I should have brought this to the table sooner--sorry about that, but--
I wonder if Westerbrook's comments in the Chicago mag article are really
best understood in the context of his chapter, The Chicago School, in his
book, Bystander, where he explains the Bauhaus movement--coming out of the
Institute of Design--as established by Moholy-Nagy, Callahan, and
Siskind--and later students Joespheson, Metzker, and Barabra Crane. The way
these photographers used *photographic technique*--multiple printings &
exposures, photograms, composition of light and shadow etc--yeilded greater
abstraction (as you would expect of this modernist/constructivist movement),
and hence, greater *intellectual distance* as Westerbrook *might* say. So
when Westerbrook says, Maier is no Callahan, he is, in fact, right, but so
far, it looks as if she never intended to be, so it's really an unfair
comparison in my view.
I absolutely love Harry Callahan's picture Alley, which you can see here.
http://www.geh.org/ne/str085/htmlsrc9/m198111310002_ful.html To me, this
is soooo Chicago! I love it. To my eye he, has used the *photographic
technique* of multiples--multiple printing- to great effect. What I also
find interesting about the Chicago School, as Westerbrook explains, is their
interest in light; the interest lay not so much in the specific subject, but
rather in the structure of light around the subject--it's angles etc! I can
see in my own mediocre body of work that I pay so little attention to the
specific kinds of light in my native location--oh, I bow my head to magic
hour light and morning light occassionally, but virtually none of my work
incorporates the unique charcter of the shafts of light that occur here,
especially in the downtown area. To pay so little attention to light seems
to miss the point; kind of like a writer not being that interested in words.
Well, be assured, I'm embarrassed enough!
One last interesting point about Callahan; at one point he began to reject
the Bauhaus movement:
"Everything was Bauhaus this and Bauhaus that. I wanted to break it . . . I
got tired of expermination. I got sick of the solarization and reticulation
and walked-on negatives. What I was interested in was the technique of
seeing. . . . I introducded problems like 'the evidence of man,' and talking
to people--making protraits on the street. . . .I thought [the students]
should enter into dealings with human beings and leave abstract photography.
I felt that social photography would be the next concern."
Seems to me Maier followed that concern! cheers, Christine
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