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Poems in Black and White: The Photography of Ernst Haas
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11804 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1994 |
1,808 Words |
| Author
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A.D. Coleman
A.D. Coleman is an internationally published photography
writer, critic, and historian currently based in New York
City. |
When Woody Allen chose to film Manhattan in black and white, he was deliberately evoking a vision of Gotham familiar today mainly through photographs. Pictures of this metropolis made by photographers who spent some years of their lives there have had a shaping effect on world photography over the past hundred years.
In her just-published critical study The New York School: Photographs 1936-1963, Jane Livingston, chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., offers an explanation for this phenomenon: the coalescence in New York, during the middle third of the century, of an informal but complexly intertwined group of photographers whose commonalities were such that they can be said to constitute a "school." In its art-historical usage, the term school connotes a commonality among a group of artists that goes beyond friendship and social interaction to deeper levels of bonding and influence.
Influential School
In that sense, there is no question that by 1950 a distinct "New York school" of photography had emerged. The personal, professional, and imagistic connections that link Lisette Model, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Alexey Brodovitch, Robert Frank, William Klein, Weegee, Bruce Davidson, and Helen Levitt have long been a matter of record. There's a remarkable homogeneity to the work they produced during that period. Collectively, they built on the models of Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, with Action Painting, film noir, and jazz as parallels in other media; treating the life of the streets as theater, they forged provocative, idiosyncratic ways of describing its dramas.
The late Ernst Haas (1921-1986) is not one of those whom Livingston names as key figures in this school, but it could easily be argued that he belongs among them. Certainly he knew and interacted with them all; he arrived in New York from his native Vienna in 1950, the heyday of the school's activity, and almost immediately made it his home and workplace. "I would have become lazy in Vienna," he would write three decades later, "so I went to New York, the city which makes you work and presses everything out of you . . . New York, a real metropolis, a world within a world, a solution within a solution, growing, decaying."
At the time he arrived, the city's photography community was still small enough that everyone working for the various picture magazines crossed paths constantly. Beyond that, however, Haas and this coalition
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