MoPA stages three shows that salute pioneering women, two modern practitioners, and the humble 35mm camera

By Robert L. Pincus
ART CRITIC

May 28, 2006

Painting, among all the forms of picture making, represented the experimental spirit of the 20th century. But it was photography thatdelivered the news about people's everyday struggles, about the action and agonies of war and about the drama of modern life.

IRINA LEONIDOVNA LANDER Olga Lander, a leading Soviet photojournalist in the 1940s, shot "Removing the Swastika From the Train."

Ezra Pound famously said that literature is news that stays news. And while events in a photograph inevitably fade, the emotions in a depicted face don't.

With great photojournalistic pictures, something else happens, too, as time passes. They look less documentary and more artful.

No one thinks that a DC-4 is a technological wonder any longer. But Margaret Bourke-White's 1939 photograph of that plane, appearing as if it is floating above Manhattan, expresses an ebullient feeling about the possibilities of technology and the city. The mood is almost utopian.

Dsytopian views of city life are more fashionable now. But that only sets in high relief the hopeful vision of Bourke-White's photograph, an image that is part of an ambitious exhibition at the Museum of Photographic Arts: “Breaking the Frame: Pioneering Women in Photojournalism.”

DATEBOOK "Breaking the Frame: Pioneering Women in Photojournalism" "Shooting in 35: The First 35mm Photographs" "Today's Pioneers: Women Photojournalists in Iraq and Afghanistan - Andrea Bruce and Stephanie Sinclair" Through Sept. 17 ("Today's Pioneers" and "Shooting in 35"); Through Sept. 24 ("Breaking the Frame"); Museum of Photographic Arts, Balboa Park; $6; (619) 238-7559 or www.mopa.org

The entire museum, in fact, is a display case for photojournalism at the moment, with two additional shows on view. As prologue to “Breaking the Frame,” there is “Shooting in 35: The First 35mm Photographs,” and, as epilogue, “Today's Pioneers: Women Photojournalists in Iraq and Afghanistan – Andrea Bruce and Stephanie Sinclair.” Along with these exhibitions are additional media from the mid-20th century – newsreels and radio broadcasts – to give a sense of the times in which Bourke-White and the other seminal photojournalists worked.

The last time that MoPA mounted a project of this scope was in 2002, when it presented “First Photographs: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Birth of Photography.”

Changing photographic history

“Breaking the Frame” features six figures who played large roles in the photography of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s: Bourke-White, Thèrése Bonney, Esther Bubley, Olga Lander, Hansel Mieth and Grace Robertson. Only one of them, Bourke-White, got her due in the decades that followed and the museum's curator, Carol McCusker, wants to give the others a platform for a bigger, well-deserved spot in the history books and a wide public.

In her focus on the role of women in the world of photography, McCusker doesn't speculate as to whether women could become prominent in this medium faster than in, say, painting or sculpture. Yet the careers of these photographers suggest as much.

JOHN FORD Alfred Eisenstaedt, before his years with Life magazine, did pioneering pictures in Europe such as "Zeppelin Crewmen in Flight Over the Atlantic" (1930).

In the United States at least, the public was willing to accept, even embrace the idea, that photography was as much a woman's field as a man's. After all, Bourke-White and Bonney attained celebrity status. It's reasonable to think that photography, because it was a newer form and less bound by conventions, was more open to women. Painting may have been a medium for stylistic experimentation, but in reality women were mostly second-tier participants in the major movements and schools.

Photojournalism created a different history. “Shooting in 35mm,” the smallest of the three exhibitions on view, is a concise reminder that the new small cameras made a fresh kind of picture possible. Just how small is made clear by the Leica 1A made in Germany between 1926 and 1930. A prototype is on view.

Such cameras made the streets and skies available as never before. They made fleeting events, small and momentous, available too. Alfred Eisenstaedt, before being recruited by Life magazine, made a name for himself in Europe with subtly heartrending pictures like “Destitute Man Near Les Halles District, Paris” (1931) and daring photographs like “Zeppelin Crewmen in Flight Over the Atlantic” (1930).

ANDREA BRUCE WOODALL / The Washington Post Andrea Bruce shows anguished women waiting for their husbands to be released from Abu Ghraib prison.

These cameras changed the way wars looked in photographs, too. Robert Capa's work was crucial in this sense. He became renowned for his dynamic, harrowing pictures of the Spanish Civil War, and was just as active during World War II. In the pictures he shot for Life, seen here, he depicted corpses as well as combat. The Jan. 31, 1944, issue with his photographs, which apparently caused a stir, is in a display case. On the walls are such moments as “German Snipers Are Fired at by Infantrymen During the Liberation of Paris” (1944).

“Shooting in 35,” with its images of peace and war and of life on the street, establishes the outlines of the territory that the six women in “Breaking the Frame” explore with equal eloquence. Photography was reinventing itself and they were among its vital practitioners.

Olga Lander, like Capa, made her reputation with wartime pictures. Only, in her case, there was the added burden of trying to work in a Soviet culture that simply didn't conceive of a woman working at the front. Valerie Stigneev, in the companion catalog to the exhibition, writes that the credit line for her pictures was customarily O. Lander. When it started appearing as Olga Lander, beginning in 1944, readers were mortified.

The photographer herself seems to have ignored the biases against her role, getting as close to combat as she could. She documented the pathos of the battlefield with an image of a female medic tending a wounded soldier. She also gives symbolic weight to the aftermath of war with “Removing the Swastika From a Train” (circa 1945). The soldier taking hammer to the despised image could be posing for her camera, but the event itself is surely real.

Getty-Time/Life Margaret Bourke-White, always attuned to historic events, was in Germany in 1945 and made "Concentration Camp Internees Cheer," one of many famous images from her celebrated career.

Lander's life, like the others in “Breaking the Frame,” is chronicled in the substantial exhibition catalog – really a book – that accompanies it. (Each photographer gets a different essayist.) But given just how obscure names like Lander, Bonney and Bubley have become, one wishes the biographies were not so brief.

Bonney, an American who lived much of her life in France, was something of a celebrity in her day. As McCusker writes, there was even a comic strip, “Photo-Fighter,” about her exploits in capturing the realities of war. (Apparently, Americans were far more accepting than the Soviets of a woman photographer on the front lines.)

The realities that engaged her most were the experiences of civilians. She strongly identifies with French refugees taking shelter in a barn or under a wagon and young girls pictured behind barbed wire in the Rivesaltes concentration camp.

Bonney's compassion extended beyond making pictures too. She became an advocate for displaced people, adopting a boy and paying for his education. She also assisted with the reconstruction of a French town, Ammerschwihr, that she had photographed in ruins. Yet you end up wanting to know more about her early life and about why she devoted far less time to photography after the immediate postwar period.

Still, it's the pictures that matter most in the context of an exhibition, and Bonney made dignified ones of people under dire circumstances. They distinguish her work.

Bourke-White, whose celebrity status in photographic history has endured, was attracted to visual drama, be the subject technology, workers or war. She was a master of the picture that expressed a straightforward sentiment, as with “Concentration Camp Internees Cheer” (1945). Her image “Anti-aircraft Gunners Define the Sky Over Red Square” (1941) is too visually spectacular for its own good. It makes a wartime moment look positively scenic. (Too much beauty in a war photograph can be unsettling, as Susan Sontag and others have pointed out.)

Photographic Archives, University of Louisville Esther Bubley was particularly skilled at capturing intimate public moments, as she demonstrates in "Man Saying Goodbye, Bus Story, New York" (1947).

War is, of course, one of the great subjects of photojournalism, reaching back to the mid-19th century. In the time frame of “Breaking the Frame,” it was an epic subject, but it was hardly the only concern.

Hansel Mieth's large subject was the unemployed, the working poor, workers in general and families. She took pictures for a few years in California in the 1930s, depicting cotton pickers outside Huron and Buttonwillow and men begging for jobs in San Francisco. One of her most heartbreaking images pictures children peering through the partially opened door of a car. Its title completes the scene with the force of a hammer: “Cotton Worker's Kid – 'Waiting All Day Long' ” (1936).

In Mieth's case as well you'd like to hear more from the photographer in the catalog. She was open about her leftist politics, and, in the rabidly anti-communist 1950s, could rarely get work. We're left wondering how she felt about this.

Moving photojournalism doesn't necessarily have to intersect with history. Bubley, an American, and Grace Robertson, who is English, represent this strain of photography. Bubley presents moody images of people going about the business of waiting or saying goodbye at a bus station; Robertson chronicles a joyful group of elderly women on a pub outing in 1954 (she shot a second pub outing in 1956).

“I like to think these early efforts capture something of the youthful longing and public togetherness of the period,” Robertson would recall.

This togetherness was all the more poignant and uplifting, given that the trauma of World War II was less than a decade behind them.

The persistence of war

Getty-Time/Life Grace Robertson had an eye for great moments in her photo essays on women's pub outings. One of her most exuberant images is "On the Caterpillar," shot in 1956.

As epilogue or update, “Today's Pioneers: Women Photojournalists in Iraq and Afghanistan – Andrea Bruce and Stephanie Sinclair” is depressing, even if the photographs themselves are often riveting. Bruce, who works for The Washington Post, and Sinclair, formerly of The Chicago Tribune and now working on assignment for the Corbis photo agency, have each spent considerable time in these ravaged countries. And while the setting is strikingly different than in the photographs of Bonney and Lander and the camera technology far better than a half century ago, the brutal events are similar.

In an image by Bruce from 2003, a Marine points a gun at the head of a man with cash and guns, suspected of being a Syrian fighter. Sinclair shows us the body of a 6-year-old girl, Lamiya Ali, being prepared for burial; she was one of three siblings killed by a cluster bomb in Baghdad in 2004.

If there is anything to feel dimly grateful for, it is the sense, in the work of both, that revealing horrors can possibly make a difference. Sinclair has devoted a good deal of time and images to the situation of woman in Afghanistan, where women set themselves on fire because of abuse or when an errant husband returns home after years to claim his wife.

Bruce photographed a child, Mariam Jassam, who was staying with her aunt because American forces had destroyed her family's home. When an anonymous reader learned of the plight of Jassam, he or she donated $5,000, which ultimately gave them enough to rebuild their home. This is a gesture that Bonney surely would have understood, with her fusion of photojournalism and social activism.

The theme that McCusker firmly establishes, with these related exhibitions, is that the photographers in “Breaking the Frame” cleared a trail for Bruce, Sinclair and countless other women in photojournalism. But looking at the work of photojournalists, past and present, we are forced to think about how the world we inhabit is no less dangerous and difficult than the one they pictured decades ago. Photojournalism shows us the world, but it can't promise to change it.

Robert L. Pincus: (619) 293-1831; robert.pincus@uniontrib.com

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