Word: lifson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...limited ways of seeing that it imposes, the five artists whose work currently hangs in the Carpenter's lobby have been taking pictures. In the last two years, their steady efforts have brought their talents to flower--any forthcoming fruit promises to be spectacular. "This is," says Ben Lifson, organizer of the show and visiting instructor in VES, "new photography; these guys are real innovators...
...that reason the process of their experimentation, study and growth positively illuminates their work. These still photographs show these artists moving forward. Now masters of technique, free of the supporting framework in which one learns the art of photography, they have not yet put themselves into any stylistic box. Lifson seems to have wanted to exhibit their searchings almost as much as their achievements: "I wanted to show students where they might be in three or four years if they just keep on working," he says...
...pictures he envisioned. The instrument's ability to capture incredibly fine detail and texture has made it a necessary tool of the avant-garde cameraman, and its mastery a challenge he must meet. (All the pictures in this exhibit, except Rubinfien's, were taken with it.) Leaving, as Lifson says, "no place to hide," the superclarity of the camera's vision lends these pictures an uncanny surrealism. The trees in Wing's pictures, or Germano's, have leaves that are leafier than any your eyes perceive. To see like this is frighteningly immediate and imminent; it's like hearing...
These pictures are without exception more than just likeable, though. Lifson's lens views a subject and catches the formal connections and the frame intrinsic to that subject. "Niagara Falls", for example, is seen through a glass window and balcony that enclose the foreground. A row of skyscrapers provide the backdrop. Looking closer, one perceives the interconnections between the forms in front of the falls--the in bric-a-brac on the window sill--and those behind, the buildings on the sill of the river...
...Lifson's work is among the most recent in the show. Distressingly, the dates of most of the other stuff reveal Faculty '76 to be a collection of artifacts. Perhaps the demands of teaching interfere with practice, but whatever the reason, drives home the point that the VES staff hasn't been producing much art worth exhibiting recently. Unquestionably they are a bunch of talented people, but what has happened to their creativity here? Faculty '76 shows artists institutionalized into Harvard professors. Trying to prove them still artists, the show is unfair to them both as practioners and professors...