Camera Mirages?
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
Camera Mirages? AMERICA IN CRISIS Photographed by Magnum Text by Mitchel Levitas Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 192 pp. $12.50. SELF-PORTRAIT: U.S.A. By David Douglas Duncan Abrams. 240 pp....
...Rather, they are nostalgic genuflections to the past by a people whose mind is on the future...
...Magnum began sending its great aggregation of photographers to all parts of the United States...
...America In Cris's features the work of 18 photographers, parceled into eight sections that are prefaced with a text by Mitchel Levitas, assistant metropolitan editor of the New York Times...
...The promise of upward movement and specter of decline create anxieties causally related to other social attitudes and actions...
...Our crisis today," he argues, "is a clash between the nation's traditional vision of itself—the American dream—and the hard, discordant realities it lives with " No doubt Levitas struggled to find a framework for the variety of pictures he faced that would give some sense of a planned photographic mission and, under the circumstances, schizophrenia seemed appropriate...
...Self-Portrait: U.S...
...With a discerning eye and technical virtuosity unmatched in the provinces, pictures were snapped and shipped back to the New York office, there to be edited by someone and, in turn, passed to another person who would finally supply the text...
...The American experience is seamless, not schizophrenic...
...This is a mirage of the camera, as should be clear from the photographs of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the Agee-Evans book that is not a production but an experience...
...There was no tension because Nixon was a shoo-in, though Reagan would have better suited the character of the place...
...focuses exclusively on these two events and might well serve as a pictorial complement to Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago...
...Only Mayor Daley and a few naive kids were happy, Daley because he had the power, the kids because they did not recognize it...
...The message of the Magnum and Duncan books are net the same, nor are the styles of presentation...
...neither of the books considered here will diminish their stature...
...Photographs of a sleepy town, Anywhere, U.S.A...
...Self-Portrait: U.S.A...
...There are also intimate photos of the two Nixon girls, Snow White and Rose Red, along with David Eisenhower, innocent as a pubescent teddy bear...
...only to the stifled spirit could it appear other than depressing...
...Of course, the reader is always privileged to rearrange the graphic impression to suit himself...
...In fact, it appears from this particular assemblage that the connect'on between man, building and land in the rural South lends life a richness transcending the liberal definition of poverty...
...But I would argue that the nation's traditional vision should not be equated with the American dream, any more than the dream should be separated from the realities...
...Some of the units deserve to be integrated, though, especially the two on youth culture and the quality of American life...
...A juxtaposition of the blank visages of the Democratic delegates and the anguished, bewildered looks of the young people on the streets would at least suggest the source of these feelings and, supplemented by the dazed, almost vacant faces of battle-worn and broken Marines watching the convention from a nearby hospital (Duncan's best photographs), could have portrayed the brutal contrasts that made Chicago a caricature of America in crisis, as Miami was an exercise in escapism...
...Miami, Duncan and Mailer agree, is the plastic creation of real estate men pandering to a hedonism bred by the ethic of constant labor...
...In both books, the quality of reproduction is superb...
...hawknosed Rotarians at lunch...
...Duncan is unable to capture the deep feelings of that affair, the hatred and the despair...
...The point is a simple one: There must be a congruence between medium and message...
...The pretentiousness of the titles is forgiven— indeed, is recognized—as being obliquely symbolic, given the national affluence which makes such productions possible...
...Not even the ebullient Hubert Humphrey could have anticipated the Democratic convention with joy...
...A., like America In Crisis, is a laudable effort if judged on its esthetic qualities alone...
...Where success is more valued than station, wealth must be the sign of accomplishment and poverty of failure...
...a rodeo, suburban cookout or cornfed beauty queen—these scenes are traditional enough, but their increasing rarity should be evidence that they do not represent the dream...
...Self-Portrait: U. S. A. is more an individual effort, since Duncan took the shots and wrote the text, but he candidly acknowledges his dependence on a host of other people, mainly for technical assistance...
...Still, there is a d sturbing aspect to viewing, say, the "bleak and minimal lives" of Southern share-croppers and reacting primarily to the photographer's marvelous sense of line and balance...
...The American dream is not tranquility but movement, not order but change, and the "hard, discordant realities"—which comprise the bulk of the Magnum photos—are its products...
...a field with rows of vegetables as orderly as the stripes in a flag...
...Both Duncan and Mailer devote the major portions of their books to Chicago, neither with notable success (perhaps because the reader's own vivid memories provide too much competition...
...Hardworking Republicans, the leaders of thousands of small communities and several large ones, turned it into a carnival...
...Reviewed by JOSEPH E. ILLICK Associate Professor of History San Francisco State College The Magnum photographers and David Douglas Duncan share a reputation for esthetic triumph...
...And if some of the chapter divisions seem artificial, such is the price of this sort of production, in which each photographer's contribution must be kept intact...
...18.50...
...But Levitas does not attempt to force his interpretation...
...Both are beautiful productions, and the word is used advisedly...
...Since these two books aspire to social commentary as well, however, both must be faulted for a failure to convey their respective messages with the clarity and depth of feeling that would have resulted from a rigorous yet imaginative organization...
...Duncan has captured some priceless portraits of delegates, along with rare shots of the Nixon inner sanctum, the most unusual being one of Billy Graham waiting to enter, unaware of the camera and candid, neither smiling nor praying...
...Months ago a task force was assembled for this book," declares the anonymously written blurb in America In Crisis...
...grandma peeling apples...
...Chicago is the city of work, not play—of muscle flexed, of reality rather than irrelevance...
...such tired but important themes as poverty and violence might also be revitalized by the same process...
...The least successful chapter concerns the major party conventions of 1968, rather dubiously entitled "The Political Response...
Vol. 53 • January 1970 • No. 1
