Photography and Realism
EDWARD STEICHEN'S famous and magnificent anthology of photographs entitled 'The Family of Man' has been brought to the Festival Hall by the Hutton Press. You will probably know already that this is a collection of more than 550 pictures by the world's leading photo- graphers chosen with a rigorous and sensitive judgement to illustrate the unity in diversity and the diversity in unity of mankind, as re- vealed in love, parenthood, labour, play and so on. This is a singularly American compila- tion, not only in its libertarian rhetoric of the Whitman-Frank Lloyd Wright-Sandburg sort, but also in its Whitmanesque montage of bold material images. Here is the world celebrating and singing itself—'The gamut of life from birth to death,' to quote Mr. Steichen's words. The photographer's gift is that of the selective eye, his ability to discover the viewpoint from which objects and events fall into a suggestive and formally engaging pattern or to pick that second at which life most eloquently projects its quiddity. This show reminds one how much of the painting which falls within the vague realistic definition is a translation of the photographic viewpoint and of the camera's level of inquiry, is a sophisticated documen- tary illustration energised by some 'con- temporary' method of handling, the smart New Yorker devices of a Ben Shahn or the tough devices of some of our Beaux Arts painters. The particular abstract language created by the camera is that through which the mass of people is now fed with experience and the overwhelming body of photographic images has imposed a norm by comparison with which any other method of pictorial projection, any less literal transcript of things, must seem esoteric. The social or socialist realist who wishes to convey directly to the public the admirable sentiments enshrined in this exhibition or any political or moral mes- sage should surely, to avoid the intrusion of formalism and personal fantasy, use the camera and not the paint brush. And indeed the majority, of these photographs are pro- foundly more affecting in the way of senti- ment or emotional persuasiveness than the
boring social realism practised on the other side of the Curtain or most of the realism to be discovered in the West, marked as it is by artistic compromise and devioukiess, not to say deviation. De Sica is a far more compelling artist than Guttuso.
BASIL TAYLOR
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