“I wanted to make my work political, without metaphor, simile, sentimentality, or heroics. I chose to transpose typography and images from daily newspapers, inherently direct political propaganda. I wanted to fix them, inescapable in scale, for you to look at.”
Photographer Donald Blumberg wrote that as the introduction to a portfolio called Twenty Daily Photographs, 1969 – 1970, which he put together in 1971. It’s as applicable to his much more recent work, in which the photographer trained his lens on his television screen.
But what does it mean to use the same approach on weight-loss ads and the coverage of the massacre in Newtown?
The Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibit of Blumberg’s work, entited “Donald Blumberg Photographs: Selections from the Master Sets,” raises this question as it covers the photographer’s career from his mid-1960s project In Front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to his 2014 images of UFC ultimate fighting, with stops along the way at the coverage of Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union address, a political speech by George Wallace, soap operas, reality shows, and, yes, the media’s coverage of the school shootings in Sandy Hook.
The exhibit runs through Nov. 22.
More Than A Formality
The series of photos making up In Front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral came about due to a happy accident. Blumberg had spent a day photographing people entering and leaving the New York City cathedral, and when he got the contact sheet, he discovered that the black backgrounds in the photographs were so uniform that he could make panoramic images from two or three photos together.
The formal exercise, though, takes on emotional resonance in the way that good street photography does. The images in the series ask you to examine each of the people they document, to linger over their faces before they walk down the avenue. That they’re leaving a place that’s both sacred and a tourist attraction adds to the mix in considering what each of the subjects is thinking. Blumberg’s later experiments in moving the camera — thus blurring the images — highlight the subject’s transience.
In giving reporters a tour of the exhibit, Museum Director Jock Reynolds commented that some of the images have “the feeling that some people are still there and others are evaporating into ghostly souls.” That might hit the nail a little too squarely on the head, but it’s valid. St. Patrick’s is a series very much worth visiting, and it gives the viewer a good sense of what Blumberg is after when he turns his camera away from the street and toward the media.
The Media’s Mirror
Starting in the late 1960s, Blumberg started to take pictures of newspapers and his television. The first were mosaics — of Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union speech, of “presidential candidate George Wallace ranting” (above), as Blumberg wrote, and of Martin Luther King’s televised funeral.
“I was interested in making one image that could encapsulate the entire funeral,” Blumberg wrote. Though to this reporter’s eye, the most affecting image is a mosaic of a grid of television screens, all of which have nothing on them but snow — something that used to be television’s natural state, but you don’t it see much anymore. What is TV really giving us? it asks. There’s no clear answer.
Fast forward 50 years, when Blumberg once again turned his camera toward his television. The camera is more or less the same. The television, meanwhile, has changed dramatically. In 2011-12, Blumberg took pictures of broadcasts of televangelists, soap operas, reality shows, and poker tournaments. In 2013 he turned his attention to QVC and infomercials. The year 2014 saw a series on broadcasts of ultimate fighting. And in 2012, he took a series of photos of the news coverage of the mass shooting in Newtown. In all of them, he turned on the closed-captioned feature on his TV so we get the text that accompanies the image.
What is TV really giving us? The question is as complicated as ever. But there’s also a sense, in the more recent photos, of the subject slipping away from the photographer. Some of the recent images are funny in the way they immortalize silly soap-opera scripts (“You missed me so much that you married our former daughter-in-law”) and the haphazard things people say on reality TV shows (“My new breasts symbolize for me everything new”; see above). The images of poker players and ultimate fighters have an understandable intensity and sometimes poignancy to them. But the photographs of the QVC items and infomercials are pretty much as blank as they are in real life.
And things get pretty knotty in the Newtown photos. Blumberg’s images capture the media’s inability to process what had happened at the time, as well as the president’s unguardedly emotional response, perhaps the only time the public got to see him that way. They also reveal the sensationalism that framed the horrific tragedy, the creepy sense that the story was being followed in part because it was good for ratings.
But if we’re going to ask what TV is really giving us, it’s fair to turn the question around: What are photographs of TV really giving us, beyond what TV already is? Why are we being asked to linger on the images of Newtown? And why are we being asked in the same way that we’re being asked to linger on the images of jewelry shopping?
The question nags at this reporter’s mind because black-and-white photography, put stupidly, just doesn’t mean the same thing as it did in the 1960s. Technological advances in the media have simplified Blumberg’s chosen method: With almost all journalism done in color, black-and-white photos are pretty much solely a self-conscious, aesthetic choice, a deliberate anachronism. So the interesting friction in the 1960s — of using a technique that was both art and journalism to capture journalism and TV — is gone now. There’s just a person making TV broadcasts into art. Which is fine and valid. But something, some ability to dig deeper into the subject, has been lost in Blumberg’s work between 1970 and 2011, in the decision to continue to use black-and-white photography, and in the decision to focus on TV in the 2010s, when that medium is itself succumbing to the internet, which Blumberg curiously doesn’t even approach.
If Blumberg is still interested in making his work political, his methods don’t connect in the same way they did in the 1960s. But there’s something emotional about it, too, like there is in the photographs outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral from 50 years ago. Slow down, the photographs say. Give this more than a moment’s thought. It’s a good message, even if Blumberg, standing still, is sending it out to a world moving so fast around him that it can probably barely hear it.
Donald Blumberg: Selections from the Master Sets runs at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., until Nov. 22. The museum is open Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; on Thursdays it is open until 8 p.m., and on Saturdays and Sundays it is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.
