|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Britain's Prime Observer
| Article
# : |
20667 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
1,648 Words |
| Author
: |
Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
The eyes, like the ears, take in a language of their own. Unlike the code of sounds and syntax that snakes through the brain to be processed as words, visual dialects may bypass the verbal maze, retaining a power to impinge directly on the emotions, much as music does. This is the burden of the old proverb about one picture and a thousand words. In today's journalism, so clogged with visual information, this nonverbal impact shapes, if it does not determine, much of our popular understanding of the world and how it works.
These days we exploit this instant visual mode of communication primarily through the medium of television. At the end of the Second World War things were different. The newsreel was relatively wooden, highly stylized, and somewhat remote. Most of the visual intimacy and emotional impact we now associate with TV were concentrated in the field of photojournalism, especially as seen in publications like Life, Look, and Picture Post.
The American photographer Eve Arnold was and still is one of the best photojournalists to emerge from the period. Her work has taken her all over the world, but she has been based in the United Kingdom since 1961, attached to the famous agency Magnum and covering every aspect of British society and life from the royal family to the most obscure of Her Majesty's subjects. She is also known to a wide audience for her book Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation and other impressive collections, including China and The Unretouched Woman. Her latest book, Eve Arnold: In Britain, is a concentrated anthology of the work she has done over three decades in the United Kingdom. The best of these pictures have been mounted as a special exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery, at the foot of Charing Cross Road just off Trafalgar Square.
The peculiar quality of Eve Arnold's work is a disarming, almost musical simplicity; like a tune that sounds inevitable, something the listener himself might have imagined, her photographs often tend to the spontaneous and apparently artless look of snapshots, so easily caught as to make the viewer exclaim, "I could have taken that!" But--like the work of any real artist--this ingenuousness is deceptive. After a second look the remark changes: "I wish I could have taken that."
Again and again, pausing to scan a print carefully, the onlooker is surprised: One picture, almost like something out of a local newspaper, apparently shows a portly, ordinary politician posed in front of a seated row of old ladies (just behind him one of them, fingers
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
