Photojournalism Icons at Monroe Gallery

Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Jul 29, 2011; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8

Without courageous, seasoned photojournalists, our understanding of the worldbecomes more and more distorted ICONIC CONSCIOUSNESS Art Issues

MALIN WILSON-POWELL

For the Journal

In our current era of citizen journalism, when amateur submissions are used on Internet news sites, technology and mediaconsolidation have rendered the work of professional photojournalists a much more contingent endeavor. There is, ofcourse, great value in the kind of rousing images that were taken by young women with cellphones during the heat ofEgypt’s uprising and transmitted instantaneously around the planet. But, what of the men and women who consistentlyinvested in firsthand photographic reporting over a number of years? The number of photojournalism images published bynews organizations has shrunk dramatically in the shift of emphasis to more entertainment and lifestyle coverage. Withoutcourageous and seasoned photojournalists actually going and talking to and taking pictures of people during the eruptionsof wars and revolutions, our understanding of the world becomes more and moredistorted.

“History’s Big Picture” exhibition at the Monroe Gallery of Photography is a gripping selection of images that brings homethe power of visual storytelling. Hung chronologically from the 1930s to the present, these 48 photo images by the mastersof 20th and 21st century photojournalism are predominately sobering. The overall impression of history and the big picturepresented here tells a collective story of “Woe is us.”

More than a third of the images are from what is known as the “Golden Age” of photojournalism, the 1930s to the 1950s,when magazines including LIFE, Look and Sports Illustrated (USA), Paris Match, and the Berliner Illustrierte Zetung alongwith newspapers The Daily Mirror (London) and The New York Daily News built huge reputations and circulations based onphotography by such artists as Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White. The show opens with the workof these three celebrity photojournalists, including Eisenstaedt’s image of the self-satisfied architects of fascism, “The FirstMeeting of Mussolini and Hitler, Venice, June 1934,” along with an especially chilling image of the vampirish “Dr. JosephGoebbels, Geneva, September, 1933,” the Reich’s minister of propaganda, himself a failed journalist and writer whoorganized the 1938 Kristallnacht for burning books and synagogues.

Capa’s “D-Day, Normandy, Omaha Beach, 1944” is actually a great watery blur of a soldier swimming toward such massiveimplements for killing as fortified tank turrets and hundreds of thousands of land mines. Bourke-White is represented bytwo images –– the first captures three raggedy children in front of a raggedy sign that announces “Entering New Deal,Montana, 1936,” which was a mini-boomtown that faded away in the 1940s after the completion of a federally financeddam. Her second image is a riveting, crowded composition of “Buchenwald Prisoners, 1945” each of them staring directly atus and still pressing forward across more than half a century from behind a metal fence on the day of their liberation.Scanning their figures and faces, it brings into question what the concepts of liberation and survival could mean to everyone of these individuals and their descendants.

On view are five iconic images that were seen on the front pages of newspapers around the world the day after they wereshot on location. In the case of Joe Rosenthal’s “Marines Raise the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945,” the U.S.government also printed 3.5 million posters for free distribution, and this image was certainly the template for Thomas E.Franklin’s raising of the flag by “Firefighters at Ground Zero, Sept 11, 2001.”

As the gallery notes, other justly famous images of the turbulent and troubled 1960s still “shake and disquiet us,” includingRobert Jackson’s “Jack Ruby Shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, November 24, 1964,” Eddie Adams’ “Execution in Saigon, SouthVietnam, February 1, 1968,” John Olson’s “U.S. Marines at battle of Hue, Vietnam, 1968,” and Bill Eppridge’s assassinationof Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

Mixed in with these images that are part of the collective consciousness of baby boomers and assembled to celebrate the

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gallery’s 10th year in Santa Fe (after 14 years in Manhattan) are many images that are no less powerful but that havenever before been exhibited on gallery walls. All of the conventions of fine art composition and framing are deployed bythese masters in the heat of the “decisive moment.” Cameras are angled upward to frame such famous men as WinstonChurchill, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. as towering presences. Ground level shots with strong diagonals thatsignal things gone seriously awry including Eppridge’s splayed, spot-lit pieta of Bobby Kennedy attended by a waiter onbended knee, Loomis Dean’s tilting blasted “Mannequins after nuclear test at Yucca Flats, Nevada, May 1955,” and JohnFilo’s “May Vecchio grieving over slain [fellow] student, Kent State, May 1970.” Unflinching, upright, straight-aheadperspective confers dignity and gives the viewer a place of privilege in such heart-wrenching situations as Ed Clark’s imageof a tear-stained African American accordionist “Navy CPO Graham Jackson playing” a dirge for Franklin D. Roosevelt’sfuneral cortege.

Sixties minimalism is used to great effect in Steve Schapiro’s austere and stripped-to-the-essential “White Women,Arkansas, 1961,” and in Eric Smith’s somber empty auditorium “Funeral for Iraqi War soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006.”Like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s late-1970s empty “Theatres” lit only by a streaming movie projector, Smith’s flag-draped, centrallyilluminated casket with no one in attendance is an eerie metaphor, in this case, of offshore deaths that are intended to bekept out of sight and out of mind. In 2003, the Bush administration summarily banned all coverage of the bodies of U.S.troops returning from Iraq, a ban that was lifted in February 2009.

That the gallery is almost always crowded with people talking about these images is due to a multitude of factors. The corereason is the consummate talent, quick response and fortitude of photojournalists working in often terrifying situationswhere their cameras make them prime targets. Are all those young viewers, who never had the opportunity to see them inprint, a testimony to their thirst for truth, rather than entertainment? Certainly, it also has to do with the central locationand welcoming open door of Monroe Gallery, a valuable addition to Santa Fe and a recognized international and persistentplayer in recovering and encouraging the best photojournalism.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the gallery is sponsoring an evening of conversation, today from 5 to 7 p.m., betweentwo American photojournalists turned editors, Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo. If you go

WHAT: “History’s Big Picture”

WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar

WHEN: Through Sept. 25.

HOURS: Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

CONTACT: 505.992-0800 or info@ monroegallery.com


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COURTESY MONROE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

“Funeral for an Iraq War soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006” is a somber metaphor by photographer Eric Smith.


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Sixties minimalism is used to great effect in Steve Schapiros’ austere image “White Women, Arkansas, 1961.


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Associated Press photographer Hadi Mizban captured a disquieting image of children playing in “Iraq ‘War Games,’ Baghdad,Iraq, July 2, 2007.”

“Demonstrators in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) Strike” is a 1937 photo by Time Inc. photographer Carl Mydans.


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Photojournalism Icons at Monroe Gallery

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