Pure Energy: Leonard Nimoy’s Photography

“Pure energy,” intoned Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in the classic Star Trek episode "Errand of Mercy." (In 1988, Information Society immortalized the phrase when they sampled it into their synthpop hit, “What’s On Your Mind.”) Actor, director, author, poet, philanthropist, photographer—Nimoy brings pure creative energy to every enterprise. R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Massachusetts, in conjunction with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, present a retrospective of Nimoy’s photography, capped off by his latest work, Secret Selves, in which he directs everyday people to tap into their inner energy and give form to their fantasy selves. The results are, as Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Pure Energy."

[Many thanks to R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Massachusetts, for providing me with the image above and press materials for Leonard Nimoy, which runs from July 29, to October 31, 2010.]

Heights and Depths

I’d love to know what percentage of art-related calendars consist of the art of Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, and Ansel Adams. The number has to be staggering. Born February 20, 1902, Ansel Adams has become over the years the comfortable-as-an-easy-chair photographer of choice for many Americans the same way that Rockwell has become synonymous with Americana and Kinkade with kitsch. Images such as Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (above, from 1941) simply take your breath away with their composition and beauty. Black and white photography never seems archaic in Adams’ hands. The tonalities just leap out at you. Adams also had the ability to frame an image in such a way that it seemed unfamiliar yet recognizable—just changed enough to make you look at it with fresh eyes. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico could almost serve as a pendant to the “Earthrise” photo taken by astronaut William Anders of the Apollo 8 mission that landed on the moon.

Unlike Alfred Stieglitz, Adams never resorted to distorting tricks to make his photographs more painterly, which was the ideal of much early photography. Instead, Adams pushed the technical limitations of photography to the brink ,experimenting with sharpened focus, increased contrast, different rates of exposure, different types of paper, and other darkroom magic to achieve realer-than-real images such as Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California (above, from 1944). Adams helped further photography as a medium when he founded with Edward Weston the Group f/64, which eventually became the photography department of the MoMA. Thanks to Adams’ efforts, photography grew from a poor cousin to painting and the other accepted fine arts to a medium on equal standing. Adams’ work also preserved much of the natural beauty of the American west, particularly that of Yosemite National Park. Sadly, much of the actual land has been altered by climate changes, but at least we have Adams’ photographs to remind us of what once was and what we have lost.



Other photographers, particularly Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, are associated with the social injustices of the first half of the twentieth century in American, but Adams also belongs in that circle. When the U.S. government detained Japanese-Americans in camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams felt compelled to fight back with his camera. Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center and took a series of photographs to demonstrate that these Japanese-Americans were “real” Americans, too. Adams faced heavy opposition (even Theodore Geisel, the future Dr. Seuss, drew cartoons questioning the loyalty of the Japanese-Americans), but he hoped that photographs such as Manzanar Baseball (above, from 1943) would change minds in a “See, they play baseball, too!” kind of way. Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans, the book that came out of this project, remains an almost-forgotten chapter of Adams career and certainly one that will never make it to the calendars. As with Norman Rockwell, we have grown too familiar with Ansel Adams and think we know him, but Adams has depths that we too often lose in his mountains.

Eye Spy

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Eaters, 1981. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1981.

At just around five feet in height, Barbara Crane has a height advantage over most other photographers. Crane makes herself inconspicuous and captures people at their most vulnerable, unguarded, and real moments, such as in Eaters (above, from 1981). The Amon Carter Museum’s current exhibition Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision displays this period of Crane’s long, protean career as well as many others. The catalogue, which features an introduction by Kenneth C. Burkhart and essays by John Rohrbach and Abigail Foerstner, brings Crane into clear focus not only as a visionary photographer but also as a groundbreaking woman photographer breaking into the boys club of modern photography while raising three children, who actually posed for her as her thesis subjects for 35 cents an hour. “It took me years—really years, way into adulthood to say I was an artist,” Crane confesses. In 1970, Crane began a two-year project of photographing people passing through a doorway, which became the series known as People of the North Portal. “Brought together, the images deliver a vivid sense of place and activity,” Rohrbach writes in his essay, “Seeing Life Differently,” “the repetitious dance of life walking out of a public doorway and into the street, given a nostalgic twist through hairstyle and clothing.” Crane’s still photography captures the movement and vitality of life with all its change and randomness. Crane herself has never stopped moving artistically over five decades of creating.

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Human Forms, 1964–65. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1964–65.

Crane’s Human Forms series (above, from 1964-1965) shows the influence of Edward Weston’s nudes but also just how different Crane’s approach to photography evolved from the work of Weston and others. Weston skirted the edges of abstraction with his nudes, but they always remained recognizably human. Crane, contrastingly, pushes the recognizable to the point of abstraction to make us see it anew. “Crane’s goal,” Rohrbach believes, “has been to critique our subservience to photographic realism and to suggest that we have fallen into a bad habit of giving undue preference to that part of photography’s magical language.” Writing specifically of Crane’s nude studies, Rohrbach writes that “[e]ach body almost dissolves, becoming a sinuous river flowing across a snowy landscape.” The gentle lyricism and natural sense of flow of Crane’s nudes departs drastically from Weston’s almost sculptural, static nudes. Such works beautifully capture the philosophical difference between Crane’s “challenging vision” and the vision of her contemporaries. Crane achieves what Rohrbach calls an “unnerving disconnect” that breaks old associations and forces us to reconnect with what we see before us.

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Neon Cowboy, 1969. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1969.

Crane jumps from subject to subject throughout her career, always seeking something new to cast askew and make new. In a series of collaged photographs involving neon lights, Crane “juxtapos[es] neon lights over faces like ceremonial urban masks,” writes Foerstner in her essay, “On the Path to the Perfect Photograph.” In Neon Cowboy (above, from 1969), Crane superimposes a grid of neon cowboy signs over a series of male nudes. Rohrbach connects Crane’s use of series to the influence of John Cage’s music celebrating the artistic potential of chance. Although the neon sign does not move, the male model beneath does, sometimes wearing the neon like a mask and sometimes pulling away, revealing the hollow “mask-ness” of the sign. Rohrbach also makes a fascinating connection between Crane and the philosopher- semiotician Roland Barthes. Contrasting Crane with Lee Friedlander, who sees photography as seeing rather than making, Rohrbach calls Crane “a linguist at heart, in love with photographs as signs rather than signifiers.” Such philosophical depth adds a whole new dimension to what seem to be Crane’s simple pictures of people, buildings, neon signs, etc. “Crane taps the everyday world for the tumultuous undercurrents of unifying themes: chance, accident, chaos, contradiction and mystery playing out before our eyes,” Foerstner concurs.

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Coloma to Covert: Fleshy Fungi, 1990. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 1990.

After years of photographing the urban landscape and its inhabitants, Crane went “back to nature” in the 1990s with her Coloma to Covert series. Crane brings her “unnerving disconnect” to such subjects as mushrooms in Fleshy Fungi (above, from 1990), rendering them more alien than earthly. Stretching her images into panoramic scrolls, diptychs, and triptychs, Crane not only mimics the Chinese scroll in style but in substance. “The images recall the pared-down vocabulary of haiku poetry,” Rohrbach writes. “Crane’s world may be alien, but it is remarkably inviting.” In other photographs consisting mainly of out-of-focus leaves, Crane makes “[t]he eye, desperate to find a foothold, fall ever deeper into the chasm of crystal-sharp trees beyond,” writes Foerstner. Whereas someone such as Ansel Adams, a friend of Crane’s, used mountains to speak of infinity, Crane uses the minutiae of nature to open up a universe. Flipping through the 265 beautifully reproduced plates of the catalogue, you get a true sense both of the versatility of Barbara Crane as she shifts from subject to subject and of her unchanging faith in what Burkhart calls in his introduction, “the serendipity of happenstance.”

Barbara Crane (b. 1928). Schisms, 2001. Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center. © Barbara Crane, 2001.

The Amon Carter Museum’s exhibition and catalogue may help win a place for Barbara Crane and her art in the hearts of the mainstream public. Crane’s art is both uniquely accessible while remaining uncompromisingly modern in its theoretical underpinnings. Crane continues to expand her repertoire by embracing the latest innovations in digital photography and computerized manipulations. Perhaps more than ever, the reality Crane photographs will find itself remolded in her spiritual likeness. Crane’s story is more than just a feminist success story, but it is certainly that as well. Faced with the reality of a male-dominated, realist-centered medium, Barbara Crane changed the rules of the game and continues to ask us to play along.


[Many thanks to the Amon Carter Museum for providing me with a review copy of Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision, with an introduction by Kenneth C. Burkhart and essays by John Rohrbach and Abigail Foerstner, and for the images above from the exhibition.]

Sex and Magic

"For me, S&M means sex and magic, not sadomasochism,” the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe once said. “It is all about trust." Born November 4, 1946, Mapplethorpe became the poster child for cultural controversy in the 1980s as AIDS, the disease that claimed Mapplethorpe’s life in 1989, thrust homosexuality into the American spotlight and opened up discussion of all types of sexual conduct. Whereas most of us see violence in many of the acts Mapplethorpe alludes to in his photography, he saw intimacy—acts natural to his sense of sexuality. Mapplethorpe fostered through his work an ideal of male physical beauty to rival the traditional female ideal in art. Mapplethorpe’s Robert Sherman (above, from 1983) echoes Man Ray’s famous portrait of Lee Miller titled simply Neck. Whereas Miller embodied the idea of the female muse for Ray, Sherman’s bald pate and heavily muscled neck and shoulders does the same for Mapplethorpe. Personally, I find much of Mapplethorpe’s work disturbing, but that’s more of an issue of my own boundaries than of any failure on his part. Sexuality is perhaps the most deeply personal aspect of whom we are, so any judgment is by definition a personal value judgment and not, as many hold, some universal rule to which all must conform. Sadly, Mapplethorpe’s sexuality and his artistic exploration of his sexuality still overshadow his larger achievement as an artist.

Mapplethorpe knew and exploited the whole history of Western art, especially in the field of portraiture. He felt a special kinship with musicians, including Deborah Harry, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, and Patti Smith (shown photographed above, from 1976). Mapplethorpe also photographed Smith for the cover of her first album, Horses. During the days of disco, Mapplethorpe enjoyed the freer sexual and cultural climate that these musicians came to embody. Unlike so many other celebrity photographers, Mapplethorpe actually maintained his high art aspirations while climbing the social ladder. The photo of Smith above reflects the singer’s “naked” style of emotional singing and playing. Smith famous “unladylike” persona struck back against sexual stereotypes as much as Mapplethorpe did in his sexually charged photography. It’s fascinating to see how Mapplethorpe flourished during this period knowing in retrospect the struggles he faced in the American culture wars just a few years later.

With the possible exception of Brett Weston, Edward’s son, Mapplethorpe emulated the flower and vegetable studies of Edward Weston like no other. Mapplethorpe’s Calla Lilly (above, from 1988), one of a series of studies of that flower, captures all the beauty of the surfaces and folds in striking close-up. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, Mapplethorpe also clearly alludes to the sexual overtones of the flower’s shape, but by the fact of his sexual orientation turns those allusions on their head. Sexual politics aside, Mapplethorpe knew how to create striking images in any format. The fact that his name has become synonymous with controversy seems a sad legacy. However, the number of artists and curators who have risen to his defense in the name of artistic freedom gives one hope that one day Mapplethorpe’s work will hang beside that of his inspirations and bring a sprinkling of that sex and magic that pervades all his art.