the possibilities of photography to create art

Rebecca Hyde Rowan Public Library

             For Diane Griliches, Vivian Maier, and Edward Curtis, taking pictures was a means to an end.  The different ends pursued illustrate the possibilities of photography to create art, capture a moment, or record history.

            Diane Griliches, the author of “Thinking Photography,” had a profession as a director of community musical theater.  But early magical years of snapping away with a Brownie box camera and spending hours in a dark room left their imprint.  As an adult, Griliches still feels the magic, but curiosity has led her to examine photography as “a gift of science to the arts.”  Her book covers technical and aesthetic elements of picture taking.  Griliches hopes that readers will be enticed into the joy of the hunt, the discovery, the capture, and the possibility of artistic creation.   The photographs in the book are collected according to theme (“The South,” “Animals,” “Children”) or process (high contrast, infrared, triton, hand-painted).  Griliches supplies notes, on technique or thoughts on the composition.

            “Vivian Maier:  Out of the Shadows,” by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, is the result of a team effort.  Maier (1926-2009) was an amateur photographer whose took more than a hundred thousand pictures of what pleased her as she roamed city streets.  She ended life in poverty.  Her belongings, including photo negatives and rolls of undeveloped film, ended up in a storage facility.  In 2007, the trunks and boxes were bought for $250 by a Chicago auctioneer, who sold them in small lots.  One of the collections was made available to Cahan and Williams, who organized the pictures in this book into “a photo memoir,” placing Maier’s work in the context of her life: pivotal years in France and New York City, travel across the United States, Chicago, the beach, the year 1968.  It appears that Maier lived her adult life through a camera, and the photos are her daily journal.  Cahan and Williams are reminded of Emily Dickinson:  Maier “lived an irregular, mysterious life and was able to convey what she felt about our shared world in a way that helps us see that world anew.”

            “Edward Sheriff Curtis,” by Edward Curtis and Joanna Cohan Scherer, is a collection of photographs taken by Curtis of Native American tribes in the first decades of the twentieth century.  Curtis wanted to provide an anthropological resource of a “vanishing race.”  But since the old way of life was passing, and because Curtis insisted on accuracy, his subjects helped him create his photographs, putting on traditional clothes and demonstrating the old tools and weapons.  And then there is the artistry used by Curtis to produce his spectacular images.  Joanna Scherer of the Smithsonian Institution is an anthropologist and a photographer, and she says we can appreciate both the record and the artistic creation.