Hopper’s subjects are never posing. They are thinking. Still, somehow they always seem to know they aren’t alone, even in their own bedrooms. His paintings are about how we make common places, which are our social places, our own; they are about how we turn lobbies and train cars into quiet spaces in the mind.
That’s from an essay, The Disembodied Moment, by Kathryn Crim in the Summer 2009 issue of The Threepenny Review. It’s about an exhibit that was at the Fraenkel Gallery, Edward Hopper & Company. Crim begins:
Let’s leave him out of it, for the moment, because this isn’t really about him. Or if it is, it’s about the influence he had on these forty years of photographs. Influence is impossible to map; it’s impressionistic, repetitive, deceptive. It eludes us, as he does.
Much later:
… Consider the nonchalance of Lee Friedlander’s wife, who stands in the morning sunlight, the silhouette of her observer casting a soft shadow over her body. The first time I saw this photograph, Las Vegas, 1970, it struck me as a little lurid, but this is because I didn’t take the shadow for what it was — the photographer himself. Now I see that there’s tenderness and consent in the mussed-up sheets on the bed. She is looking back at the man, not the camera. And as long as I stand here, she’ll go on looking — just looking and looking. But since I can’t see him I don’t know what she sees. What is she thinking of? And what is Eleanor thinking of? Not the prone Eleanor, but the other one, in Eleanor, Chicago, 1950, who’s got her face turned to the open window? And what about this other woman Arbus found at a diner counter? Time lingers: a car somewhere approaches from the horizon, a cigarette burns down to nothing, another woman turns the page of her newspaper.
Of course nothing actually changes in a photograph. So what gives me the sense that these pictures capture extended moments and not instants? I think it might be that hint of elsewhere — an elsewhere, which is not just the thought-of, off-frame elsewhere in the mind’s eye of the subject, but also the forgotten elsewhere whose artifact remains in the picture. Here’s one: a ring on the hand with which this man smoothes his hair, head down, reading away the morning (or is it afternoon?) in the Sagamore Cafeteria. Elsewhere the man is not alone — he’s married.
We hold tightly to the promise that something is different somewhere else. So we build our houses at the intersection of the past that follows and the future that beckons. Then we park our cars and our campers out front. Evans saw this; so did Robert Adams. And Robert Frank, who seemed bemused by how devoted we are to our cars. Everywhere, the photographers are standing on street corners looking at what’s arriving and what’s leaving.
And, finally, getting to Hopper:
… Hopper’s subjects are never posing. They are thinking. Still, somehow they always seem to know they aren’t alone, even in their own bedrooms. His paintings are about how we make common places, which are our social places, our own; they are about how we turn lobbies and train cars into quiet spaces in the mind.
“I don’t think I ever tried to paint the American scene; I’m trying to paint myself,” he said, introvertedly and very un-Whitman-like. What does it mean that America was found, anyway? Hopper pointed out ordinary contrasts — between what moves and what holds still, between inside and outside, between light and dark, presence and absence — and found there enough conflict for each of us.
Which is why Hopper may have opened the door for photography to grow into itself, to turn to the ordinary road and hillside, the ordinary person in the ordinary café, to lure us out of the dark and show us that we are not alone in our private reveries. “This is the power of the camera,” Newhall continued, “it can seize upon the familiar and endow it with new meanings, with special significance, with the imprint of personality.” A great artist can be endlessly borrowed from and never robbed. No matter how much they borrow from Hopper, there’s no mistaking Arbus or Frank, Friedlander or Evans. They too found themselves in the everyday and renewed it in their image.
Thinking. An image of a person thinking. It’s a doorway, an invitation.
The artist catches us; gives us a ride through a wonderful and mysterious yet somehow familiar country until we come to the end of the road and he turns us loose. From that point of release, you go through the picture into what turns out to be very much like home. All those thinking people are just such a point of release because inevitably “what are they thinking” leads to “of?” and everything blooms.
[For my non-photographer readers, I should have linked to explanations of all the references she is making (Eleanor was the wife and frequent subject of Harry Callahan's photographs and so forth) but there are so many ... and they are not absolutely essential in order to get the meaning of the essay.]
Read the full essay. It’s good. [ link ]
-Julie
