Unlike

The girlfriend waits out a brief afternoon shower during a visit to L.A.'s Getty Center.

My only non-wedding related goal in L.A. last weekend was to make a first visit to the Getty Center, especially because it is currently exhibiting some great photography, including side-by-side exhibitions of Weston and Delahaye (how much more diverse can you get?). Luc Delahaye's work has long since been a huge inspiration to me (as I've said before, Winterreise is one of the best photo books ever produced) and I was really pumped to see his newer "historic" panos up close and huge.

Love him or hate him, Delahaye is a fascinating figure in contemporary photography for his work and viewpoints. After shunning photojournalism and Magnum, Delahaye gave an interview where he attacked the presumption that Bresson is as important or ground-breaking as everyone gives him credit for, a position that is as close to heresy as you can find among our godless lot (I agree with him, in part), and declared himself an artist(e). Reincarnating his career he mentally and physically took a big step back and began exhibiting large scale post-modern, documentary photographic art that was immediately embraced for its sensationality and craft. Now these prints, often panoramic, seem to be selling briskly in the 5-figures range.

So yeah, I was pretty excited when we arrived in the morning at 'Da Getty and began to wander around the immaculate grounds. As it turns out, whether you make any attempt to see the wonderful collections at the museum, just being there surrounded by the incredible architecture, gardens, and views is a perfect way to spend a day (especially because the center, like all great ones should be, is free.)

The way into the Delahaye exhibit was through the Weston galleries (Fun, simple, graceful, fruity, incredibly rich, soft prints, and ultimately boring), and then suddenly there were the large images from the Frenchman (the contrast all the greater because of the tiny size of all of Weston's prints). On first walk through its just a delight to see these pictures so big and present. You can watch people walk by looking, and then stop and step back again to find more and more detail that is rewarding in the Gursky sense. The editing of the dozen prints shown was strong and graphic, but also pretty diverse, pointing me towards the still thin line between Delahaye's competing roles as artist and journalist.

On my second walk through I began to begin noticing little cracks in the magic and also stopped to read the accompanying text stenciled in on the walls. That was a mistake. Here is one sentence from the exhibit (written by the Getty?): "Unlike the sensational, hurried representations of international editorial news, [Delahaye's] photographs depict the long-term consequences of those events on ordinary life." (The website puts in a slightly different, more stomach-able way here).

All I could think was, well, that's too bad. Galleries and museums will be galleries and museums, and that sort of text is always sort of ridiculous. But fuck, "unlike the sensational, hurried representations" ??! Um, aren't you forgetting that Delahaye was/is a member of that teeming mass we throw the label "Media" at. Isn't that how he got access to photograph Milosevic's trial? Doesn't his transformation make that claim a hell of a lot more complicated, and isn't the fact that current events are so much more complicated than a daily newspaper, weekly magazine, or yearly report can ever really demonstrate that someone like Delahaye would be tempted to break away from journalism all together to find a different approach and scale??!

And after that I was also dealt the blow of learning that my favorite picture at the exhibit, the incredible panoramic of the OPEC meeting in Vienna swarming with members of that same wild and crazy media, is a digital composite of multiple different frames that Delahaye combined in post-production (I know, I know, its "art"). This was probably already well known, but I missed hearing about it and have been admiring this image for quite some time.

I think the text should have left the media as culprits out of the equation and instead focused on something more personal to these images and Luc's situation which has a lot more impact, namely that so many members of the media are constantly frustrated by how focused and narrow the coverage must be on any given story, and the tremendous loss of context and subtlety that it mandates. Several of the images are a literal and physical metaphor of a photographer simply stepping back (and amping up the resolution for maximum detail) to show the vast scale of these landscapes that they work in.

We are shown the Jenin Refugee Camp in an awkward view from a hillside, instead of a tight shot of kids throwing rocks, or fathers picking up debris from another Israeli rocket attack. In an image from Eastern Chad (the only vertical) there is so much detail that not only can we clearly see all of the faces of the women lining up to register their names as displaced people, but we can actually read their names from the clipboard that the man is writing on in the lower right corner. Think about that: fuck captions!... their names and faces are right there; its beautiful.

The use of the word sensational in the text is not only irresponsible, it's dismissive (which is worse). News coverage by its very nature is extremely focused, often down to just a single hour, press conference, or day, which makes finding context nearly impossible. This is why every major magazine in the world is doing 2-year Katrina issues this month -- to try and step back and deliver a wider view of what happened, why, and what it means to our lives. "Ordinary" is not necessarily the opposite of sensational, its just different, and in choosing to make ordinary or mundane images of giant world events, I don't think that Delahaye is actually showing their effect on our everyday lives. What he is doing is showing that war, famine, evil men, and everything else is also just life, and that by always narrowing our view and excluding the un-dramatic, we lose the more accurate pictures of what it was really like to be there.

The other problem with mundane/ordinary is that it is anything but these days as represented by art photographers. Celebration of the mundane is everywhere, and its very rarely as thoughtful as it is in Delahaye's exhibit. And ultimately that's the split between the two shows: Weston finds delight and wonder in the ordinary and daily, and Delahaye steps back far enough to view the extraordinary through the filter of life (to so many very, very deep sadness and regret) as normal.

Ultimately its wonderful for Delahaye's work to be exhibited and seen. After a chat with one of the salespeople in the gift shop, I learned that my favorite little book is also a very hot item as well (wahoo!). I'm not going to hold my breath that art institutions are going to catch on to the ironic stupidity of their grandiose text, trying to exclaim a photographer who shows the depth and complication of current events while ignoring the same in the process and production of the pieces (while simultaneously ignoring almost all true documentary work by people who are even more independent from the Big Bad Media Machine). Cheers to you, Luc - congrats on your success! Why don't you start a grant with all of the 5-figure checks!

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Comments (2)

I had the same reaction to the photo of the OPEC meeting when I was at the Getty last Thursday. It changed how I saw the photo, and not in a good way. I guess I'm just a purist. The one of the refugee camp was my favorite, without question. And I felt the same way you did about Edward Weston's stuff. I really, really wanted to like it. But I could see Delahaye's work in the next room, and I pretty much flew through the Weston space to get to Delahaye. I guess that tells you what my priorities are.

Add me to the list of the disappointed about the OPEC image. I read the Getty website and thought I read it wrong. What is pure, really? He has put himself in Walker Evans camp, and for as amazing as his work is, some of it is not so pure, but today's standards. I still like that image. The work almost makes me want to the a Technorama myself. I also find it interesting that Delahaye's previous books were small and now his work is so large.

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