Page 27 - Studio International - December 1971

Atget V belied by the dreariness of the stores and
If it is a merit of Pop art to have drawn more used-car lots and the like behind them. The
and the City II attention than before to such iconography, one genuine vulgar energy and variety of Coney
of the sadder things about it is the kind of Island or of any area with a real night-life going
diminishment that has been too often involved. on seems to me wholly good. Where the major
Just as amusement arcades, operating-room American photographers are concerned,
equipment, airplane cockpits, the funnies, unfortunately, it is only Walker Evans and
and so on are generally far more inventive Robert Frank who have taken much cognizance
formally and charged with significance than of commercial iconography.26 Frank, of course,
the art objects whose forms are derived from learned immensely from Evans,27 and if it is
them, so advertisements and commercial and only an educated guess that the inspiration for
industrial signs have generally much more all the brilliant technical 'wrongness' of Frank's
vitality than the little Pop commentaries on work came from a couple of photographs by the
them. (Which is why, no doubt, Pop imagery latter, it is a certainty that the great inspiring
has been so effortlessly assimilated back into force behind Evans's own work was Atget's. In
the undisguisedly commercial.) Of course there both cases, however, the indebtednesses are of
are uglinesses, especially in the ghastly the thoroughly healthy kind that involves
debased-Bauhaus lettering that predominates intelligent transpositions, progressions, and
in the supermarkets, but in general the ugliness divergences; and in both the emphasis is
is not so much formal as moral, as in those almost wholly on ironical discrepancies
appalling paeons to gluttony in the Swift meat between the promises and affirmations of ads
ads a few years back. Even where the clutter of and signs and the more or less sordid contexts
signs and ads lining highways is concerned, the in which they are placed.
real objection is not that they make the outskirts With Atget, on the other hand, there is no
of a city look like Coney Island but that generally irony at all so far as I can see, not even in the
9 Coiffeur, Avenue de l'Observatoire the promise of the blaze of lights and colours is picture in which the announcement 'Figaro
Paris c. 192o

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