December 22, 2006
TOWERING TALENT
Photography could be described as an effort to capture and freeze the ever-in-motion with a static medium. Nature, people, almost all living and even inanimate subjects are in some sort of motion, albeit of various speeds. One exception is architectural photography; the practice of taking portraits of immoveable objects most frequently with a tool that emphasizes light, dark, lines, shape, and detail.
The small-format camera — 35 mm or the digital equivalent — is terrific for capturing fast moving action and doing it inconspicuously. It is virtually impossible to use a view camera unobtrusively. They are big, maybe 8 inches by 10 inches, with a bellows that can extend for two feet. Because they are heavy, they have to be supported on a tripod. To see the ground glass properly, the photographer uses a black cloth that drapes from the rear of the camera to his waist. But they are ideal for certain types of photography, and one of them — architectural photography — was Mr. Trager's first enthusiasm. (He went on to become an important photographer of modern dance, but for that he used a handheld camera.)
The view camera, because it is fixed on its tripod, allows meticulous framing. The photographer decides with great precision exactly what he wants in his picture, and what he wants to exclude. It favors photographers with a strong sense of composition, Mr. Trager's great strength. The image the photographer sees on the ground glass is upside down and reversed, which gives him a sense of its abstract qualities. (Representational painters will look at a canvas upside down for the same purpose.) The bellows can be adjusted to eliminate parallax, the illusion that the sides of a building are converging. And the large negative size captures an enormous amount of detail. Mr. Trager used all these traits to great effect in his 1977 book "Photographs of Architecture." Six blackand-white vintage prints from it are at Stevenson.
The photographer mentioned above is Philip Trager, a lawyer turned photographer whose work is currently being shown at the John Stevenson Gallery at 338 W. 23rd St. between 8th and 9th Aves in an exhibit called Philip Trager: Retrospective. Some examples of Trager's work is available online at the Stevenson Gallery site here.
The New York Sun ran a great review of the retrospective in yesterday's paper.
Mr. Trager's impulses are not those of a documentarian, or even properly those of an architectural photographer, but of an art photographer. He uses his view camera to make a handsome picture that happens to have this or that house as its subject. His indebtedness to the Walker Evans of "American Photographs" is clear, but so is his difference. The simple two-story wood framed house in "Glastonbury" (1976) is shot head-on, as Evans might have taken it, but from farther away, to give a sense of its placement in a treerimmed field. It is winter and the two large trees on either side of the path leading to the front door are bare of leaves. Mr. Trager shot with the sun low so that the trees cast dramatic shadows on the front of the house and on the lawn, upsetting its symmetry. There is a calculated beauty in the image that careful manipulation of his view camera made possible.
Philip Trager: Retrospective runs through January 13. The gallery is open to the public Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 - 6 p.m.
Posted by Lexiphane at December 22, 2006 2:03 PM
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