Photography in Three's

photo taken from the Cleveland Museum of Art website

I've noticed that things often come in 3's...I don't know why that is nor do I stake claim to any mystical relationship with the universe, but by the time I hear of/read about/or am told something for the third time, I pay attention.

Recently I had 3 encounters with photography in my life: photography exhibit and lecture, a novel featuring a photographer, and viewing my son Amnon's new photos.

The lecture was at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), which has mounted an exhibition of surrealist and post modernist photography called, not surprisingly Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography. We were fortunate to attend the opening preview in which the collector and the curator had an on-stage discussion of the work, which helped put the collection into context for me.

The collection was donated in its entirety to the museum by David Raymond, who began collecting the works in the 1990s. Its acquisition by CMA is a major contribution to the permanent collection. The exhibit is described by the museum as, "Vertiginous camera angles, odd croppings, and exaggerated tones and perspectives are hallmarks of the two principal photographic movements of the period, surrealism and modernism. As with surrealist efforts in other media, artists making photographs also aimed to explore the irrational and the chance encounter—magic and the mundane—filtered through the unconscious defined by Sigmund Freud. Eventually, photography became a preeminent tool of surrealist visual culture."

I loved hearing the collector talk about the hunger for these arresting and strange images that possessed him. The vintage collection is all from the 1920's - 1940's. I learned to look at photography in a different way, specifically I was taken by the role of the photographic paper in the depths of the blacks and greys in the photos.



With photography on my mind the next day I cracked open the latest selection from my Book Club, Anna Quindlin's Still Life with Bread Crumbs: A Novel. I didn't know what the book was about in advance, so it was a completely coincidental juxtaposition of media around photography, that after viewing a collection, and hearing the collector impart his passion for the photos, I was reading an author's imagining of the way her heroine, a celebrity photographer in the art world, approached photography. The book is called by critics a comedy of manners, and it is a great story about finding oneself in the "second half" of life, but it is also a look at how the art world randomly elevates one artist to celebrity, almost despite herself, as well as a look at some of the questionably voyeuristic aspects of photography as an "art." When I first started it I sighed, thinking it was another one of those glib dysfunctional family novels that seem to occupy all the prize winning lists, but I was delightfully surprised by the quiet of the book, and the playfulness of its narration, and came to genuinely care about the characters.
And just to add the dessert course to my week of photography, my son Amnon shared some photos from his experiments with a twin lens reflex camera using medium format film— and I loved the results:

Akko

I don't think the universe is sending me a message about becoming a photographer, but I certainly enjoyed spending a week thinking about photography from so many perspectives.

Ben on a Bench

Cafe Tel Aviv