Photography

Few connoisseurs of the image are unfamiliar with the great French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). But his name is, unfortunately, unfamiliar to the lay person. This is a shame: his gloriously detailed, sharply focused black-and-white images of late 19th- and early 20th-century Paris evocatively conjure the shadows and lights of the boulevards, parks and alleyways of the Belle Époque. His astonishing close-ups of finely crafted architectural details are as striking as his sometimes surreal views of storefront windows and food-stall displays. Whether training his bulky large-format view camera on scenes interior or exterior, he reveals an aesthetic sensibility exquisitely sensitive to the world around him.

At Eyes of the Storm, the de Young Museum’s exhibition of photographs taken by Paul McCartney, mainly on the Beatles’ first American visit, the typical viewer will be surprised to find herself empathizing more with the rock stars than the audience. In early photos, the crowds – and the band members – are eager, curious and frank. But through the months and the cities and photoshoots, the Beatles learn to pose. They soon find themselves flattened by a camera’s gaze in a way all too familiar to just about everyone today. The collection opens with the Beatles’ British tour in 1963 and residency in Paris in early 1964. “We were just wondering at the world,” McCartney writes, “just excited about all these little things that were making up our lives.

We are familiar with Dorothea Lange’s gritty photographs of Okies during the Dust Bowl. New Woman Behind the Camera, which opens this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, showcases Lange alongside over 120 other female photographers who refashioned modernist photography in the same years. Photography developed through an ambivalent relationship to high art: the camera was often seen as a medium for journalism or advertising. Yet the modernist works here showcase the flexibility of the form. Still, there are inherent tensions in an exhibit like this. Georgia O’Keeffe once declined an invitation to be included in an exhibit of ‘women artists’: she wanted to be seen as competing with the best, not as part of an inferior subgroup.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’ was the headline of the New York Daily News. To which the City said to Ford, you first. When the Daily News ran that famous headline on October 29 1975, New York was teetering on bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford had declared he would veto a federal bailout. It looked like the Big Apple was stewed. The world had written off New York. The feeling was mutual: the city had written off the world. Between 1970 and 1980, the city lost nearly a million residents, over a tenth of its population. Still, New York attracted people who, against the reigning wisdom, would not or could not live anywhere else.