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Email PageEuropean Personal Journalism
November 30, 2006- February 17, 2007
Reception: November 30, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Brassai, Bill Brandt, Edouard Boubat, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Andre Kertesz, Rene Jacques, Marcel Bovis
Alan Klotz Gallery
511 W 25th StThe second decade of the 20th Century saw, in Photography, a turning away from the painterly romanticism of Pictorialism in favor of the more objective view of the group f64 (in the U.S.), and in Europe a more reportorial study of the bohemian life of cities like Paris, London and Berlin. While in the U.S. the large format camera remained the norm, the Europeans were more attracted to the increasingly miniature cameras culminating in the 35mm Leica.
Yet rather than wandering off to the relative privacy of Lake George or Point Lobos, Europeans sought each other’s company in the post-war playgrounds that were their cities…and especially the cities at night. World War I gave the Europeans a taste for the night… for the dark. They could hide in the dark, or be private in the dark, in the demi-monde of the night people. Thieves, prostitutes and their middle class victims and/or co-conspirators were all finding each other in the dark, or rather in pools of light on dark streets or under the roofs of clubs, bars and brothels. The daylight world was too well known. The night world was worth exploring, it’s where things happened as inhibitions fell away. The best of these photographers were the reporters of the night: Kertesz, Brassai, Rene Jacques and Marcel Bovis. These artists were especially adept at peering into the darkness, whereas Bill Brandt’s London seemed dark even at noon. Cartier-Bresson seemed to deftly intersect life as if it was a dance performance, and he was only cutting in. Boubat and Ronis seemed to go to sleep earlier, and loved to fit their street characters into the geometry of their neighborhoods to see the social fabric at play.
This personal journalism, the recording of the photographer’s personal involvement in everyday events and personalities, is actually a large departure from recording the world’s more importunate events as an anonymous disengaged observer. Personal journalists were personally involved and active participants in the world being observed.
This insinuation of the self into the world of social and cultural experience was new, and was imported into the US by such practitioners as Kertesz and Robert Frank. There it combined with the gritty, open ended, raw American experience and truly blossomed into what we call “street photography”. It was characterized by a large dose of the personal, exemplified by the work of Klein, Faurer, Smith, Arbus, Eggleston, Winogrand, Friedlander et al. The vestige of the pictorial, the loveliness of Paris as the broth of creation, is now completely gone, supplanted by cultural dissonance, irony and alienation. These questionable treasures are the basic building blocks of art in the 20th Century. But the first steps toward their grim agony-filled reality were taken by the European Personal Journalists of “La Vie en Rose”.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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Alan Klotz Gallery was last updated: 2008-12-01
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