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CHICAGO TRIBUNE, May 25, 1990
A censored genre and masterpieces from the past.
Review by Larry Thall
Joe Ziolkowski has been photographing the male nude for almost 10 years
now.
Although more than 20 of his black-and-white photographs go on view at
Catherine Edelman Gallery Friday night, in the exhibition "Amazing
Grace," the photographer works in a genre whose history has been defined
as much by censorship as scholarship.
"The history of the male nude is a history of man's [self] image
in 150 years of the photographic medium; it is a history of repression and
sublimation, and it is a history of overcoming the taboo," wrote Peter
Weiermair in the preface to "The Hidden Image," in his 1987 anthology
of male-nude photography.
Ziolkowski, who says his work has been censored several times in recent
years, agrees with Weiermair. "It's still a lot more [socially] acceptable
to look at the female nude than the male," he says. "Women are
more likely to look at the work. Men-it will put the hair up on the back
of their necks."
The continuing national controversy surrounding the homoerotic and occasionally
sadomasochistic photographs of the late Robert Mapplethorpe might lead some
viewers to believe that repression of the male nude in photography is simply
the result of antigay or antipornography sentiments.
However, in her introduction to "The Male Nude," published
in 1978, Shelley Rice indicates that this interpretion of censorship is
incorrect. "Just last year, for instance, Washingtonian magazine was
banned in a large metropolitan Washington supermarket because it contained
reproductions of Edward Weston's studies of his son Neil," she wrote.
Earlier in the century, Imogen Cunningham created a scandal when she
exhibited a nude photograph of her husband taken in the pictorialist style.
Ziolkowski's "Amazing Grace" images are devoid of explicit
prurient overtones and lean aesthetically toward classicism.
"Compassion and vulnerability are common emotions felt when looking
at his work," says Catherine Edelman, owner of Catherine Edelman Gallery.
"These are emotions not usually attributed to men."
The absence of these qualities in pictures of men is explained, in part,
in Rice's essay.
"Vulnerability is permissible-in fact, customary-for women in this
society, but it is hardly in keeping with the dominant masculine self-image,"
she writes. "As a result, nudity has come to seem like a stigma rather
than a revelation to men, a sign of feminine weakness rather than a sign
of masculine strength."
Ziolkowski says he is exploring in his photographs the physical and emotional
bonds shared by men, as well as the fact that men can't be openly affectionate
with each other in this society. "My goal is to create photographs
that cause viewers to consciously evaluate their own sexual parameters."
Ziolkowski's subjects, either alone or in pairs, appear to float in photographic
environments of pure white, outlined in black edges. In this one respect,
they are reminiscent of some well-known portraits by Richard Avedon.
Two small notches in Ziolkowski's black borders, however, indicate that
he works with a Hasselblad medium-format camera rather than the 8-by-10
inch view camera preferred by Avedon.
"Whether he shows an image of a man suspended in air, two men clutching
each other, a man balancing himself on an isolated piece of wood jutting
from the image edge, or men somersaulting, all of Ziolkowski's subjects
are bathed in a glowing (white) light," Edelman says in a written statement
accompanying the exhibit. Ziolkowski says white to him is a symbol of life.
Ziolkowski, 30, received his master's degree from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago and is a former staff photographer for the Museum of
Contemporary Art. He has spent the past year teaching photography at Southern
Illinois University at Carbondale and plans to move to New York City this
summer.
An opening reception for "Amazing Grace" will be held from
5 to 7 p.m. Friday at the gallery. The artist will attend.
Accompanying "Amazing Grace" is a selection of images by 19th
Century portraitist Baron Raimund von Stillfried and 20th Century masters
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, and Garry Winogrand from the gallery's inventory.
Baron von Stillfried was born in Bohemia in 1839 and had a multifacted
early career. He was a painter as well as a volunteer officer in the army
of Maximilian, the Austrian emperor of Mexico.
In the early 1870's, however, Von Stillfried opened a photographic studio
in Japan that was soon reputed to be the best in Eastern Asia. He also
purchased the studio of the then-well-known photographers Felice Beato and
Charles Wirgman in 1877.
Returning to Europe in the mid-1880s, he left his studios to the most
talented of his Japanese disciples. His departure marked the end of the
high point for Westerners in 19th Century Japanese photography.
Von Stillfried's photographic work in Japan was dominated by portraiture.
As was customary at the time, his portraits, although taken in the studio,
often portrayed reconstructed domestic scenes.
The painter-turned-photographer painstakingly hand-colored his albumen
prints. More than 100 years later, Von Stillfried's talent as a colorist
as well as a photographer is clearly evident in the exhibition's five beautiful
prints.
"Without Henri Carter-Bresson, it would be difficult to imagine
the work of Robert Frank, William Klein, or even indirectly, that of Lee
Friedlander and Garry Winogrand," photo historian Robert A. Sobieszek
wrote in "Masterpieces of Photography."
Since the early 1950s, Cartier-Bresson primarily has been known as the
photographer of "The Decisive Moment." Originally the title of
a Cartier-Bresson book, the phrase has become synonymous with the instinctive,
visually balanced, graceful type of street photograph for which he is famous.
One of the first group of photographers to shoot for Life magazine and
one of the seven founding members Magnum Photos Inc., Cartier-Bresson also
was one of the first photographers to fulfill the visual promise offered
by the 35 mm Leica rangefinder camera.
"I craved to seize the whole essence in the confines of a single
photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself
before my eyes," he wrote.
Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee (after the Ouija board), became
well-known for his '30s and '40s nighttime photos of gangland slayings,
botched holdups, arrests, suicides and tenement fires.
Although his nickname suggests an element of clairvoyance regarding where
and when the next local tragedy would occur, Weegee lived in a room across
the street from the Manhattan police headquarters and often slept in his
car, where he had a police radio.
The trunk of his car became his lifeline. In it he kept loaded 4-by-5
Speed Graphics and film holders, case of flashbulbs, a typewriter, firefighter's
boots, boxes of cigars, salami, uniforms, disguises, underwear and extra
shoes and socks. Reportedly, he often beat police squad cars to the crime
scene.
As a newspaper photographer, Weegee took pictures that often centered
on a corpse, suspect, prostitute or police official. However, he was one
of the first photojournalists to often turn his camera away from the action
and focus on the reaction of the bystanders. Weegee found that their expressions,
whether of horror, grief or sadistic amusement, presented fascinating photographic
opportunities.
Garry Winogrand is well-known for saying that he photographed in order
to see how things would look photographed. In this vein he displayed a
voracious appetite and was probably one of the medium's most prolific practitioners.
When he died in 1984, Winogrand reportedly left 2,500 rolls of exposed
but undeveloped film. More than 6,000 rolls of developed but unproofed
negatives also were found, as well as another 3,000 or so rolls that had
been developed and proofed but apparently not edited or printed.
Together with Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon and others,
Winogrand came of age in the '60s as a documentary photographer.
"Amazing Grace" and the additional selections remain on view
through June 30.
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