Word: photographs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sure thing, though, that this particular angle on the scene--the chilled, ironic feeling of mockery and awe--did not exist outside the photograph. Neutral and straightforward as the picture appears at first glance, you could not come by the same perspective even if you were able to stand at that street, at that instant, and witness the actual event. The picture, like much of the work in the exhibit, illustrates the most basic, elusive and inexhaustible fact about photography--that even the most artless photographs are not so much records of reality as they are refinements and extensions...
Other pictures are more emphatically striking: a large color photograph by Paul Souza, shot through a tilting windshield, containing a snaking road, dark cliffs and, above the foreshortened yellow strip of the car's hood, an exultant view of sunstruck clouds--a kind of visual trumpet blast. Essentially the same compositional strategy, and the same dramatic clarity, are on view in a black-and-white photograph of an industrial wasteland by Roswell Angier: in the foreground, framed by a windshield and side-window, we see the blurred silhouette of a rearview mirror, a woman's blanketed back, a squinting Indian...
What remains most heartening and absorbing about "The Automotive image" is the quality of cheerful, reckless perception on view in the best work, betokening as it does an anarchic embrace of everything that exists--everything that exists and that can be photographed--despite and including the world's meanness, violence, and disorder. Even the most coolly-pictured scenes convey a sharp sense of the photographer's elation in the face of his medium's immense range, its omnivorousness. Consider, as a final example, James Bodo's color photograph showing a "Putt-Putt" miniature car raceway, empty and sheeted in snow...
HERE IS The Tin Drum's failure, of course. Intimidated by Grass and by the novel itself, Schlondorff's film is hardly more than a moving picture show, Oskar's treasured photograph album (left out of the film) brought to life. The director has made little attempt to translate aspects of the novel into cinematic language. While Grass' imagination provides an exciting and titillating narrative, Scholondorff only steers his camera earnestly through each sequence, giving Oskar's war-time charades a warm, personal gloss. Schlondorff's Oskar is little Oskar, a cruel, manipulative Peter Pan who ultimately leaves his Never...
...Mount St. Helens finally erupting after weeks of ominous activity? A booby-trapped pineapple in the act of blowing up? In fact the remarkable photograph released by the microbiology laboratories of the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center in New York City shows a bacterium literally exploding after getting a dose of antibiotic...