Word: rosenblum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...subjects of the pictures obscure Rosenblum's accomplishment as a photographer. These photographs are not particularly concerned with a coherent description of their subjects or with any sort of journalistic rendering of events. Instead of the sociological or surrealistic approach which is traditional among photographed people and human places with a reverence for them as pure visual objects. His scenes are scenes and subjects seen as inanimate as a nature photographer...
...Rosenblum has used neither gesture nor context to give meaning to his photographs: stripped of surface drama, their strength has to come from a sort of photographic "impression," a symbolic "equivalence" inherent in the forms of the picture. Rosenblum has tried to "document" the beauty of life, more than he has its particulars...
...their best, these photographs have a wondrously subtle tension to them. On one hand, they seem absolutely dumb in conception. Their composition is so casual-seeming that it is as if their frames enclose not a work of art, but a transparent "peephole" to the physical event that Rosenblum recorded. They are almost like the leaves of a family snapshot album, so direct is the affair they seem to engender between the viewer and the viewed...
...these pictures also have an eternal quality that belies their seeming randomness Rosenblum has found a sort of sculptural elegance in his subjects that seems to hold the pictures to the gallery wall and prevent any quick dismissal of them. It is as if that "transparent" peephole is also completely opaque-full of a mysters that could not be ciphered. He has turned his snapshots into stone. His portrait of a "Haitian Woman," for example, is so casual that it could be a passport photograph and yet so full of a unity of expression that it is ultimately as impenetrable...
...formal elegance and highly-keyed tones, these pictures seem ultimately somewhat artificial. They are quite marvelously photographed, but they are also anachronistic. The great photographers of nature Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams--have been able to make photographs full of the tonal richness and graphic simplicity which typifies Rosenblum's work, but Rosenblum's pictures of the "humanscape" seem to lack the sort of passionate involvement with their particular subject that the "nature scapes" of Weston, Strand and Adams had with theirs. Perhaps it is as simple a matter as the fact that human faces are "supposed" to come...