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     David  Blumenkrantz  Art  615  May  17,  2001  

THE  PHOTOGRAPHY  OF  ROBERT  FRANK  &  HELEN  LEVITT

(as seen through the filter of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction.")

“By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.”1

* Walter Benjamin, 1936

The photographs of Robert

Frank and Helen Levitt perfectly fit Walter Benjamin's exacting definition of film's potential. Both artists used the camera to expose the extraordinary details of life so often overlooked in the commonplace. Levitt sought

harmony in the body language of children at play, while granting significance to their

seemingly haphazard chalk drawings. Frank took Walker Evan's preoccupation with the

iconography of an American vernacular to the cusp of postmodernism, turning

jukeboxes and flags into symbols of what he interpreted to be a bland and faceless

consumer culture. (Figure 1)

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Photographs representing the two artists' most important bodies of work are currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art's "A Room of Their Own" exhibition. There are eighteen selections from Levitt's images of New York City street life in the 1940s, published in her book A Way of Seeing. Likewise, there are seventeen selections from Frank's landmark series The Americans, photographed during a Guggenheim-funded cross-country tour, and first published in book form in 1958.

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

While there are as many stylistic similarities as there are differences in the works

of the two photographers, this essay is not meant to compare the two. Rather, my purpose is to analyze photographs made by both artists in relation to Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction." Broadly speaking, Benjamin's treatise was built around the premise that the technique of reproduction, particularly embodied by photographic processes, robs artworks of their aura, the unique presence that surrounds an original work of art. However in analyzing the photographs of Frank and Levitt, the issue of the aura is less relevant than some of Benjamin's other themes. I specifically refer to those that center on his premise that mechanical reproduction "changes the reaction of the masses toward art," and "emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."2 Benjamin's essay outlines the social, political, and psychological implications of this "emancipation," which I believe are directly reflected in the works to be discussed.

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EXHIBITION  VALUE  OVER  CULT  VALUE  

In Benjamin's view the emancipation of art from ritual has led to a displacement of cult value with exhibition value. The results have been revolutionary:

" . . . by the absolute emphasis

on its exhibition value the work of

art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.” 3

I Figure 2. Untitled. Helen Levitt. Ca 1940.

Stenciled onto the wall at MOCA are

Levitt's own words: "The aesthetic is in the reality itself." Her photograph of a building

front marked with the scrawled message "Bill Jones mother is a hare" (sic) can be cited

as an example of the "incidental artistic function" characterized by street photography

since Walker Evans. (Figure 2) In this case, it is the bricks, boarded windows, chalk

writing, and reflections from across the street, which constitute the aesthetic. In the

introductory essay in A Way of Seeing, James Agee elaborates the point further:

"In   every   other   art   which   draws   directly   on   the   actual   world,   the   actual   is  

transformed  by  the  artist's  creative  intelligence,  into  a  new  and  different  kind  

of   reality;  aesthetic   reality.   In   the  kind  of  photography  we  are   talking  about  here,  the  actual  is  not  at  all  transformed;  it  is  reflected  and  recorded,  within  

the  limits  of  the  camera,  with  all  possible  accuracy.”  4  

UNCONSCIOUS  OPTICS  

Figure  3.  Rooming  House-­‐-­‐Bunker  Hill,  Los  Angeles.  Robert  Frank,  ca  1957  

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Benjamin theorized "the camera introduces us

to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." Compared with painting, "filmed

., behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of

its incomparably more precise statements of the situation."6 MOCA's inclusion of Frank and Levitt's "realistic" photographs among a collection of largely abstract works serves to accentuate the psychological differences between photography and other visual art forms. The viewer may find it incongruous to leave a

room of sublime Rothko Color Field paintings and be suddenly confronted by Levitt's New York. Similarly, the viewer must pass through the cluttered mine field of neo Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg before encountering Frank's grainy interpretations of American culture. Photographs such as Frank's Rooming House-Bunker Hill, Los Angeles (figure 3) lend credence to Benjamin's proposition that:

"A different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye-if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.”7

The partially hidden figure of the man beneath the steps imbues the image with an

uneasy sense of mystery, made all the more profound by the viewer's knowledge that this fleeting moment actually occurred, passing unnoticed to all but the camera.

5 A  WAY  OF  SEEING  

"Photographs   demand   a   specific   kind   of  

approach;   free-­‐floating   contemplation   is  

not   appropriate   to   them.   They   stir   the  

viewer;   he   feels   challenged   by   them   in   a  

new  way.”8  

Benjamin was thinking of Eugene

Atget's images of Paris when he wrote

these words, but one can easily apply

them to the work of Levitt, Frank and

others. Analogies with poetry are not

unusual in photography, and are useful in

Figure 4. Untitled. Helen Levitt, 1942

explaining Benjamin's insistence that

photographs require a new way of seeing.

Agee refers to Levitt's work as lyrical photography, "the most nearly related to the elastic, causal and subjective way in which we ordinarily look aroundus."9 (Figure 4)

The casual, unaffected positioning of the children in figure 4, the centering of the boy on the bicycle inside the mirror's frame, and the undisturbed rhythm of life on the sidewalk

behind them suggest Agee's line that Levitt's photographs "assemble their delicate

order like so many syllables in a line of poetry."10 Similarly, Jack Kerouac wrote in

The Americans that Frank "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking

rank among the tragic poets of the world."11

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Aside from the essays of Kerouac and Agee, neither Frank nor Levitt use supporting text to "explain" their photographs. The absence of captions indicates that the artists believe that images are capable of communicating messages, independent of the written word. All of Levitt's entries at MOCA are untitled, and neither photographer offers any information other than dates and locations. Their respective books are even more cryptic: The pages of The Americans are uncaptioned, but there is a list in the back of the book to identify the images. In A Way of Seeing, Levitt emulated Walker Evans' proclivity for of letting images speak for themselves. Other than Agee's essay, there is no text of any kind anywhere in the book.

SEMIOTICS  &  SURREALISM  

If the signification of imagery and symbols found in photographs can be thought

of in terms of language, then semiotics is introduced into the discussion. Ironically Benjamin (considered a forerunner of semiology) wrote that with the hidden political significance of photography, "captions have become obligatory.”12 Roland Barthes believed that although a (press) photograph is a message without a code, and has no syntax, it does contain a second order of meaning, a connotation, which must be deciphered. Barthes wrote that any text or caption only complicates this meaning.13 Therefore, in figure 4, the placement of the boy inside the frame of the mirror would seem to speak for itself - in a language that is as open to interpretation as any surrealistic form of poetry. Agee is correct when he writes, "In much of her feeling for the streets, strange details, and spaces, (Levitt's) vocabulary is often suggestive of and

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sometimes identical with that of

the Surrealists."14 He adds that

the surrealism in her images "is

that of the ordinary metropolitan

soil, which breeds these

remarkable juxtapositions and

moments, and that what we call

Figure 5. Untitled. Helen Levitt, 1945.

'fantasy' is instead reality."15

(Figure 5) Susan Sontag in fact

argued that photography is the only art that is natively surreal, and that "what renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past, and the concreteness of its intimations about social class."16 Which brings us back full circle to Benjamin's assertion that as mechanical reproduction emancipates art from ritual, art begins to be based on another practice - politics.

SOCIAL  SIGNIFICANCE  AND  CRITICISM  

The self-taught Levitt, who aligned herself with Henri Cartier-Bresson, shared the

French master's knack for capturing the "decisive moment." The same fluidity is central to Frank's work, yet in direct contrast to Levitt, his subjectivity was initially pilloried for the darkness of the moments he chose. When The Americans first appeared, both Aperture and Popular Photography printed editorials that declared it to be distinctly "un American."17 Many critics felt that Frank dwelled too heavily on negative experiences in

8 American life, and that the images were "largely incongruent with prevailing social rhetoric."18 The book has since earned the status of a classic, indicating that what Frank was seeing were interpretations of American life whose relevance were not immediately apparent to many in the 1950's, but have become more so in the years since. Benjamin, in a statement that preceded Clement Greenberg's dictum that "all original art looks ugly at first," anticipated the influence of photographers such as Robert Frank:

"Mechanical   reproduction   of   art   changes   the  

reaction   of   the   masses   toward   art   .   .   .   The  

greater  the  decrease   in  the  social  significance  

of   an   art   form,   the   sharper   the   distinction  

between   criticism   and   enjoyment   by   the  

public.   The   conventional   is   uncritically  

enjoyed,   and   the   truly   new   is   criticized   with  

aversion.”  19  

Obviously it is easy to identify the

political component in photographs such as the one Frank took during a Chicago rally.

(Figure 6) One could just as easily conclude Figure 6. Political Rally-Chicago. Robert Frank. 1956.

that all the photographs of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt are seen by Benjamin's "masses" as having a political basis for their conception, dissemination and perception. The lost aura is replaced with a social significance, which Benjamin argues is "inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect that is the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage."2o

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POSTSCRIPT:  SYNCHRONICITY  

Benjamin wrote his essay in 1936, the year that James Agee and Walker Evans began work in the South on their cult classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This introduces an intriguing element of synchronicity, and a measure of continuity to our history of photography. Evans' biographer Belinda Rathbone writes that Levitt became a friend of Agee's and a "disciple" of Evans in 1937, sharing their literary interests and a kitchen darkroom. From 1938-1941, around the time she was to begin her work for A Way of Seeing, she accompanied Evans during his excursions into the New York subways to photograph unsuspecting passengers.21 The publication of Evans' book American Photographs, along with his having recently been the first photographer to hold a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, gave Evans great influence, which he used to promote Levitt, and later, Robert Frank. When the Swiss-born Frank applied for a Guggenheim fellowship, it was Walker Evans whom he sought out for support. Evans, a former Guggenheim fellow himself and a member of the foundation's advisory committee, responded by helping Frank write his proposal, and authoring his own note of support. Evans would go on to extend his advocacy toward other photographers who infused similar (though not identical) political, psychological and social elements in their work, including Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander.22 The work of art in the age of reproduction, as elucidated by Walter Benjamin (his strident Marxism notwithstanding), can thus be said to have been validated and exemplified by a litany of artists dating back to Atget.

 ENDNOTES   1 Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Photography in Print. Ed. Vicki Goldberg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.332. 2 Benjamin, 327. 3 Benjamin, 328.

4 Agee, James. Essay. A Way of Seeing. By Helen Levitt. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989. viii.

5 Benjamin, 332. 6 Benjamin, 331. 7 Benjamin, 332. 8 Benjamin, 332. 9 Agee, viii. 10 Agee, xi. 11 Kerouac, Jack. Essay. The Americans. By Robert Frank. New York: Grover Press, 1959.9. 12 Benjamin, 332. 13 Barthes, Roland. "The Photographic Message." Photography in Print. Ed. Vicki Goldberg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 321. 14 Agee, xii. 15 Agee, xii. 16 Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Doubleday, 1973.51-54. 17 Nesterenko, Alexander, and C. Zoe Smith. "Contemporary Interpretations of Robert Frank's The Americans." Journalism Quarterly 61 (1984).568. 18 Nesterenko, 569. 19 Benjamin, 330. 20 Benjamin, 324. 21 Rathbone, Belinda. Walker Evans: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 155-170. 22 Rosenheim, Jeff and Douglas Ekland. Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology. Ed. Jeff L. Rosenheim with Alexis Schwarzenberg. New York: Scalo, 2000.

   REFERENCES   Agee, James. Essay. A Way of Seeing. By Helen Levitt. Durham: Duke

University Press, 1989.

Barthes, Roland. "The Photographic Message." Photography in Print. Ed. Vicki

Goldberg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.321-333.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Photography in Print. Ed. Vicki Goldberg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 319 334.

Frank, Robert. The Americans. New York: Grover Press, 1959. Frank, Robert. "Statement by Robert Frank." Photography in Print. Ed. Vicki

Goldberg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 400-401.

Kerouac, Jack. Essay. The Americans. By Robert Frank. New York: Grover Press, 1959. Levitt, Helen. A Way of Seeing. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989. Nesterenko, Alexander, and C. Zoe Smith. "Contemporary Interpretations of

Robert Frank's The Americans." Journalism Quarterly 61 (1984): 567-577.

Rathbone, Belinda. Walker Evans: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin,

1995.

Rosenheim, Jeff and Douglas Ekland. Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology.

Ed. Jeff L. Rosenheim with Alexis Schwarzenberg. New York: Scalo, 2000.85-89.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Doubleday, 1973. Takata, Ken. "Towards an Elegance of Movement-Walker Evans and Robert

Frank Revisited." Journal of American Culture 12 (1989): 55-64.