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Johnson, The New York Times, May 4, 2001
Jose Agustin, la Jornada Anniversary supplement, Mexico City, May 6, 2000
André Kertész, New York Magazine, March 18, 1985
Jean-Calude Lemagny, LeMonde, October, 1986
Margaret Regan, Expanded World View, December 29, 1997
Kathryn E. Livingston, American Photographer, February 1988
Vicki Goldberg, American Photographer, July 1987
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The New York Times, Friday, May 4, 2001
Galleries: S7th Street CHARLES HARBUTT, "Dreams and Memories... "' Laurence Miller, 20 West 57th Street, (212) 397-3930 (through May 19). This small retrospective looks back on an admirable 40-year career in photojournalism. With affectionate warmth and great framing instincts, Mr. Harbutt captures moments of riveting narrative pregnancy. In a shot in Milan in 1970, for example, five businessmen gather on an astonishingly long modern stairway against a high wall splashed by sunlight; you feel an almost divine immanence (Johnson).
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I really like to travel with Charles Harbutt, this splendid photographer from the United States with a French name. [Through his pictures; the two have never met.] For example, he takes me to a village which appears like a fantasma and where the monuments receive the reverence they deserve. Up ahead, needless to say, embarrassingly, not even good Carlos could avoid the always uncomfortable presence of the "authorities," and I discover that we are way too accustomed to the police being part of the daily landscape; anyhow some won't stop feeling uncomfortable while others cover themselves with indifference. Anyhow, when I least expected it, Harbutt unleashed an alternative plan, the torso in a mirror of what appears to be a bather, which in this case increases the tension and emphasizes the complexity of the everyday habits.
Carlos Harbutt later takes me to this interior where I feel this desire in white, a smooth and sweet move which waits: when things have begun even though they may not start and perhaps never occur.Or suddenly he tells you that something so simple as an undershirt is an x-ray of the contemporary soul; what an undershirt, damn it; it is also a mask, a beast and a crucifixion.
Charles and I exit out onto the street and encounter the five planes of reality, and my friend, framing from underneath like Orson Welles liked to do, permits me to see them clearly, at the same time as I get hit with bittersweet sentiment from things that are familiar. Harbutt smiles as he insists on the topic of the different levels of life, and in a grand tour de force superimposes the interior of a vehicle, the urban vicinity and that here is an old building and the always perturbing shade that at the same time enlightens (clarifies) as much as it throws blurred figures and sharp lines.
This Charles Harbutt I like better every minute; if the symbolic net of photographs shown before excite me, today the American photographer returns me to the interior so I can envelope myself in a familiar atmosphere, quotidian, where without doubt everything manifests itself strangely from the man who urinates in the dark to the cripple who plays his guitar in his bicycle car with his friends.
"Life is so strange," says David Lynch in Blue Velvet. After everything, I don't find it strange that in the end Harbutt turns poetic, that we walk in solitude and that he opens for me the door to the temple of death, with its rooms and its chairs and the weight that awaits us. The following two photos are a variation of the same theme, but from a more enlightened perspective: death as the refuge of beauty and truth lets one rest in peace. I finish my trip with my friend Charlangas, who for sure is the godfather of my son Agustin. This Harbutt is a noteworthy artist. He confronts life, but covers himself in darkness, plays like a magistrate with the planes, dimensions, the lights, the shadows, the sharpness, the obscured, the composition and the frame. The two final photographs are sensational; the top shot of the roots next to a white wall, so white and peculiar and one final superimposition of an urban and disturbing Monet-like atmosphere.
by the poet and novelist Jose Agustin, la Jornada Anniversary supplement, Mexico City, May 6, 2000
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André Kertész says of photographer Charles Harbutt:
"He expresses himself directly-there's no chichi in his pictures." Some of Harbutt's most recent work, including this shot of a lonely compartment on a French train, can be seen in a show that will run through April 6 at Artists Space, 223 West Broadway.
"I never go where anybody else goes," says Harbutt.
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Jean-Calude Lemagny, LeMonde, October, 1986
Charles
Harbutt, the reporter of forms
[A report on a crisis, a testimony and a reality, but
also the essence of the meaning and of the renewal of forms, as well
as a photographic adventure, that is what Jean-Claude Lemagny, curator
of the Bibliotheque Nationale, discusses here.]
The crisis in photographic reporting has been discussed for a long time. From the 30's to the 50's, the reporter-photographer had become a hero. The competition with television and, on a deeper level, the deceptive belief that violence arises only to give content to the reportages, have robbed this genre of its primary virtue, to penetrate the unknown.
Nowadays, it is traditional reporting, which, when it rises above mediocrity, becomes “esthetized” and serves as a form of advertising an event(with all that implies of added prettiness). But there still exists a fundamental necessity: bearing witness - and the unavoidable grandeur of those who proclaim loudly to us that people suffer, die or kill, out there.
The work of Charles Harbutt seems to dwell at the heart of that problem. He became “engagé” in his country by being a militant, through images, against the war in Vietnam and social injustice. As a member of Magnum, he has reached the highest levels of professionalism. As a good “photojournalist,” he is someone who went to see and came back to tell.
He is someone who reflected on what he was doing. That reflection matured through two realizations: On the one hand the photographers lives on a level which is also experienced by the draftsman or any other visual artist: that of seeing everything around him as a world of forms, surfaces, volumes, shadows and lights. On the other hand, the photographer becomes conscious of the extraordinary privilege belonging to photography: that of showing to us things as they are when we are not thinking of them, in the absurdity of the instant, in the interval, in the interpretation that our mind applies to them, the “in-between,” dear to Robert Frank. And it is in that, of course, that the new photography is the exact opposite of the classic reportage, even thought it is just as direct and attentive to the human.
However, Charles Harbutt’s photographs are not at all formalist, in the pejorative sense of the word. They do not rely solely on a game of the retina and they bring to our mind a lot of things that touch us in the world of today. He forces reportage to perform quite a somersault. The problems of the world are not suppressed for the sake of a hedonistic gaze, but they are recaptured after quite a metamorphosis - at the other end of a total assessment of the condition of artist - and not for the sake of a pseudo-objectivity.
Harbutt knows that he can only remain a reporter, that he can only continue to report the grave problems that shake our world if he has taken full consciousness and responsibility for himself as an artist by renouncing the capture of significant, but intimate facts, and instead throwing his entire self into the presence of masses, shadows, light. Then everything emerges, but no longer in the style of the anecdote, of partisan judgment or of the predictably picturesque. Everything emerges, the great mysteries, into which our modern world plunges us and, I dare say, what epic qualities it still contains, no matter how sordid they may be.
The work of such a reporter of forms brings about the conclusion that there is but an “infra-thinness” (l’inframince, Marcel Duchamp), between idiotic authenticity and an abyss of possible meanings. There is a dialectic of continuity-discontinuity which properly belongs to photography. Each image is limited by a short instant and a limited space, but, because of that very fact, the photographer often works on an ensemble project or series. With Harbutt the results are possible trajectories: sort of metaphysical detective stories with no solutions. Each person can tell them in their own way, but one way or the other, we all obsess on them. That shadow on a cement pillar: is it the same one that, a moment ago, we observed as a black silhouette cut out against a background of neon, up there, in that illuminated office in a skyscraper?
Since he understands photography for what it is: an extraordinarily artificial object, a succession of optical phenomena and of chemical reactions, Harbutt knows that it adapts perfectly to the artificiality of plastic, of the worthless, of the imitation materials in which we live more and more. There are times when people seem to be made of spun sugar or of foam rubber, puppets in a universe which has become as air-conditioned as the store-window display.
Modern cities, with their architecture made of steel and glass, have their own beauty which can be expressed in a very pure chant. The worst in the world in which we live is what is neither city nor country-side: the projects, the behind the garbage-can area, and that infinite landfill-like are that we call the Third World. Progreso 1 is a shabby little harbor in the Yucatan, a land of legends. Its derisive name tells of the disappointed hope of the people who strive to catch up to the “progress” of elsewhere, stuck as they are between impoverishment and extinction. Among the trucks in complete disarray and the Coca-Cola billboards, a face as beautiful as the bas-reliefs in the temples. Through these images, which often seem to list like a sinking ship, it is a tale of the worst which is told us. It is neither war nor famine: it is mediocrity. And, nevertheless, what poignant beauty in those scaly walls, those torn posters and those cabins made of grey cement.
(1) Progreso, by Charles Harbutt, Navarin Editeur, Paris, 1986.
“90 Photographs by Charles Harbutt,” at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Galerie Colbert 4 rue Vivienne until Nov. 28"
Under the direction of J.C. Lemagny and Andre Rouille “Histoire de la Photographie,” 288 pp, 24 plates. Bordas
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Expanded
World View
Charles Harbutt overcame many obstacles in his career, most notably
cynicism.
By Margaret Regan
DECEMBER 29, 1997: AFTER 15 YEARS, Charles Harbutt was a seasoned photojournalist. He had witnessed the early days of Castro's revolution, he'd been shot at during the Six Day War in the Middle East and he'd sloshed through the mud at Woodstock.
Yet in the spring of 1970, Harbutt--the latest photographer to be honored with a permanent archive of his work at the UA Center for Creative Photography--saw something so horrifying it made him seriously question the value of his profession. It was the cynical manipulation of a news event by the U.S. government.
A photographer with the prestigious international agency Magnum, Harbutt had arrived in New Haven to cover a Black Panther rally for Bobby Seale for Life magazine. Coincidentally, the rally was scheduled the weekend of the Kent State murders, and tensions were high. When Harbutt checked into his hotel, he noticed four other men registering; their car was a fancy model with Washington, D.C., plates. The next day, when the crowds gathered on New Haven Commons, the atmosphere was jittery, with the local police and the National Guard lined up on one side with a tank, the Black Panthers, local protesters and Yale students on the other. Then Harbutt noticed the men from the hotel, now outfitted in elaborately disreputable hippie finery, yelling provocative slogans at the protesters. They were trying, as Harbutt put it, "to foment something that would provoke an armed response."
The agents' strategy didn't work that time, but the incident fed Harbutt's growing discontent with his role as the person who was supposed to be telling the truth to the world. (His version of the events tends to be confirmed by government files, since opened, that indicate federal intelligence agents did indeed infiltrate assorted "progressive" political groups.)
"If reality
was going to be staged, that disillusioned me with journalism,"
Harbutt said in an interview last month. "I didn't want to be a
delivery boy for Nixon or for any politician."
Harbutt, 62, nowadays teaches photography at Parsons School of Design
in New York City. In town in November to kick off Foto/Auto/Bio: The
Charles Harbutt Archive, an exhibition that showcases his photographs
as well as his personal papers, he was still dressed like the intrepid
photojournalist, arrayed in the profession's trademark leather jacket
and jeans. And in truth, the episode with the federal agents didn't
turn him away from journalism altogether. He still works the occasional
magazine job, such as a recent New York Times magazine spread about
North Dakota. He does spend the bulk of his time on the other pictures--a
Yucatecan Indian glimpsed watching television in his tiny house, barbed
wire strung above a decrepit Harlem apartment house--that have won him
numerous exhibitions in Europe, the publication of several photography
books and assorted prizes.
"People call them (the more recent work) fine art, but they are still dealing with the formal issue of time," Harbutt said, an issue that has preoccupied him in all his work, photojournalism included.
Harbutt grew up in the little town of Teaneck, N.J. He learned so much about photography from the "amateurs" in the local camera club that at Marquette in the 1950s he was banned from photog classes on the grounds that he already knew what he was doing. Convinced his future lay in written reporting, he studied journalism at the university and photography in outside workshops. In his junior year, he sold his first photo-story to the progressive Catholic magazine Jubilee. The project was a week-long photographic documentary about a family of immigrants, war refuges from Europe, from the time they stepped on American soil, through their train journey across the country, to their arrival at their new home.
"Certain events have a strict narrative," Harbutt said, "all the events took place in order...I tried to play around with it."
Harbutt graduated from college during the heyday of the photo-magazines (namely Life and Looks) and hired on as a writer/photographer at Jubilee. He still thought of himself primarily as a writer, until the sweltering day when he was assigned to write a story about winter in Japan.
"The sweat was dripping off me. I was not experiencing winter in Japan. I was full of shit. I had never experienced winter in Japan. (As a staff writer) I was less and less out in the world. I realized that the only way I could guarantee that I would actually look at things myself was to be a photographer."
So that's what he
did. Soon after, he was invited to join an international group of writers
and artists to witness the Cuban revolution in 1959. He was 23 years
old.
"I got to Havana two days before Castro," he remembered. "The
regular Cuban photographers were doing intelligence for Castro. I was
taking pictures...People my age were saying this is how we will run
education, this is how we'll run this. They were making up the country
as they went along."
But the young photographer's excitement about what he saw happening in Cuba was not shared by conservative editors stateside. "At Life, the fix was in," he said. "They were not interested in anything but their own controlling view. It was typical Time-Life."
Harbutt determined not to become a slave to narrow-minded editors, and freelanced his way through stories on Hispanic ghettoes in New York to his baby daughter's first pair of shoes to Jacqueline Kennedy's trip to Pakistan. He signed on at Magnum in 1963, and stayed until 1981, working in Europe, the Middle East and the U.S.
In 1967, he and several other journalists were fired on as they covered a rally in Saudi Arabia. Terrified, Harbutt ran into a mosque. "Stupid," he says now, but he lived. What bothered him, he wrote later in his book Travelog, is that while the Israeli photographs he subsequently took were publishable, they by no means conveyed his "visual and emotional memories" of what it was like to fear for his life, or what it was like for a nation to be at war. He began to think of alternative forms of photography. And he started teaching, to test out his ideas about what the medium really is, working at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His impressionistic observations of life in the Yucatan, included in the Center show and collected into the book Progreso, are typical of the way Harbutt has worked in the years since Magnum. They're full of the odd moments that tell a lot about a person or place, but probably wouldn't make it over the international news wire. A man holds a bunch of speckled balloons against a deteriorating church wall, a woman checks her hair in the mirror of a shabby hotel room, a line of preschoolers traipse into a room. As Harbutt explains in an essay in his book Travelog, "That magic little black box (camera) enables one to leave, in a small way and for a short while, one's own time and space and to occupy...another time and space."
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Sideshows
of Charles Harbutt
A photojournalist with a refined sense of looking around
Kathryn E. Livingston
"Charles Harbutt: A 25-Year Retrospective," the Witkin Gallery,
New York City.
Charles Harbutt was shooting pictures when Castro formed his revolutionary government in Cuba, when thousands marched on Washington to protest Vietnam, and when poverty in Appalachia was a subject worthy of daily headlines. He covered presidential conventions and the Arab-Israeli war and shot Timothy Leary's's'santics in the East Village. One might expect a 25-year retrospective by this onetime Magnum photographer, who later cofounded Archive Pictures and who has worked for most of the major newsmagazines, to serve as a mirror of the turbulent times he's witnessed rather than as a reflection of his own soul. Yet the general tenor of the work selected by Harbutt and the Witkin Gallery for this exhibit was of a personal nature-wisp of smoke in a darkened room, seagulls stretching out in the sky.
The 50 pictures exhibited at the Witkin this past autumn seemed to have been made by instinct rather than on assignment and bore the imprint of Andr6 Kert6sz, to whom the exhibition was dedicated. Like Kert6sz, Harbutt is a photographer who depends upon his intellect but may value his intuitions even more highly.
Harbutt's pictures are well grounded in the world at hand-though imbued with the fancy of a browser. "Photography is the only visual medium that has an inherent relationship with reality," he once wrote (it was in the same essay, in his 1974 book Travelog, that Harbutt explained why critics are dinosaurs). judging from the work shown at the Witkin, this photographer has maintained an abiding allegiance to the former sentiment. Harbutt has approached his work with a kind of dogged honesty; even when his framing was tilted or his use of wide-angle lenses caused distortion, what he saw-what he was in fact looking for-appeared to have actually happened in just the way it was shown. If the photos were lying, as at times they probably were, they lied convincingly. That may seem refreshing today simply because we've walked away from too many recent photographs with the feeling that the photographer who made them had raced his imagination clear off the track. Apparently, Harbutt knew how to keep his reins pulled tight without really slowing down.
Comings and goings:
Harbutt shot this mysterious portside passage in Vera Cruz, Mexico,
in 1982.
Harbutt's architectural photographs are some of his best, though not merely from the force of their design. In every case, Harbutt has included a human element. that is as compelling as the strong lines and dramatic planes of the buildings themselves. Harbutt's view of Wall Street, for instance, depicts not only the looming brawn of skyscrapers but also a shadowed glimpse of a man on the telephone in one lit window; in the heart of Dallas, a couple meets in the corner of Harbutt's photograph, while the nearby buildings tower above and around them; a lone silhouette is caught in New York's Chrysler Building, a stiletto moving amid a maze of glass and line; and a shadow-scorched hat and face ease down an escalator in the Union Carbide Building. In all of these pictures, Harbutt conveys man's submissiveness at the bands of his own modern construction.
Some of Harbutt's pictures from Progreso,a book about the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico published by Archive last year (see Books, AP, July '87), were particularly good. Harbutt wrote that he was seduced by the Mayan notion of progress, "that time is cyclical; things don't get better and better day by day, they just swirl around like dust in the street." In his pictures, too, Harbutt is caught up in that metaphoric dust and yet is still able to see through it. In one photograph of two women on a street corner, we see the shadows of their hands touching on a building behind them. Elsewhere, we watch an amorous couple in a shop as a motorcycle speeds by, or peer around a thick tree to observe villagers congregating in a plaza. Looking in from afar, yet maintaining an intimate view, Harbutt uses perspective to open up rather than foreshorten the distance between photographer and his subjects.
Entering a 'Bicentennial
Cannon, " a roadside attraction that Harbutt came across somewhere
in Colorado in 1973.
Harbutt has a sense of humor-it cropped up in Progreso when
he described himself as a "chunky" man who fit in well with
the "chubby" Mayans and it turned up again in the pictures
at the Witkin. In a photograph of three heads looking up at seagulls,
an "Information" sign at the edge of the frame becomes the
working title for the picture, as does the "Kalamazoo Phone"
hardly noticeable in an image of a buck toothed
girl approaching a trash basket. What Harbutt has penned in his wry
captions matches his photographic observations about life. This is one
exhibition in which the sum may be less than the parts, but no one should
really be counting, because Harbutt's sideshows are at least as entertaining
as his features: Call it the aesthetic of the extraneous.
Harbutt can be grim as well, as in his recent photographs of barbed wire at a deserted Dachau in what is now West Germany. Although the triptych at the Witkin was uncharacteristic of his other work-smaller images were superimposed on wire seen against a stark white background-t here was ample evidence in this abstraction of his willingness to experiment. Some of his most poignant images were made in the 1960s; best of all was his picture of a blind boy in a paisley shirt eagerly reaching out to a shaft of light as it traveled down a wall. Harbutt captured not only the child's world but the suggestion of hope he had found within it.
Harbutt has a distinct style, a sophisticated ability to realize design within the frame, and a very clean technique, whether he is snatching a blur of motion on the street or rendering objects and figures in sharp, clearly delineated tones. His vision seems open to new possibilities-a way not merely of focusing in but of looking about. Harbutt's selective process is slightly odd, as though he has some uncanny peripheral awareness or has retraced the boundaries of vision to fill increasingly wider margins. His image of a nude torso unexpectedly caught in a sideview mirror of a car at a heavily guarded ferry crossing seems analogous to the way he looks at life. To Harbutt, the afterthought seems as important as the original flash of an idea.
"How beautiful is the world; it is a pity that I must die," Harbutt quoted a traveler in Progreso. The choice fits perfectly with his own photographic approach, for he has captured life as a series of small pities and pleasures rather than as dramatic highs and lows. Unlike many contemporary photojournalists who scrutinize with an exaggerated severity, Harbutt has concentrated on an evenhanded look at his surroundings. If there was no drum roll in his retrospective and no real crescendo either, there was a satisfying hum of discovery; one suspects from this exhibit that Harbutt will never close the book on life as if he already knows the ending. His work will continue to be an inquisitive turning of pages.
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The
Human Condition, Almost
The New Photojournalist in search of the serious
Progreso by Charles Harbutt (an Archive Pictures book), 1986, $45 hardback, $27.50 paperback.
Back in 1979, Gore Vidal wrote in the New York Review of Books: "Currently, there are two kinds of serious novel, The first deals with the Human Condition (often confused, in Manhattan, with marriage) while the second is a word structure that deals only with itself. Although the Human Condition novel can be read-if not fully appreciated-by any moderately competent reader of the late Dame Agatha Christie, the second cannot be read at all." Ah, the state of photography at this very moment. If serious-photography has recently scanted the Human Condition (often confused, by camera buffs, with poverty), that is because most Human Condition photography is so Is life like this? easy to understand it makes serious- photographers nervous. For the most part, they leave the Condition to photojournalists, who for a long while were happy mucking about in that backwater but of late have sent up f lares signaling that they no longer consider it Enough.
The so-called New Photojournalists generally want to state their opinions and biases in their photographs. Sometimes they add in their awareness of art and their consciousness that neither photography nor the media are wholly trustworthy. None of this makes them especially popular with the magazines (and now the newspapers) that support them, so they render unto magazineswhat belongs to them and produce something closer to art on the side. So it has ever been, from Robert Frank to Diane Arbus to BruceDavidson. New Photojournalists like Susan Meiselas, Eugene Richards, and Giles Peress feel they must publish books because the magazine market, which never fit them well anyway, is shrinking faster than an un-Sanforized shirt. Magazines want celebrities in quantity but are touchy about more lasting matters (love, work, death, that sort of thing), which they usually want summed up in two or three pictures rather than the old-fashioned extended essay.
Tailor's dummy, Carnival, Merida,
1977. Photograph by Charles Harbutt:
Is life like this?
Charles Harbutt has
been New for some time as Travelog, his inner voyage through urban existence,
made clear in 1973. Progreso, about a town in the Yucatdn, looks as
f he began with a study in journalistic formalism but was too enamored
of life to give it up for photography. Harbutt balances old means and
new, traditional and more contemporary attitudes; the result, though
rarely gripping, is solid, quiet, and thoughtful. His influences go
back to such masters of black and white as Walker Evans, Cartier-Bresson,
and Robert Frank. At times he plays with their imagery, at times with
their devices-which makes him seem not so much derivative as traditional.
(Today's new style becomes tomorrow's convention in very short order.)
Some of Harbutt's pictures are structured on the abrupt angles, overlaps,
and juxtaposed patterns that mark style in the1970s and '80s. But his
sentiments (and for this we may be grateful) must be a bit old-fashioned,
for he returns again and again to a sense of the traditional and familiar.
He photographs a tree as if he were a pictorialist and the sea as if
he were a 19th-century luminist painter. He considers balloons floating
against time-dappled walls an occasion for lyrical poetry, and once
in a while he reminds us, offhandedly but tenderly, that there are babies,
cripples, and men who care about each other in the world.
In short, within the photographer who relishes the pure patterns of wall posters, the obscurity of blurred figures, and the anonymity of men's backs, there beats the heart of a romantic. And sometimes, among good pictures that are not exciting, there are photographs that are truly affecting-surely a greater accomplishment than being merely admirable. The photograph that begins and ends the book-a statue of a young military man on a pockmarked pedestal out on the beach, his eye and nose blackened by weather as if by an angry and accurate fist-whispers of Ozymandias and history.
The New Photojournalism, so vauntedly personal in its concerns, sometimes trades on style at the expense of its subjects. Harbutt keeps saving himself from such indifference by close attention and by some quality that looks like affection for the things of this world. In Travelog he wrote, "If you want to judge a good photograph, ask yourself: Is life like that? The answer must be yes and no, but mostly yes." A good question. A good answer.
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