Page 30 - Studio International - December 1971

elegance aspired to is not necessarily the less Atget and been taken in a way that enables them Lange's individually moving but collectively all
real because of the grotesqueness of the means to be there simply as individuals, not 'types', too uniformly decent, careworn, undeservedly
used to attain it. Again, where the series of viewed without indignation, contempt, suffering sharecroppers are obvious examples of
prostitutes is concerned, two more pictures sentimentality, or fuss of any kind. this ;36 so, in the opposite direction, are the
should be mentioned.34 One is of a couple of And the same disinterested respect for grainy vacuous monsters of too many of Frank's
figures posed casually in a doorway, he a identities informs Atget's better-known pictures pictures. Again, just as Cartier-Bresson When
youngish soldier in undress uniform and cap, of individuals in more reputable trades. Great his genius flags tends to fall into a Family-of-
legs comfortably crossed, hand on hip, face portraiture, whether formal or informal, is Man cuteness or quaintness or slightly
moustached and good-humoured, she in a short, almost certainly no easier in photography than spurious 'warmness', so Strand, in his ruthless
white, simple house-dress, the door slightly ajar it is in painting (the genre seems to me to be to eschewal of precisely that sort of thing, has too
behind her, a faintly diffident half-smile on her photography what drawing is to the other often imposed a glumness on his subjects that
youngish-looking, unmade-up face. They are graphic arts, namely the form in which faking is is even more irritating because done with such
completely real and individual beings, posing for least easy), and one of the glories of the art is obvious deliberation and conviction.37 With
the camera in the course of a normal relationship. that it has given us the finest portraits of Atget these kinds of falsification don't occur.
So are the three handsome, dark-haired, Mathew Brady, Julia Margaret Cameron, Paul His subjects are simply there, taken in their
middle-aged 'girls' in the second of the two Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, professional clothes and for the most part
pictures (V93), posed in a doorway in a Berenice Abbott,35 Dorothea Lange, Henri engaged in the pursuit of their professions,
comfortably neighbourly fashion like three Cartier-Bresson, and others. But there would sometimes smiling, sometimes pensive,
housewives who have been visiting each other. seem to be special temptations for the occasionally a shade odd (like the little
And even the other prostitutes and/or madams photographer in the way of producing too umbrella-merchant, black-coated and hatted
that I have mentioned have likewise posed for obviously controlled a response. Dorothea in the hot sunlight) or even, like one or two of the
12 prostitute/madams, a shade sinister. And as far
as the main emphasis goes, these are plainly
not people entrapped and distorted by the city.
As Miss Abbott puts it, 'human dignity is
expressed in each and all' of the pictures."
Two pictures stand out especially in this
respect. The first seems to me one of the
unquestionable masterpieces of twentieth-
century art, for all its relative simplicity and
immediacy of impact. Heavily whiskered,
middle-aged, expressionless under a shabby hat,
a street-musician stares towards the camera
from behind a little street-piano (W49, Vi i6,
A20, C24). His right hand blurs slightly as he
turns the handle, his left hand rests on the other
corner of the machine, and against or on that
hand rests the hand of his tiny, long-skirted,
black-scarved singer, who is gazing upwards,
head thrown back, mouth half-open as if in
song. Their clothes are heavy-looking, redolent
of dirt and perspiration; the man is not
especially prepossessing, the woman is almost a
midget; the positioning of the wheels of the
piano emphasizes the travelling they do, the
oil-cloth cover on the piano recalls the weathers
they face, and the bourgeois façade behind them
is not hospitable. Yet the expression of radiant,
exultant happiness and pride on the woman's
face is unequalled by anything that I can recall
in art except the closing shot of Marlene
Dietrich in Sternberg's Scarlet Empress; and,
with the incongruity in ages, yet manifest
closeness of the couple, the picture seems to me
one of the greatest pictorial images of love that
we have. The second picture is even more
relevant where the essential pre-occupations of
Atget that I have been trying to trace are
concerned (see fig. 12). A working-girl and a
youngish street-vendor or porter are standing
talking in a courtyard, taken in profile, he
capped and with a basket strapped on his back,
another in his hand, she in an anlde-length long-
sleeved black dress with a coarse-looking apron
over it. (A couple of similarly attired older
women look on from the right; it is, one guesses,
a brief break from work.) The sunlight falls
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