Word: harbutt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Charles Harbutt is a victim of the changing times. Or perhaps more accurately, a harbinger of them for his recent work published as Travelog, shows both the exhilaration and the trials of a photojournalist set loose to find himself...
...consequence of this development has been a rash of self-conscious, overtly subjective photojournalism. Men like Harbutt have been driven by the increasing respectability of photography as ART, the decreasing consequence of photography as journalism, and maybe an increased jadedness about life in general, to make more and more personally-assertive, arty photographs...
Travelog follows neither of these frameworks, however. The model for this book is James Joyce's Ulysses, although Harbutt also takes elements from The Book of Common Prayer and Dante's Divine Comedy...
...Harbutt wants to use his photographs to compose an epic tale, not merely to document. Classic photographic studies have relished the surfaces and appearances of things; they have tried to weave a dialectic between the "reality" of the subject of the photograph and the suspensionn in time and space--in short the "image"--with which the camera has rendered the subject. But Harbutt's pictures are not fundamentally concerned with their subjects. In his Introduction, Harbutt says that the pictures in the book are only the "images to which I had the response: 'Yes, life's like that,' "They...
...photographer ever to live, is missing completely: so are Elliot Erwitt and Constantine Manos, both of whom have had one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art; Danny Lyon, whose photoessays have been widely acclaimed, has only one picture in the show. But Dennis Stock and Charles Harbutt, by no mean's Magnum's greatest talents, have several pictures apiece. And so it goes through the show. Much of the color work that Doty picked belongs on a calendar rather than a museum wall, and there is a slew of just-plain-bad attempts at portraiture and "social documentation...