The Nation's Pulse/Lens Democracy
Mallon, Thomas
Lens Democracy by Thomas Mallon F or a century and a half the politician and the camera have been involved in a power struggle, changes in technology shifting the advantage between one side and the...
...George Bush, going halfway as usual, accepts a ceremonial pipe from Crow medicine-man Floyd Realbird in Billings, Montana, but instead of trying on Realbird's magnificent bonnet, Bush is pointing toward his waiting limo...
...Whatever he's doing in his freshly pressed suit, it's certainly not milking...
...you know what comes just before and after them, and it's frustrating not to be able to scroll them forward or backward...
...Soon the camera could even travel along with a Thomas Mallon's latest book is the novel Henry and Clara (Ticknor & Fields...
...48 The American Spectator December 1994 the additional merit of giving an aerodynamic lift to Nixon's jowls), but politicians are best captured when they are trying to manipulate people instead of permitting photographers to manipulate them...
...His Eisenhower, wan and wall-eyed, is of course meant to surprise us with some sort of meaningfully reversed expectations, but it doesn't, any more than a driver'slicense photo exerts any strong claim as truth or art...
...Even so, still photography invites greater contemplativeness, and it's only in Michael E. Samojeden's AP photo that you're likely to spot the person actually driving the tank, who's keeping his head sensibly hidden behind a gun...
...Probably the best political photographs come out of election campaigns, when the candidates are desperate with self-importance and the voters are jazzed by courtship...
...Forty years later, Michael Dukakis, the closest thing to Dewey the Democrats ever came up with, rides an M1-A-1 battle tank toward a photographer who has just helped to build the George Bush presidential library...
...The photo opportunity, which came in with Teddy Roosevelt (shown here riding a steam shovel and weighing some skinny boys in a New York hospital), brought politicians to a point of maximum power over the camera, allowing them to be a different sort of actor from the kind they had been playing since the Roman forum...
...Riding through Elwood, Indiana, in August 1940, Wendell Willkie—surrounded by roaring faithful tipping their hats, and police motorcycles churning up dust—seems so mad with excitement that he can't have noticed how he's just ridden past the undertaker's parlor...
...A 1952 Cornell Capa shot of Adlai Stevenson, "Deciding Whether to Run for the Presidency" as he sits beneath a tree on his Illinois farm, canstill probably fool some of the people some of the time—though Al Gore, who sits next to Bill Clinton in "Family Help," a 1993 AP photo of the president and vice president talking "on telephones in the Oval Office . . . to families who were forced to choose between their jobs and time off to care for children or ailing parents," seems to be overacting his way through a tryout for the St...
...Occasionally, a single photograph in this exhibition will call up many moods, such as one from 1977 that gives us a group including Carter, Robert Byrd, and Tip O'Neill, all dewlaps and wattles and perplexity, a ridiculous picture of one-party gridlock—comical until you realize that the emaciated fellow with the wisps of hair at the picture's left is the gallant, dying Hubert Humphrey...
...Her face, full of intelligence, is more directly present than either Mrs...
...Kennedy is fully present, fully in control, projecting mystery into the camera with more art than that mustered by most of the thousands of photographers who took her picture...
...Even after its cornball apotheosis with Fiorello LaGuardia, who drove rivets, cut ribbons, smashed slot machines, and pretended to fight fires to shamelessly good effect, the photo op wasn't exhausted...
...In fact, Mrs...
...1 50 The American Spectator December 1994...
...Lincoln, unsurprisingly, manages to defy convention even as he honors it...
...More thought-provoking, and certainly amusing, is a 1945 Life photograph of the general returning to his mother's front porch in Abilene, Kansas...
...Her talent was something opposite to that of Ronald Reagan, a man who, in so many photos one remembers, madehimself seem fully present to the camera, shaking your hand with his eye, while all the time a part of him, probably the best and most interesting part, was somewhere else...
...So stunned does Martin seem (he's on his way to becoming Speaker of the House), and so in character everyone else around him, that a viewer wonders just how spontaneous Allan Grant's picture really was...
...Early presidential facial expressions run to impatience and bafflement, as their wearers struggle not to move: Martin Van Buren leans on a book and John Quincy Adams folds his hands, to steady them, one suspects, in his lap...
...Jacqueline Kennedy's beautiful face fools the lens into thinking it's being eluded, that her realest part is somewhere else, held in reserve, a glamorous mystery...
...The camera's true historical focus here is less on the familiar faces than on all the tiny heads looking up at the platforms and waving from the sidewalks, row upon row of them, blurry bowlers and Gibson-Girl hairdos, appearing to be mere extras who made up the crowd scenes, but in fact the people who, however imperfectly, ran the show...
...After the Civil War, the camera's increasing speed and portability allowed the politician to force it away from portraiture and into witnessing the historical moment...
...But it says something fine about the national character and the essentially untragic history of the United States that irreverent and humorous pictures make up as large a part of this show as they do...
...The current exhibit provides few depictions of politicians in truly unguarded moments, but the most pleasing of these comes from Atlantic City c. 1928, when Al Smith and his plump, giggling wife crowded into a photo booth and made two four-shot strips, unfiltered and fully human...
...The Happy Warrior is also shown in an Indian headdress ("Governor Smith Becomes Chief 'Leading Star'"), a venerable subgenre of political photography...
...He makes Clinton look positively genuine...
...The current exhibition offers two wince-inducing examples, the first of them from September 1947, in which Governor Thomas E. Dewey appears to be performing chiropractic upon a cow...
...Pat Nixon lacked the acting skills of either of these two...
...one sees her straining to cooperate in a situation she cannot bear but knows she must, unable to displace herself mentally to wherever it is she would prefer being...
...There's no here there...
...When dealing with politicians, art photography is generally about as appealing as state-sponsored painting...
...politician on the mere chance that something might happen...
...The curators of "American Politicians: Photographs from 1843 to 1993,"1 which runs at New York's Museum of Modern Art through January 3, have tried to keep a balance between general historical significance and important developments in this particular genre of picture-taking...
...In this show, William Jennings Bryan and James Garfield, each of them photographed in a six-button coat and trying to look as Napoleonic as possible, provide a study in contrasts between the former species and the latter...
...No photographer ever "got" Reagan any more than a biographer will...
...the blood pours down from his head and a young man rushes wide-eyed to his aid...
...A viewer will find little of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, however much the camera loved each of these titans, and a surprising amount of William McKinley, a dull-looking man whose photographers did an interesting job (inthe days before zoom lenses) of capturing the crowds around him...
...But recent photo ops seem less autonomous than the older ones, more like millimeters of a video you've got on Pause...
...there has rarely been a picture of politicians more joyfully in their element...
...The oratorical ham gave way to the silent player of tableau vivant, which required little more than the ability, after hours of someone else's advance work, to show up when the flashbulb popped...
...General Grant actually stands with his head clamped between the tines of what looks like a giant tuning fork...
...The show gives us Jimmy Walker similarly attired, and of course, Calvin Coolidge, who looks as sad as one of The American Spectator December 1994 49 those William Wegman dogs forced into a negligee for the camera...
...The MOMA show is mercifully short of Avedon, whose coroner's style of portraiture remains utterly unrevealing—totally individuating, yes, but in the way of a DNA smear, and no more evocative of character or essence than that...
...Kennedy's or Reagan's...
...In 1910, William Warnecke succeeded in capturing New York Mayor William J. Gaynor an instant after he had been shot...
...The last thing she appears to be is plastic, a word with which she was always scorned, but which, in the application of its simple physical meaning to camera-subject relations, seems made for Jackie and Reagan and painfully inapplicable to her...
...T he camera may not lie, but that fact has misled many photographers and viewers into believing that every time it opens and closes its shutter it speaks the truth, whereas, like the human mouth, as often as not, it says nothing at all...
...n recent years the photographer has regained a certain power over the politician...
...After all, you've seen these images on video...
...Lens Democracy by Thomas Mallon F or a century and a half the politician and the camera have been involved in a power struggle, changes in technology shifting the advantage between one side and the other...
...But even in 1862, Gardner was shooting Lincoln and McClellan in a tent at Antietam, the two subjects looking animated and intense, a map or newspaper (it's difficult to tell) discarded at the President's feet, and a Confederate flag folded up on the dry ground...
...photo opportunities have, on occa- sion, undone the lesser lights of political theater...
...Photographed by Gardner in the last months of his life, he adopts the conventional three-quarters profile staring into space, but his lips portray amusement over his son, Tad, standing a foot or two away...
...Albans class play...
...A Life photo of John Kennedy from the same year shows the congressional hopeful sitting beneath his own poster, which looks as if it's been designed to tout a film instead of a candidacy...
...The camera does sometimes succeed in differentiating the mere phony from, to use a term of Truman Capote's, the "real phony," that preferable entity who actually "believes all this crap (he] believes...
...She is the one wearing a big grin, looking more like Ike than he does...
...Wasn't it, in fact, the waggle, i.e., the movement, of Dukakis's helmeted head, like one of those dolls with a spring in the neck, that added to the scene's absurdity...
...Edward Steichen's Theodore Roosevelt, from 1908, is gauzily heroic, and the 1955 Nixon that Philippe Halsman caught for his pointless "jumping" series does have a certain vice-presidential irony to it (as well as 1An accompanying book, with the same title, carries a text by Susan Kismaric and is distributed by Harry N. Abrams, New York (208 pp., $39.95...
...When the camera does manage to say something, it often does so by indirection, or even inversion, like the reliable source whose yes can be counted on to mean no...
...In 1984, even the still-squeamish New York Times could not resist running on its front page a Columbus Day photograph (absent from this exhibit) of Walter Mondale, Mario Cuomo, and Geraldine Ferraro stepping gaily around some horse manure on the parade route...
...The lenses are longer and less merciful than ever, and now tricks like "morphing" allow for such uncannily apt editorializing as Time's recent series of a half-dozen photos in which Bill Clinton turns into Jimmy Carter...
...In the beginning, like anyone else who posed for Mathew Brady or Alexander Gardner, statesmen had to stand still and, even less characteristically, shut up for a moment or two...
...Six years later, Congressman Joseph Martin is photographed through the office window of the Massachusetts paper he published, as he listens to election returns over the telephone...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
