The irony is not lost on me—as a photo-editor who has devoted many years to a medium known for stilling, or capturing, time, decisive or otherwise—that I should be equally consumed by another medium, one that defies any notion of “capture,” that I am seduced by dance’s very impermanence, especially in the case of Merce Cunningham. Cunningham’s choreography never leaves even a storyline to hang onto in its wake, but rather evinces a kind of isness, as if each dance has an ineffable essence that might somehow be touched, experienced, and that remains vital and resonant long after the curtain falls, so that endings are somehow intangible.

Cunningham’s sensibility was as much about time as about space—or, better, it was about the coexistence of the two and, unlike what transpires in much photography, time is liberated from illustration in a Cunningham dance. Things don’t have to happen in any narrative sense. Time is more about duration—which is in part why John Cage, and the other composers with whom Cunningham collaborated, had such freedom. In photography, conversely, the precise moment at which a picture is created may make all the difference—from evidentiary images to sports coverage to street shots to dance photography.

Which gets me thinking about the ephemeral—an idea that rarely pertains to the photographic object. (more…)

Opening next week at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum is Lisette Model and Her Successors, featuring work from the last century’s most significant photographers. Lisette Model (1901–1983) was a woman whose images and eloquent teachings influenced her students Diane Arbus, Larry Fink, and a host of others, many of whom went on to leave their own marks on American photographic history.

Model, born in Vienna, arrived in New York in 1938, a few years after Alexey Brodovitch art director of Harper’s Bazaar, and like him, had resided in France for some fifteen years before settling permanently in the United States. An influx of Continental artistic impulses increasingly pervaded the cultural milieu of New York in the 1940s and 1950s, which may have made it difficult for some photographers to find their own voices. For her part, Model embraced the life and values of the American artistic vanguard, while remaining always and to everyone who knew her somehow different, just slightly mysterious and completely unique.

This exhibition consists of 145 vintage photographs by 13 artists: Diane Arbus, Bruce Cratsley, Elaine Ellman, Larry Fink, Peter Hujar, Raymond Jacobs, Ruth Kaplan, Leon Levinstein, Eva Rubinstein, Gary Schneider, Rosalind Solomon, and Bruce Weber.

Lisette Model and Her Successors
Tuesday, September 1—Sunday, December, 13 2009
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
Lower Lake Road, South Hadley, Massachusetts
(413) 538-2245

Click here to purchase your copy of Lisette Model from Aperture.