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Mark Steinmetz: American Photographer in Paris
| Article
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19032 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
1,296 Words |
| Author
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Larry R. Thall
Larry R. Thall is a photography writer for the Chicago
Tribune and former managing editor of Photomethods magazine |
Looking at photographs of foreign lands is an enjoyable form of vicarious travel for many Americans. To appreciate the Paris photographs of American photographer Mark Steinmetz, though, requires somewhat more effort than flipping through the pages of National Geographic or Travel & Leisure magazines. Few of Paris' famous landmarks are clearly recognizable in Steinmetz's photographs--a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower in the distance; a small piece of the Louvre pyramid and a side of the museum--that's about all.
Unlike Atget who spent many years cataloging the city's architecture, or Brassai who documented its celebrated nightlife, however, Steinmetz's photographs use Paris as a backdrop, as much for exploration of the photographic medium as of physical geography.
Photography critic Janet Malcolm once wrote that if you scratch a great photograph you find two things: a painting and a photograph. In other words, the concerns of traditional painting content, formal composition, light, and symbolism are present, but it's the photographic process that gives the image its unique vitality. Since the 1960s, however (the decade in which Steinmetz was born) many American photographers have endeavored to produce pictures, which if scratched, torn, or otherwise mutilated, will reveal but one thing: a photograph.
No sentimental nostalgia for 1950s films, Gene Kelly's dancing or George Gershwin's scores was meant to be implied by the title of this essay. It rather was designed to suggest an aesthetic evolution between the Paris photographs of Steinmetz--a 29-year-old Chicagoan working in the French capital sporadically throughout the mid-to-late 1980s--and the images of the city made by renowned European photographers of preceding generations.
Since the 1839 public announcement of Louis Daguerre's invention, the first commercially viable photographic process, at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, empirical evidence strongly indicates that more fine-are photographers have exposed more film chronicling that city, then any other western capital.
Two of the most talented and famous were Andre Kertesz and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Steinmetz views their work as influencing his own.
Born in 1894 in Budapest, Kertesz spent a decade (1925 to 1935) photographing in Paris. His work affected many photographers including Cartier-Bresson, his junior by fourteen
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