From Sarah Greenough's introduction to
this beautiful work I learn that Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker
„began to collect photographs somewhat accidentally“. Many of the
ones assembled in „Photography Reinvented“ – a rather
pretentious title, I think, for I fail to see in what this would show
– I feel much attracted to, especially the ones by Thomas Struth,
Candida Höfer, Anselm Kiefer, and Andreas Gursky.
„Photography Reinvented“ is a rare
and exceptional book. Because of the picture selection, because of
how the photos were arranged, because of the elegant format. Most of
all, however, because of the texts by Sarah Greenough, Diane
Waggoner, Andrea Nelson, Philip Brookman, and Leslie Ureña that
accompany the images. Not only are they very well written, they do to
me what most texts on photography miss to do – they pull me in,
they make me feel involved in what is driving the photographer.
Here's an example by Sarah Greenough:
„From the moment she arrived in New York City in 1993 as a
thirty-year-old art student, Vera Lutter was entranced with her new
home. Although she found the country 'largely foreign' and her
neighborhood 'really bad,' the city itself was intoxicating and
liberating. 'I was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the place
and the speed,' she later asserted, the 'mix of people and culture
... the general energy, the light, and the ways the city presents
itself ... New York was absolutely new to me, and I was profoundly
inspired by it all.“
That is exactly how I felt when
arriving in Bangkok in 1988 as a thirty-five-year-old who had just
given up his job as managing director of an academic publishing
company in Switzerland. No wonder did I immediately identify with
Vera Lutter's excitement and eagerness to discover her surroundings.
***
How does one come up with a collection
of photographs? Does one start with an idea, a concept, a business
plan? In the case of Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker it started
with Rheda visiting the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, in 2004, where she
first saw Albrecht Dürer's Self-Portrait. „Yet she was
startled when she went from there to the Pinakothek der Moderne and
saw Thomas Struth's photograph Alte Pinakothek, Self-Portrait,
Munich, 2000, in which he
presented himself admiring the same painting she had seen only
moments before.“ When, two years later, she told Bob „of her
experience and delight in Struth's perceptive examination of the
spectator's place in the museum, he remembered seeing this same
photograph on display in New York. Shifting gears from decades of
collecting paintings and drawings, Bob resolved to acquire it and
together they embarked on a new passion. Although it took them more
than a year to find a print of Struth's photograph, that visit to the
Alte Pinakothek sparked their interest in forming a collection of
photographs.“
Every collection of
photographs, I assume, is first of all a group of pictures with
personal meanings to the owners. Yet, if it were just that (and yet
again: I would think in most cases, if not in all, this is precisely
what it is – and this, needless to say, is just fine with me; there
hasn't to be anything more, as far as I'm concerned) why would
that be of interest to, say, a museum? Well, the personal meaning of
photographs might become somewhat less personal if the owners share
the stories of why the photographs are special to them. And, they
might eventually find out that what is so special to them can be
equally special to others too. Maybe for other reasons, but what do we know about the reasons that drive us anyway?
Sarah
Greenough sees it differently. This is after all her job as senior
curator and head of the department of photographs at the National
Gallery of Art in Washington. For her The Collection of
Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker „is
more than just a group of pictures with personal meanings to the
owners; it is an intriguingly complex and telling collection of
photographs“. On the one hand, she notices „a remarkable
diversity“, on the other hand, however, she points out the
similarities – several of the photographers are closely associated
with the Düsseldorf School of Photography, all but one attended art
schools.
As instructive as I do
find the texts in this tome, I do fail to see what ties these artists
together. The „deep engagement that the artists in the
Meyerhoff-Becker Collection have with history“ and that „they
have drawn on the art of the past to invent a new course for
contemporary photography in the twenty-first century“ is so
generally put that it is almost meaningless and so Sarah Greenough
proposes to look „at several pictures made at key moments in the
last forty years.“ How she and her collaborators do that, and
report on it, is educative and illuminating. Especially when they
provide background information about how the photos came about for,
in my view, to learn about the process of taking photographs (how was
„the object“ approached?; how, if at all, was the scene
prepared?; in what mood was the photographer when taking the pic?)
is preferable to highly sophisticated interpretations that often are
not much more than widely accepted (and rather academic) knowledge
that is brought to the picture – and, as always, with the benefit
of hindsight.
„Photography
Reinvented“ is an extraordinary book!
PS: A selection of pics you will find here
Photography Reinvented
The Collection of Robert E.Meyerhoff
and Rheda Becker
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Princeton University Press, Princeton
and Oxford 2016
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