Astonish Me

John Haber
in New York City

Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine

Gordon Parks: Home and on the Streets

Astonish me. Alexey Brodovitch made it an imperative when he founded the Design Lab of Philadelphia's School of Industrial Art in 1933. It was no more than he was demanding as art director of Harper's Bazaar.

It is no more, too, than he would demand from "Modern Look" at the Jewish Museum. Subtitled "Photography and the American Magazine," it includes pretty much every major photographer from the late 1930s through the 1950s, and they still astonish. So do photographers you may not know, but also art directors behind the scenes. And their role comes as the biggest surprise of all. Photographers accepted the demand—and, as World War II gave way to a divided America, came back with demands of their own. The show ends by asking how their challenges led to photography apart from commerce today, but the change may not be so clear-cut after all.

The show opens with a wall enlargement after Frances McLaughlin-Gill in 1949—of a woman, seen from the back, in a black hat and black gloves. She is the woman of beauty as the modern woman, reading a newspaper and facing the still-unfinished UN. Is fashion a thing of the moment, with the city and its landmarks always new? Here New York is the work in progress, with high style to get it through. Which is right, and who gets to decide, commerce or the creative artist? As an African American, the show's most frequent contributor, Gordon Parks, had his doubts.

Not just fashion

What is magazine photography anyway? It might make you think of eye-candy, shallow or irresistible. It includes the temptations of the picturesque in National Geographic or of headline news. Most of all, it has meant the gloss of fashion. Irving Penn and Richard Avedon excelled at that—and, at times, have had to live it down. The public lines up reliably for shows of fashion at the Met, but critics of museum commercialism still push back.

Then again, you may think of magazine work as just one of those things that photographers have to do to earn a living, although David Seidner, for one, made it so much more. "Fashioning Fiction" glorified fashion photography at MoMA in 2004, but photographers might disagree. Maybe it beats waiting tables, but Diane Arbus, to name just one, put it behind her as soon as she could. (Imagining Arbus as a commercial photographer is entertaining all by itself, but she worked after the show's end.) Andy Warhol had his early work in fashion, and the latest Warhol retrospective began with it. Still, he learned his lessons about what sells and moved on.

The Jewish Museum buys neither story. For starters, its photographers are not hiding their work in shame, no more than Kwame Brathwaite in celebrating African American fashion. Penn was among the first students at the Design Lab, and he isolated Marcel Duchamp and Marlene Dietrich in the very same corner of a room. He saw no need to distinguish fine art from popular culture. Nor did Avedon when he posed Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe—for a spread with text by Truman Capote. Robert Frank distrusted the industry, but his The Americans is not be so far from the pageant in print every single day. The show includes his photographs of a charity ball and a black woman holding a white child.

Then, too, here commercial photography is not just fashion. For Avedon before his familiar black borders, it is no more or less than portraiture. For others, it is the entirety of the graphic arts. Annual of the Graphic Arts featured Jackson Pollock in 1951, at the peak of Pollock's drips—two years after he appeared in Life. You may not think of Fortune as progressive, but covers by Herbert Matter, Herbert Bayer, and others have the graphic sophistication and demands on the future of early Soviet art. Josef Breitenbach even asked What About Steel? The Container Corporation of America puts in an appearance, too, for a series on "Great Ideas of Western Man."

The show is about more than photography as well. It is about publishing itself as a haven for talent and ideas. It is about art directors like Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman at Vogue. It is about editors like Carmel Snow, who brought Brodovitch to Harper's Bazaar. It features typesetters, too, the firm of Robert Leslie—himself a designer and editor at PM magazine. Typography matters.

It is also about the diversity they brought to magazines, including Gordon Parks as the first black photographer at Vogue, before his work for Ebony and Life, and Frances McLaughlin-Gill as the first woman. Such women as Cipe Pineles and Lillian Bassman also served as art directors. Jews like Liberman had fled to America, as did the Bauhaus. Most of all, it is about the interchange. Refugees shaped publishing and graphic design. Art directors were photographers and designers, too. Brodovitch did store windows for Saks.

Beauty and shadow

"Modern Look" comes at a time of questioning—of the distinctions between art and design, high art and low. The curator, Mason Klein, begins with a section for "Art as Design, Design as Art" for the show's earliest work and its most experimental. Edward Steichen photographs tacks and matches as an approach to abstraction. Josef Breitenbach photographs his wife in a strange place between a positive print and a photographic negative. Mere swirls of light for Matter become a dance. Dancers for Brodovich leap onto the stage as a leap into the void.

They are picking up where Modernism in Europe left off, and the show is about the very image of modernity. Margaret Bourke-White photographs a worker tightening bolts, in a city on the rise. Martin Munkacsi poses a model overhead at the 1939 World's Fair, Louise Dahl-Wolfe a model on the balcony of the Museum of Modern Art. In each case, it is hard not to think of the famous image of construction workers taking lunch atop a skyscraper. Still, Modernity was a scary place. Paul Rand wraps the cover of Direction magazine in barbed wire during the Holocaust, while William Klein sees New York beneath an Atom Bomb Sky.

It has room for beauty in experiment, and the show's second section picks up "Fashion as Desire." Already Steichen has photographed Gloria Swanson, and her face behind a patterned stocking looks different than before between Erwin Blumenfeld's portraits in shadows and printer's dots. Just who, though, is left out? The show's third section raises the first explicit challenge to editors, as "The Contested Page." Parks photographs exclusions, like the black mother and child outside a department store in Mobile. Blumenfeld captures a couple of mixed race, their faces pressed together in close-up.

Modernity is still at issue. The fourth section, "Reimagining Industry," returns to the nexus of art and design. Westvaco (the former West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company) tries to remake itself as a design company, while Penn and Leslie Gill turn to still life. The final section, "Graphic Effect," is no longer advertising. In place of fashion or modernity, it has only The Wedding as a Funeral for Saul Leiter, a menacing silhouette with a bowler hat and cigarette—and a nude for Paul Himmel as a gaunt and sinuous shadow. For the museum, it is one last challenge and a decisive blow.

Just how great, though, is the conflict between beauty and shadow? It must seem stark as one turns from a cafeteria on Lexington Avenue, by Louis Faurer, to McLaughlin-Gill's fashion shoot on Third, but they are only a block apart. New York is like that, and so in the end are photography and publishing. Parks also photographed Helen Frankenthaler in color in her studio and Ralph Ellison in black and white in the den of the Invisible Man. They could be worlds apart—or just two creative artists at home on the floor. Roy DeCarava can always count on the everyday grace of jazz musicians and Faurer on the view from the back of a city bus.

Lisette Model explicitly rejected photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his "decisive moment," but does the show's final section? She may have found her decisive moment after all with running legs—and Parks with his black man emerging from a manhole. Hope keeps popping up, and so does the relevance for art today. When Parks photographs Charles White, I kept thinking about a student of White's David Hammons. When Langston Hughes for Parks thrusts his arm through a picture frame, I kept thinking about gilded frames for Lorraine O'Grady at a parade in Harlem. Everyone needs a good frame and a good editor, but not everyone can astonish me.

Faces, hands, and fences

Gordon Parks belongs to past decades or to the ages, until you read the protest signs. He has never looked so prescient as he commands both his gallery's Chelsea spaces. Yes, the signs are in black and white, although Parks was quick to embrace color. And yes, this was the civil-rights era, before its hopes faded and divisions heightened, although he already gives more than equal attention to Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver along with Martin Luther King, Jr. A cleaning woman in the nation's capital, a mop and broom in her two hands like loaded weapons, could embody both sides in those divisions. The signs, though, might just as well have come out only last summer, in protest against state repression and police violence.

Parks lingers most over not the leaders, who often fade into the background, but anonymous protestors, the kind that drive Black Lives Matter now. He wants you to read every word, in bold letters, but also to remember the faces. Often as not by now, you will know them well, like the cleaning woman in a classic image. There are the faces of three boys behind barbed wire, the white kid somehow almost in your space and the black kid at center smiling as he raises a toy pistol because this is only a game, but he wants to win. There is the head of a man popping up improbably from a manhole that has not lost its cover. Sometimes you may feel that you remember most the faces that you cannot see—like the black mothers and daughters looking through a different fence, to a Ferris wheel they cannot ride and a playground where they can never play.

Parks has had many a show in recent years, including a prior pair with the same dealer, so pardon me if I refer you to past reviews for more. He worked in titled series, starting in the 1940s, so shows have broken that way, and these two are no exception. One space has only the events of the 1960s, in black and white, the other lives at home and on the streets, mostly larger and in color. You could see them as public and private lives, but their subjects are not just individuals, unless you count the man in the manhole. They are families, friends, and communities. Even when a seated man on his front porch shows all too clearly his age, his wife is right behind him.

These are African American communities, in the plural, and the paired shows help one see past epochs and events to just that. The protests turn on a sense of community. Hands are raised together, as in a church service, in equal parts anger and joy. Hands are a focus, too, in rural communities and on Harlem streets. Children raise their hands together as they reach out to fences. They do so again wading for pleasure in ugly, muddy waters or enjoying the spray from a fire hydrant in summer. When a hand really is alone, a lone hand protruding from the water, it seems to plead for help, and Parks comes as close as he ever could to despair.

Fences are not the only barriers, and the gallery's space for private lives multiplies them along with its series. One series sticks to marks of exclusion, like signs for a "colored" entrance, a "colored" drinking fountain, and whites only. These are legal, social, and bitterly emotional barriers, not just physical ones. You will know instantly why families are fenced out. Yet again anger and longing are inseparable from pleasure and hope. Even in the dark of night outside a liquor store, it casts not a glare but a field of light on the sidewalk.

Parks has few villains, because cannot spare the time and attention. In the one shot of police and their suspects, the camera soars overhead. You can see why a blond boy, too, is behind barbed wire along with others, and you can take their friendship as a sign of hope. Still, race complicates each and every sign of longing. When African Americans look at clothing in a store window, the mannequins are lily white, and actual whites are absent from their struggles. Maybe there has been change in more than fifty years after all.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Modern Look" ran at the Jewish Museum through July 11, 2021, Gordon Parks at Jack Shainman through February 20. Related articles look in depth at fashion photography and Gordon Parks.