than in the truly execrable work of one Gary Winogrand. It’s not just that Winogrand could not make a good image, it’s that he refused to do so. Thousands of times a day.

In this regard his non-existent sense of composition or timing distinguishes him from that other great fake of his generation, Diane Arbus. My sub-caption to that piece – “A cruel, exploitative photographer without a shred of decency.” – cannot be improved on, but what distinguishes Arbus’s work from that of Winogrand is that she had a clear purpose and direction, even if these were evil and corrupted. Needless to add, Winogrand’s output of noise found its apologists and just when you thought his pap was forgotten, new rumblings surface. Yes, I’m afraid Winogrand put lipstick on the pig that was his manic monochrome manglings, using color film.

Adding insult to injury, the Brooklyn Museum has a show running no fewer than nine months devoted to his color carnage. Here’s a random image from the show and in this case random selection is entirely appropriate as the result is always the same. Pure garbage.

Winogrand in color.