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Email PageFour Decades at LIFE
January 11, 2007- March 3, 2007
Reception: January 11, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Carl Mydans
Alan Klotz Gallery
511 W 25th StThe Alan Klotz Gallery proudly presents “Carl Mydans: Four Decades at LIFE” an exclusive east coast exhibition of both vintage and modern photographs by one of America’s most famous and respected photographers.
Carl Mydans (1917-2004) began his career as a journalist with freelance writing work for Boston newspapers. In 1931 Mydans bought a 35mm camera and entered the world of photojournalism, becoming one of the new breed of reporter: those who know how to handle the typewriter and camera alike.
Mydans’ first important photographic assignment came in 1935 after he joined what was to become the Farm Security Administration (FSA) under the leadership of Roy Stryker. Stryker assigned him to document the southern cotton industry. Besides recording the facts of the industry, Mydans photographed the lives of those who suffered, the dispossessed and the exploited, setting a pattern to be followed by many other FSA photographers.
Carl Mydans’ stay with the FSA was brief. In 1936 he joined the staff of LIFE magazine as the first issue went to press in November of that year. He remained an active staff photographer until 1972 when LIFE ceased weekly publication. During those 36 years Mydans covered major news events in the United States, Europe and Asia. He experienced first hand the ravages of World War II and the Korean War. When war broke out in Europe, Mydans and his wife, LIFE researcher Shelley Smith, became the magazine’s first husband and wife photographer-reporter team to be sent overseas. In the Philippines he and Shelley were captured by the Japanese and imprisoned for 21 months. They were released to American authorities in exchange for Japanese prisoners.
Subsequently, Mydans was sent back into war in Europe for the battles of Italy at Cassino, Rome and Florence and the American-Free-French invasion of southern France in August 1944. The following years saw him return to the Philippines covering General Douglas MacArthur’s landing. One of Mydans’ most celebrated shots was of this famous commander striding ashore at Luzon beach in January of 1945.
Mydans was not only a war photojournalist. His body of work spans many subjects. A master of portraiture, Mydans made studies of such artists and political figures as William Faulkner, Nikita Khrushchev, Harry Truman, Vladamir Nabokov, and Gable and Lombard. His photo essays include coverage of the town of Freer, Texas, unemployed workers on the east and west coasts during the Depression, sandhogs working under the East River in New York City, and migratory workers.
Mydans work shows he was comfortable with either the macro or the micro view of history. He could take the staged photo-op of MacArthur wading ashore in his pressed Khakis “returning” as promised to the Philippines at Luzon. He transformed this bit of theatre into a powerful and compelling national historical composition along the lines of “Washington Crossing the Delaware”. Or he could show you the deep suffering in the eyes of a depression era sharecropper. He was the photographer for all seasons. His photographs etched themselves into our collective psyches describing, explaining and sympathizing with all that life threw at us as individuals and as a nation.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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