There is of course a sense in which a show like ‘The New York School‘, currently at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London’s Chelsea, is bound to disappoint, and it is one that is heightened by the hype in the listings which describe it as “An overview of a period of intense photographic creativity from the Big Apple featuring the likes of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and William Klein” (BJP)
It certainly isn’t an overview. Michael Hoppen is a commercial gallery and the contents of their show is determined by what can be found currently on the market and so offered for sale – only a couple of the works were without prices. It would be impossible to mount a real overview without the collaboration of various museums and collectors in lending work, and would require a considerably larger space. London saw a much better overview as the first half of the major Barbican show ‘American Images‘ in 1985 – and that just isn’t the kind of thing a commercial gallery can hope to match.
We can perhaps take “the likes of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and William Klein” simply as sloppy journalism, in that the very point about these photographers was that they stood out as each having a particular view. There is a decent print of one of Klein’s better pictures in the show, but Frank and Arbus are poorly served by the couple of examples on offer, at least one of which should clearly have gone direct into the darkroom waste bin.
I went to the gallery not expecting a great deal, and in that respect I wasn’t really disappointed. There were however at least a couple of prints that interested, even moved me, including a fine photogravure of four men from the mid 1950s by Roy DeCarava (surprisingly not included in his fine volume ‘the sound I saw‘ although his second picture in the show, to me less interesting image of dancers is – and I think looks better in the book.) Unfortunately the lighting in the gallery gave maddening reflections – if you want to see the richly stygian ‘Four Men‘ at its best you should take a large black card along with you. I could only really make out two of them in the show.
One of a few Leon Levinstein pictures also caught my attention, although it perhaps lacked the kind of shock of his best work it did have a little of his characteristic directness.
Overall, by the time I’d been round the show – which does include some other pictures, particularly by Weegee and Louis Faurer, of at least some interest – I was beginning to think a more accurate title might have been ‘New York on a Bad Day’. Most of the photographers in it are deservedly well-known, but not on the basis of what was on show here. (I’ve never quite understood why people rate Ted Croner (19222005), an early Brodovitch student who he sent to photograph the city at night, and certainly what I saw here didn’t help.)
But as an overview, it simply omitted so many photographers whose work seems so central to the creative ferment stirred up by the New York Photo League and by Brodovitch in the period around and after the war. It was also perhaps rather defocussed by the inclusion of work from the city by two visiting British photographers, David Bailey and Neil Libbert.
Perhaps the good prints from the ‘New York School’ are all elsewhere, in galleries on on people’s walls, or, hideous thought, stashed in vaults by ‘investors’. Fortunately we are talking photography, and it is often best seen in books. One of the best overviews of what this show purports is still the catalogue of the Barbican show, ‘American Images‘ still readily available secondhand at a very reasonable price (ranging from 74p from one US bookseller, up to £65 elsewhere.)