Word: trachtenbergs
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Social Worker Martin Trachtenberg, co-founder of a number of groups that support children of Holocaust survivors, several years ago began to notice one odd symptom: survivors' children were frequently overwhelmed by anxiety when facing some less-than-vital decisions, such as choosing a college or leaving home to move into an apartment of their own. Trachtenberg saw it as a fear of separating from parents; in the camps, separation was usually final and meant death. "Some struggled with going to college, but they did it," says Trachtenberg. "And when they got there, they called their parents every...
...side of a highway expresses the "haunted" quality of America, its vast space and extremes--of hot and cold, of violence, exhaustion and pity. While Evans' photographs sometimes speak less forcefully than Franks', the message in the retrospective and in his book American Photographs is clear. As Trachtenberg concludes, "Each picture completes itself only in the complete work, which in turn reflects not only upon 'America' in a state of upheaval, but upon the art of representation itself...the theme is survival, and constructive seeing the means...
...many projects include studies of the New York subways, tenant farmers during the Depression (Let us Now Praise Famous Men], Chicago streets. Coney Island, Victorian architecture, Cuban scenes and hundreds of photographs documenting roadside stands, interiors and corners of rooms. In his essay "The Artist of the Real," Alan Trachtenberg suggests Evans' work was inspired not by painters or by other artists, but by literature, the writings of Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Whitman and Henry James. "He arrived at his proper point of view through the spirit of objective realism, aesthetic autonomy, respect for feeling and epiphany in common life, that...
That such factual and technically pure photography would be taken as "high art" 70 years ago was not to be expected. Hine did not care. As Alan Trachtenberg points out in his excellent catalogue essay, "Ellis Island represented the opening American act of one of the most remarkable dramas in all of history: the conversion of agricultural laborers, rural homemakers and traditional craftsmen into urban industrial workers." Hine, unlike other American photographers, perceived this and made it the lifelong theme of his work. The subject chose him. It presented Hine with a sense of historical duty, as witness...
...series of dramatically affirmative "work portraits," designed, as Hine un abashedly put it, for "social uplift," such as Powerhouse Mechanic, 1925. He hit the peak of this imagery in 1930, when he began to document that marvel of audacity and skill, the construction of the Empire State Building. As Trachtenberg remarks, Hine's Empire State series, with its daring calligraphy of girders and Icarian figures treading on air, "participates in the making of the tower by serving as its faithful reflection - its self-consciousness, one might say. It is as if the making of the tower, an epitome...