Spinster

Last night, I met up with my friends Eddie (of almost boy-version-of-me fame) and Stephanie (non blog-reader, but I forgave her for that a long time ago) for a gut-bomb of a Mexican meal at Margarita’s – and I mean that in the nicest way possible – after which we took in the photography exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Currently, the AGO is displaying photographs by Ansel Adams and Alfred Eisenstaedt. It’s kind of a weird pairing – the master of the meticulous zone system and the original California photographer meets the much more of-the-moment German photographer, whose pre-Hitler portraits of ordinary Germans are almost impossible to take at face value – but the photographs are magnificent.

I’d honestly never heard of Eisenstaedt before, though a quick Wikipedia check reveals him to be the artist behind that famous photo of the sailor kissing the nurse on V-J Day in New York. Though that photo captures a certain spirit, I have to say that I enjoyed his earlier works much more, maybe because I’d never seen them before. He did several series of occupations in Germany – bakers, the sewing industry, etc. – and they all generally have that Henri Cartier Bresson-like sense of capturing the moment. The kind of neat thing about Eisenstaedt is that he was working in Germany during its Weimar, pre-Hitler, period, which is when the photomontage artists John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch were also producing art that greatly criticized the emerging leader and challenged the racial and sexual discriminatory practices of the time. (Interesting, isn’t it, that German culture flourished so much right before what has to be considered the country’s bleakest period? It’s so easy to forget that twentieth-century German history goes far, far beyond WWII and the Holocaust.) Anyway, my point is that Eisenstaedt was working in Germany at the beginning of a very volatile time, and some of his images – some, but not all- reflect this. However, regardless of whether or not they include members of the Third Reich, I found myself considering the photos in the context of a world existing in the most fragile of peaces, between two enormously devastating world wars, entirely unaware of what was to come. Knowing now what the subjects of the photos did not know then is quite a way to view art…

Everyone is familiar with Ansel Adams. His images of Yosemite are world renowned, and many a student has proudly displayed Adams’ elm trees or mountain scenes on her dorm room wall. Again, it’s easy to forget that behind the sort of American cliche of Adams as the ultimate in black and white photography, there lies a very real artist. Adams started out the way most artists begin – you copy what you see, what is popular at the time, until you find your own vision – but once he found his style, he really never looked back. And, cliche or not, his work is gorgeous. The AGO has many of the most well-known works, including Moonrise over Hernandez, Half-Dome, and the tide series; and up close, they are breathtaking. The exhibit goes far beyond the masterpieces, however, and displays some of Adams’ early images and many of his lesser-known photos.

Adams and Eisenstaedt were working at roughly the same time, and one gets the sense that the US was operating in an entirely different world, perhaps to to its uninvolvement in WWI and WWII, in the sense that US turf was not involved until Pearl Harbour – this afforded artists the opportunity to meditate on the landscape in a way that Germany/Europe were unable to offer their culture-makers. However, this is a pretty limited way to take it all in, considering that the US was facing the Depression in the 1930s and many a bleak portrait was created to illuminate that particular milestone in twentieth-century US history (Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans).

Anyway. I don’t even know what I’m talking about any more. I’m tired and sick and I’m off to Deliverance country tomorrow, so no more posts for a while, darlings.