Word: travelog
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...grass. Abruptly, as you reach Cristobol on the edge of the American Canal Zone, the jungle--steaming, ennervating, thick with history and bananas--gives way to the manicured lawns. And the golf fairways. "There are golf courses in plenty," Graham Greene writes with a piercing simplicity in a travelog from Panama, "The Country With Five Frontiers," that appears in the February 17 issue of The New York Review of Books...
...Travelog is the apotheosis of this of this strange melange of literary and visual expression. There are two more or less "traditional" modes of organizing a book of photographs. One is essentially no organization at all; the book is seen as a cheap way to mass-produce or distribute a portfolio or exhibition of individual images. The other is a careful, but more or less unstated juxtaposition of images--as in Robert Frank's seminal The Americans--or of images and writing--as in Lyon's Conversations with the Dead--which produce a mosaic image more profound that...
...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...
...pictures in Travelog bear all the marks of his lofty aspirations, Each seems to be trying to shout. "I am profound!" They all have quick impact, as does any journalistic photograph, but many depart in their cropping or subject matter from traditional journalistic photography. His images of "The World" are particularly radical. In order to achieve forceful pictures of inanimate subjects. Harbutt has had to use his camera violently. He has adopted strange vantage points; he has had to look for hyper graphic qualities in his subject matter; he has isolated objects in a very unnatural way. The result...
...ENTIRETY, Travelog tails to meet the standards of its model, Ulysses, as an existential voyage. Joyce's work succeeded in evoking mythic archetypes from the experience of everyday life by investing that everyday life with all the descriptive richness Joyce could muster in 1000 pages of dense writing; Ulysses is built upon Joyce's talent with the smallest stuff of language just as much as it is upon vision Travelog, however, has no such solid base. The pictures in it just are not good enough. The very process of photography creates enough of a suspension of the real and mystification...