Elliott Erwitt Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. 1951. © Elliott Erwitt | Magnum Photos

Unseen for decades, an early reportage in a quintessentially American postwar city reveals the making of Erwitt’s photographic style, released as a new book (Pittsburgh 1950) and introduced by National Geographic writer Vaughn Wallace

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In September 1950, 22-year-old Elliott Erwitt stepped off a Greyhound bus in Pittsburgh and, new to the city, took a small, rented room at the YMCA downtown. The Paris-born Erwitt had traveled to Pittsburgh from New York at the invitation of Roy Stryker, the former head of the Information Division of the federal government’s Farm Security Administration. Controlling, magnanimous, often impossibly mission-driven, Stryker had furthered the careers of countless photojournalists, many of whom – Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks and more – in later years would be recognized as pioneers whose visual stories helped define the first half of the 20th century.

Andreas Gursky’s photograph of a Montparnasse tower block is a stunning mosaic of colour (Credit: Andreas Gursky)

I just came across this article (The stunning photographs that are like paintings) on the BBC website. It deals ith the so-called “Dusseldorf School” and refers to an exhibition featuring their work at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. In particular it draws attention to the influence of Bernd and Hilla Becher on the photographers (Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse) belonging to the school.

At the heart of Engler’s exhibition is the following question: how important, as an influence upon this special generation, were their teachers in Düsseldorf, the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher? The answer, it transpires, is: extremely important. If you aren’t already familiar with the Bechers, then it’s time to become acquainted with two crucial figures in the history of photography.
Draconian and dispassionate.

It was 1976 when Bernd Becher (1931-2007), who had trained as a painter, was appointed professor of photography at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. His wife and artistic partner, Hilla (1934-2015), was never given a formal role at the institution, but she always worked closely with her husband, who often taught at home, and was an equally important influence upon his students until 1996, when Bernd left the faculty.

They had met as students, themselves, at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie in 1957, and began collaborating two years later, before getting married in 1961. During the 60s, they spent time in New York City, where they encountered avant-garde art, and mixed with Conceptual and Minimalist artists such as Carl Andre. “Their experience in New York totally changed the way they perceived photography,” Engler says.

A while back I went to an exhibition of Bernd and Hilla Becher at Dia, a nearby art museum. It featured a number of photographs of industrial buildings and structures and I quite liked them.

At first I didn’t much care much for the work of the other photographers, but it’s now starting to grow on me. I suspect that you really have to see the photographs in person to really “get” them. As the BBC article notes:

As an exhibition featuring their work at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt recently made plain, before the emergence of Gursky and his contemporaries, including Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, photography was typically seen as something small-scale and black-and-white. Its status as contemporary “art”, i.e. as work that could stand shoulder to shoulder with painting in museums and auction houses, was still a matter of debate.

During the 90s, though, curators and collectors started going wild for the sort of photography that Gursky and his peers were producing: massive, scintillating compositions, like Paris, Montparnasse, printed in full colour, and often presented, in the manner of serious paintings, in heavy wooden frames.

Just looking at tiny pictures on a computer/iphone/ipad just won’t do. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find an opportunity to see them in their full glory.

Smoke pours from the chimneys of an Ohio steel mill in a 1949 picture for Life magazine. Photograph: W Eugene Smith/Life/Getty. Source: W Eugene Smith, the photographer who wanted to record everything.

Interesting review in The Guardian. W Eugene Smith, the photographer who wanted to record everything of a new book on the above mentioned photographer: Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View.

A couple of extracts from the article:

Like many photographers, Smith was obsessive in the pursuit of his vision, but fuelled by alcohol and a long-term addiction to amphetamines, his compulsive behaviour had over the years become extreme. Among his archives were several boxes containing photocopies of all the letters he had ever written.

More startling still are the 1,740 reels of audio tape, which were made by Smith between 1957 and 1965 in his previous loft apartment in 6th Avenue near West 28th Street. They contain around 4,500 hours of mostly ambient recordings often caught clandestinely on microphones he draped on dangling leads throughout the loft and in its stairways. These tapes reveal Smith’s seeming desire to document everything going on around him – and not just through photographs. They include hundred of hours of recordings of the many jazz musicians who gravitated there after hours; the likes of Thelonious Monk, Roland Kirk, Sonny Clark and Chick Corea, but also the conversations of stellar visitors including Norman Mailer, Salvador Dali and Anaïs Nin, as well as visiting photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank.

“For each famous person,” writes Sam Stephenson in his fascinating book, Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View, “there were dozens of obscure musicians, pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts and dealers, dropouts, hustlers and thieves, beat cops and buildings inspectors, photography students, frame makers, fire extinguisher technicians and countless other figures”.

Written on a desk customised from Smith’s darkroom sink, Stephenson’s evocative book is the result of 20 years of research into the life of an American documentary photographer who, having been revered in his lifetime, is now regarded in the digital age with a kind of respectful curiosity.

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For all that, the wayward individual that emerges out of Stephenson’s ambitious “wide angle” approach remains essentially unknowable, a blur in an otherwise sharply defined portrait of a tougher time and a truly bohemian milieu that already seems impossibly distant. I wondered if Stephenson’s opinion of the object of his elusive devotion had altered over the course of his long labour of love. “Well, I rate him even more highly as a photographer now, particularly for his Pittsburgh work, in which he captured American industrial urbanism at its pinnacle. For me, it’s his crowning achievement. But the book is about the life more than the work and, for me, tapes were the way into that life. Put it this way, if he had not made those tapes, I would not have spent 20 years of my life researching the book. I would not have followed the leads and connections to the many extraordinary characters in that life. For me, the characters that were drawn to his loft are the truest reflection of who he was.”