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St. Cloud, 1926
By Thomas Weston Fels When I was given a poster from the Museum of Modern
Art several years ago, by a well-meaning soul who simply wished me to enjoy
it, I had no idea that it would eventually prove to be my guide into
the field of photography. Perhaps I had an inkling. I was immediately drawn
to its dark sepia color, and to the sense it projected of a quiet misty
morning in a formal park. I liked the composition; large, dark forms in
the foreground, and more delicate, lighter ones behind; verticals against
horizontals, with continuing echoes of each. But this is hardly enough
to explain the role which this old photograph---and a reproduction at that,
has played since the time it was given to me. Although I had had it up
at regular intervals for several years, I rarely looked at it without discovering
something new: not a new branch, or tree, or path, but a new principle,
major compositional device, or discrete interwoven detail of design. In
a curious way its rugged simplicity seemed to hide an endless store of
elegance and subtlety.
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them has come insight into the artistic issues
they represent or are a part of, so that the picture has served as a koan
for, and its unraveling as the touchstone of, my education in photography.
At first, even the name was a mystery, an unpronounceable cluster of consonants proudly emblazoned beneath the photograph. Atget. Eventually I learned to say it: ahd-jay. But there was more. Why take a photograph of an almost empty tree, its naked branches nearly devoid of foliage? What was the statue to the left of the tree? What era of dress was represented in its darkened form? Where did the statue end and the tree begin, and was that a feather in the hair of the statue (like a Native American) or a branch which happened to be conjoined with the form of the head? Most of all, I wondered, why in a photograph of such delicate, spectral beauty, the representative image for a major exhibition, was there in the foreground a large pile of gravel? I thought about that pile of gravel off and on over the years. As I thought about it I noticed other things. In the private grammar of photography, those tiny leaves and fragile branches indicated spring. The effort to reconcile the vibrant yellow-greens of April with the still, dead, brown fixity of a scene which had occurred over fifty years before was like learning to read a foreign language. (Perhaps the pile of gravel had to do with repairing the roads in the park in the spring?) I noticed that whatever the precise nature of the statue, the salient fact about it was that it was indeed difficult to tell where it ended and the tree began. The photographer had taken care to join them, to link them at a point at which their respective limbs |
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were of a comparable size and shape. The statue
and the tree were thus very closely visually related, so closely related
that if one began at the tangle of arm and branch, it was actually a surprise
to find that, in following them out, one ended as a tree and the other
as a piece of stonework. Clearly, Atget had had morphology as one of his
guiding concepts in the composition of this photograph. (What had the form
of the pile of gravel to do with this?)
I noticed that both the statue and the tree with its branches, the most important foreground elements, were reduced by extreme contrast to a screen which was spread over the picture plane, a kind of two-dimensional pattern beyond and through which the rest of the photograph was seen. There was a subtle additional complexity to this in that the screen tended toward three dimensions at its base. (The gravel, more clearly modeled by the light, seemed a link between the fore- and middle ground.) Finally, I saw that the stone-curbed formal pond, which occupied the central middle ground of the photograph, was carefully aligned to put its borders in gentle diagonals which did not confront the viewer directly, and which emphasized in an indirect, discrete way its horizontal, planar quality. As my eye traced the border of this watery mirror with its truncated image of foliage, I could only admire the many concurrent levels on which order and meaning had been indicated and suggested without ever having been directly stated. Yet, there was an exception. How could I have missed it? The photographer had arranged his picture so that one short section of the pond's curb, insignificant in the overall composition of the |
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photograph, pointed directly to the viewer.
When I finally saw that single, small element in the design of the photograph,
I was greatly reassured. I knew without being told that I had traced the
construction of the image to its center; or, to put it another way, that
I had been told so by the artist. Once having seen that small detail, the
entire composition snapped into place. It was like a key: there was no
other way to read the photograph, no other way in.
That small detail spoke to me with amazing clarity. Its startling, because surprising, frankness caused me to step back and reassess what I had seen, to look with more hope and care now that I was sure I was on the right track. What I saw was a portal, an opening in roughly the shape of a door or a window, through which by virtue of the composition itself, I was encouraged to look. The photograph was thus to some extent, perhaps to a large extent, like much of modern art, about looking. It was about art, as well as being art. It had been a portal to me as well. Its major elements had fascinated me long enough to hold my attention until I had unraveled some of its less obvious ones. Still, in the middle of this metaphorical doorway, was a pile of gravel. Sometime after, I was given a large set of photographs from which to select and organize an exhibition of my own. It was as I looked through these pictures again and again that many of the mysteries of my Atget image fell into place. Eventually they were claimed by the various specific areas of photographic history and technique to which they properly belonged. The darkened corners which arched the top of the image were the legacy of early photographic lenses which distorted at the edge, or whose image |
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did not quite cover the entire glass plate.
The sepia ink echoed the color of early photographic prints on paper. The
sharpness of detail and careful composition were the product of an era
in which a heavy box camera had to be set up, and the results worth the
photographer's trouble. (This was an age for which Atget was in fact somewhat
late.) The calm morning stillness insured few human intrusions, and little
movement in foliage or water.
But what I learned from most was the tradition of documentary photography of which a large group of my photographs were a part. Because Atget had wanted to photograph in St. Cloud, he had had to work with what was there. He had had to arrange himself, making decisions in three dimensions, in such a way as to bring into meaningful relationship as many of the preexisting aspects of the scene as possible. As a result, certain relationships could be seen to be more intentional and important than others. The tree was a tree and the statue a statue, but by linking them the photographer had created a new abstract form. Many of the other relationships in the photograph, though supportive and relevant, were secondary to this one.. The bare branches of the tree neatly fit the blank space of the sky, filling it almost precisely to the horizon---but not exactly. The arm of the statue was echoed in the tree; the small bit of curb in a distant opening in the trees; the statue in another far away statue; even the trunk of the tree and the statue themselves shared remarkable similarities of form. Yet, on consideration, how could these correspondences possibly be perfect? Rather, Atget's genius seemed to lie not only in the discerning eye which had discovered and organized these |
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correspondences for the viewer, but in a certain ability to present them to us in their natural state, not encumbered but positively amplified by their association with the unavoidable world around them, with, in this photograph for example, such things as a pile of gravel. |