Maybe it's just pre-Christmas grumpiness on my part, but one suspects that the pairing of Alfred Eisenstaedt and Ansel Adams in the current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario was more the product of expediency than genuine curatorial initiative -- the opportunity to take advantage of a touring Adams show from the United States and to get part of David Thomson's photography gift (the Eisenstaedts) up on the walls pronto, while simultaneously filling a programming hole as the Toronto gallery toils toward its completion date in 2008.
Looking at these two exhibitions, hitched together in what feels like a somewhat artificial way, I had to wonder at this strategy. It feels a bit like pairing Jagger with Sinatra (hey, they're both singers) or Rembrandt with Schnabel (they both paint). Play this parlour game in your head and you realize that just about any such combination could produce interesting collisions and intersections.
Such is the case, ultimately, with these two. Compare and contrast.
Adams is best known for his canonical images of the natural world, and, in particular, of the American West, images such as Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (included in a spectacular large format print here), and Monolith: The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, a photograph of a looming rock face that captures the stupefying scale and fundamental, unnerving indifference of the natural world Adams encountered with his camera. Bent on furthering the case for photography as fine art, Adams was instrumental in the creation of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote many books on photographic technique and was a tireless proselytizer for the medium.
Eisenstaedt, on the other hand, was a photojournalist, shooting for various German newspapers and magazines in the twenties and early thirties before decamping in 1935 to the United States, where he conducted about 2,500 shoots on assignment for Life magazine.
He became a key figure in photography's rising supremacy in mass media andshot 92 covers for Life.
The two photographers can thus be seen to embody two poles of photographic production: that which tends to the gallery wall and that which tends to the page of the newspaper or magazine.
The Adams show, drawn from the famous collection of William and Saundra Lane, gives us a healthy sampling of the traditional Adams so widely known and beloved, an artist whose art has moved from fine art into the realm of popular culture, to take its place in the Sierra Club calendar and on the dormitory wall. Since the sixties, his photographs -- which document U.S. national parks such as Yosemite, the California coastline, Taos, N.M., and other treasured places in the American cultural psyche -- have been carried to fame on the rising tide of the environmental movement, borne along on a stream of back-to-the-land yearning.
But this show throws us a few curve balls, revealing a more complex view of the artist than his reputation as a pioneering landscape photographer would allow. There are some portraits here, such as his spectacular shot of Georgia O'Keeffe flirting with the camera , and the grizzled denizens of a waning gold-mining town on the western flank of the Sierra Nevada.
He made object studies -- formal experiments revealing gnarled wood, snow accumulating on pine needles, the fleshy whorls of a single rose -- that one could mistake for photographs by Edward Weston (his partner, with Imogen Cunningham and others, in Group f/64, active in the San Francisco Bay area during the 1930s).
He made pictures of Hornitos and Westport, Calif., that call to mind the shrewd editorial insightful of Walker Evans's photography and his desolate clapboard geometries. And Adams's photograph of the low-budget housing developments straggling along the flank of the San Bruno mountains behind San Francisco feels kindred to the work of the New Topographics photographers such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Stephen Shore, who explored the fringe of urban America. Adams was an evangelist for the medium, but he also wrung from it more range than is commonly understood.
Just as remarkable, though, is the sense of place that one receives from these pictures. Adams gives us the West, northern California particularly, in all its hot and dusty, eucalyptus-scented simplicity. This flavour couldn't be more precise.
Eisenstaedt, too, covers a lot of ground. The selection of work on show here is drawn from the Klinsky Press Agency archive, a repository of about 20,000 photographs amassed during the 1930s in Germany, which was bought in its entirety by David Thomson and gifted to the AGO in 2002. (Thomson chose to remain anonymous as the donor, and is nowhere noted in the press materials or text panels, but it hardly seems fair to let the occasion pass without a thank you.)
What we see in this show are classic examples of Eisenstaedt's output as one of Germany's premier prewar photojournalists, as well as the work that followed in the United States. (The AGO now owns 800 of his prints.) The gallery's curator of photography, Maia-Mari Sutnik, has chosen to focus our attention on a few clusters of images drawn from Eisenstaedt's assignments, and this gives us a sense of the ingenuity he brought to bear on his subjects. Dramatic angles, plunging shadows, telling narrative detail, psychological insight -- these are all the constituents of a vision that defined American photojournalism.
This is a man who could wring a wide significance from his sometimes rather quotidian subjects. Looking at his photographs of the puppet makers of Neustadt bei Coburg, we see a workshop that could be medieval, but is now infused with the beginnings of assembly-line production. Eerie orderliness is highlighted as well in his documentation of a commercial bakery or, once he gets to America, of the young students at the School of Rhythm and Deportment.
Eisenstaedt witnessed the seeds of fascism in Germany with prescient insight (there is no way to avoid this reading of his 1934 photograph of a young German ballerina performing before a Nazi inspection committee), and when he goes to the U.S., he finds regimentation there too, and a kind of soullessness that seems to echo the terrors of the Old World. Thus, we can read his 1936 picture of a young woman in her sunglasses -- Dark Glasses: The Newest Rage, with their sweeping lenses reflecting the Manhattan skyline -- as an image about the rampaging homogenization of the individual in consumer culture, worshipping the twin gods of fame and materialism. With the insightfulness of the outsider, he could see what we are up against.
Something else emerges here, in considering these two. Adams is about what we are leaving -- a pristine state of nature in the West, with its vast, silent spaces, the romance of the frontier, the slower pace of life. Eisenstaedt, anxious chronicler that he was, is about what's coming. They stand astride the 20th century and they look both ways -- one back, one forward -- offering us a kind of twinned perspective on a historical moment of profound change. Photography played a role in that moment, an instrument of modern looking that is celebrated here by these two odd bedfellows. Adams and Eisenstaedt. Why not?
Two Photographers/Two Visions continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto until Feb. 4 (416-979-6648).