Heroic Figures?
between the lines of photo criticism
“Am I a heroic figure, a giant straddling across the mountains of photography?” Saul Leiter asked cinematographer Tomas Leach and, with his characteristic humor and humility, answered his own question. “I don’t think so.” Jörg Colberg doesn’t think so either. Reviewing the posthumously published 2018 book All About Saul Leiter for his April Fool’s Day Patreon* post, the popular photography critic takes the artist to task for having made “perfect pictures for book covers. They’re stylish, they’re very well done. But they all also hit just one note, and they do that over and over again.” Lest there be any doubt, Colberg pushes the piano pedal of his metaphor to its mathematical conclusion, “You can have ten Saul Leiter pictures, and they don’t even add up to ten pictures. Instead, they’re ten pictures of the same idea….”
All About Saul Leiter includes black and white and color photographs, as well as paintings and light-hearted remarks quoted from interviews with the artist. With surprising animosity after spending “maybe five minutes with the book,” Colberg blames Leiter, who died in 2013, for having made years ago elegant color pictures that look great on books today. Leiter’s photographs are “filled with these people that decades later look stylish” while his black and white pictures “don’t offer anything that you haven’t seen better versions of by other artists.” Without defining these “versions,” or photographic tropes, and oblivious to Leiter’s place in the history of abstract expressionism, Colberg places his “paintings” in inverted commas then suggests, “let’s be polite and just ignore them.” Ignoring Leiter’s work as a fashion photographer and preaching like an overwrought moralist, Colberg cannot consider even parenthetically “the nudes (don’t get me started on those) … But let’s say the nudes also are their own one idea: a guy ogling over the body of a rakish young woman” like the model who was Leiter's life partner for more than 40 years. As for Leiter's pithy one-liners, Colberg quotes one then exclaims, “I’ve received more profound messages in fortune cookies!” Fortune cookies can be very profound. Years ago, the fact that I carried in my wallet various meditative cookie fortunes turned out to be of great interest to a friend, who went off to Paris to find Proust and disappeared nine months later. But I’ve strayed far from my subject.
Colberg cannot let Leiter go; the more he writes the more “I realise how many problems I have with the work.” For Colberg, Leiter’s photographs drone, musically. At least with music, he reminds us, hitting “one note over and over again, at first it’s really irritating. But after a while, it gets interesting” when played by one of his favorite British post-punk bands. No, he tells us, photography “doesn’t work that way. The same note not only remains the same note, it also doesn’t add up to more the way music does.” Colberg prefers inferior pictures. “Add up a lot of bad pictures, and you’re in business,” whereas “add up a lot of good pictures that all hit the same note, and it just doesn’t work….”
A “strange business” indeed. No one knows better than Colberg, who has been a reviewer for some twenty years, how contemporary photobooks bound to a specific concept all too often feel “more like one picture that you see in some form of variation.” For example, J. Blaustein belabors the world’s wanton destruction of its planet at his Extinction Party; B. Feuerhelm winks at Nazism with his Dein Kampf; and Colberg himself after two decades abroad seeks to find his motherland in Vaterland. These books all present variations on a theme; the first with its gaudy, irony seeking catalog pictures, the other two channeling a cultivated vernacular, muddy black-and-white aesthetic popular with the Gen X cognoscenti. If we look hard enough, we will find that most photobooks are variations on one theme or another.
Book covers? Why not coffee mugs or tee-shirts? I’d wear a Saul Leiter hoodie in a heartbeat. In music, less is more, unless it’s not. Instead of listening for deafening feedback loops in Leiter’s photographs and being disappointed by their lack of raw simplicity, Colberg might play John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and let his eyes go out of focus. Rather than read All About Saul Leiter as a skylight through which he may catch glimpses of Leiter’s art and personality, and turning a deaf ear to the historical context of postwar American society in which Leiter lived and worked, Colberg resents his photographs, not because they sound one note he cannot hum, but because they perform a visual symphony he cannot see and hear, and he knows it.
The question is, why?
* The link is for subscribers to Colberg’s Patreon, thus his review of Leiter’s book may not be publicly available. My commentary began as remarks I posted after reading Colberg’s text. To his credit, my post was neither moderated, i.e., censored, nor deleted.