W.M. Hunt

 #somerealllygoodones, #stills, #groups, #moma, #douglasblau 

Sometimes an art event will prompt your brain to bump out with discovery.  “Ah ha!”  Such a exhibition was “Stills”, curated by Douglas Blau (American, b. 1955) at the MoMA in 1994.  I know this history because I looked it up in the museum records, remembering the event but not the specifics.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen any critical writing about it or even reference to it.  The show was a large selection of film stills from the MoMA’s enormous film archive.  

What was so stunning or illuminating was that a portion of the exhibition of photographs — black and white — had people in them, lots of people.  They were not portraits, landscapes or still lifes.  It may not strike the reader as a breakthrough idea but consider how very, very few photographs have more than one or two people in them.  I felt as if I had never looked at photographs before.

The show was installed in three densely packed horizontal rows, minimally framed, and moving from left to right — possibly — the number of people in the scenes would aggregate.  I have effectively no memory of specific images but imagine that there must have been captures from theatrical looking tableaus like courtroom dramas and sweeping vistas of people in Biblical epics in the ‘Ben Hur” mode.  The viewer searches for Jesus in a “Where’s Waldo?” mass of players.   If there had been any color, the shot of Scarlet walking through the fallen in the ashes of Atlanta from the “Gone with the Wind” would have been a candidate for inclusion. 

From the press release: (It) “progresses to ever more intricate compositions in which a large number of cast members are assembled. From card games to cocktail parties, from ancient Rome to New York in the 1920s, these scenes play seemingly infinite variations on standard compositional motifs. Thus the exhibition simultaneously explores the richness of the film-still tradition and the structure of its photographic conventions”.*1

My surprise — the bump — was the seeming novelty of seeing a group in a photograph, in recognizing a couple of fresh ideas: one is that it’s hard to make such a photograph because, simply, you need a lot of people, and second, you see the photograph differently, you deconstruct it and take it apart to examine the separate elements and then let them all play together.   

These pictures take some work.

I recognized almost immediately that in all of photography, not simply this distinct genre of “film still” these are not commonplace.  Prints are not in the marketplace demonstrably; they are vernacular curiosities and not widely available.  This may because they have been handled badly in the past; they are awkward to store and expensive to frame.  You have to go online to the Library of Congress to find them or wander the hallways of old gymnasiums or V.F.W. halls.  These are the three-legged dogs of photography.  I have tried to adopt a number of them.  I love their oddity,  and wonder at their specific histories now most often lost to us.  

They seem to be really unpopular, and that’s fine with me.  

*1 from the press release, “STILLS”, Museum of Modern Art, No. 40, July 1994

©2021

#somereallygoodones, #theunseeneye, #wmhunt, #collectiondancingbear, #collectionblindpirate, #greatphotographs, #howilookatphotographs, #photographsfromtheunconsicous, #collectingislikerunningaroundinathunderstormhopingyoullbehitbylightning, #aphotographsogooditmakesyoufart- lightning, #photographychangeditlifeitgavemeone, #somerealllygoodones, #stills, #groups, #moma, #douglasblau