Word: harbutt
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...seems to be trying to shout. "I am profound!" They all have quick impact, as does any journalistic photograph, but many depart in their cropping or subject matter from traditional journalistic photography. His images of "The World" are particularly radical. In order to achieve forceful pictures of inanimate subjects. Harbutt has had to use his camera violently. He has adopted strange vantage points; he has had to look for hyper graphic qualities in his subject matter; he has isolated objects in a very unnatural way. The result is a set of pictures which are flat, without any visual Iyricism. Harbutt...
...Harbutt claims in his introduction that these picture attempt to relate to my visual experience," but this is dubious. Perhaps they are pictures of his psychic experience--whatever that might be--but these pictures are only peripherally related to purely visual experience. When one walks the streets of N.Y., one simply does not see the world of so little real space and such severely truncated forms that Harbutt has depicted in his photograph of the city...
...Charles Harbutt has not recorded on his films the cluttered squirming complexity of city life and simply suspended it before our eyes. Instead, a modern romantic, he has attempted to distill it neatly into its graphic "essence." In the process, he has created pictures that are shocking and disturbing, but meaningless. Their subject matter is only a series of superficial formal coincidences; they are artificial pictures with neither spirit nor sensitivity...
...Harbutt's credit, however, a few pictures in these last sections have a sort of life within themselves--even though they acquire that "eternal" quality by concerning themselves directly with their subjects, not Harbutt's question "Is Life like that?" In making these pictures he seems to have thrown away his notions of an "automatic" surrealistic photography and he knows well. The pictures are still formally simply responded to scenes and things that he knows well. The pictures are still formally simple and relatively direct, but now they have elegance. A deftness of tough and vibrancy which was missing...
...upon vision Travelog, however, has no such solid base. The pictures in it just are not good enough. The very process of photography creates enough of a suspension of the real and mystification of it to make the image of a real object in fact surreal. But Harbutt has not realized that such truly surreal and evocative photography requires pictures that are as classically descriptive and uncontrived as a photograph...