DariusHimes

I have long admired Vince Aletti’s writing on photography. Who, in the photography and publishing community, hasn’t eagerly looked forward to his year-end list of Top Ten photobooks produced annually for a number of years for The Village Voice, where he was editor of the art pages up until just a couple years ago? And what photographer, established or unknown, who has mounted a show in New York City, hasn’t anxiously awaited the arrival of the weekly New Yorker, praying that their exhibition was reviewed in 100 words or less in “Goings On About Town”?

The chance to become deeply familiar with Aletti’s style and tone over a series of essays was first deliciously served up in 2001 by Andrew Roth’s magical tome, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the 20th Century. Roth, a rare book dealer, collector and photobook connoisseur based in New York had decided to publish a very personal list of just that: photographic books he considered to be the most seminal of the century that had just come to a close. He enlisted a handful of essayists and artists to contribute to the volume, including Daido Moriyama, Shelley Rice and Jeffrey Fraenkel, but he conscripted both Aletti and David Levi Strauss, another prominent photography critic and writer, for the brunt of the work. They evenly split the list of 101 books, and set about writing summaries of each artist’s life, work, publishing history, as well as the contents and salient features of the book in question, all within the space of 300-600 words.

In short, these reviews are nothing short of brilliant for their lucidity, expository nature, and sheer brevity. I’ve been recommending it as a concise history of the medium to photography students (and who of us aren’t students?) since the book first appeared.

I can only imagine, as a writer, that the project must have been daunting at first; constraining oneself to a limited space is generally more difficult than an open-ended assignment. But the mini-essays that were eventually published reveal no traces of the difficulty I imagine. By the end of the task, the discipline required to begin, and the discipline surely gained from having written 50 reviews spanning two-thirds of the entire history of the medium of photography, I can only imagine had a lasting effect.

Aletti now not only writes brief reviews of shows in “Goings On About Town” (among contributing essays and interviews to various books and journals), but he is one of a half dozen critics charged by that magazine with covering the performing and visual arts in a regular column entitled “Critic’s Notebook.” These columns appear scattered within the “Goings On About Town” section and are briefer than anything from The Book of 101 Books, weighing in at roughly 150 words each.

But they are masterful. Below are my own notes made in studying one of Aletti’s recent “Critic’s Notebook” entries, (Nov. 19, 2007).

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK: Art and Soul. Vince Aletti, writing about Fazal Sheikh
November 19, 2007
[Full text]
The photographs in Fazal Sheikh’s first exhibition, in 1995, were portraits of refugees who’d fled civil unrest in Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia and found shelter in Kenya. His most recent works, currently on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, depict Indian widows and girls who have found themselves to be outcasts in a culture where female infanticide still regularly occurs. In between, Sheikh has worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, and the Netherlands, documenting the displaced and the persecuted—people whose basic human rights are at stake. A compact, engrossing survey of this work at Pace/MacGill couldn’t look less like photojournalism. Sheikh’s subjects are not anonymous victims; all but a few are identified by name. At once descriptive and loving, and warm rather than cool, the photographs are extraordinarily moving portraits in the classic mode (think Julia Margaret Camera and Irving Penn), whose aesthetic weight is multiplied by the power of their maker’s concern.

[I’ve broken out each sentence and then summarized it.]
1. The photographs in Fazal Sheikh’s first exhibition, in 1995, were portraits of refugees who’d fled civil unrest in Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia and found shelter in Kenya.
[1. A beginning point of some kind.]

2. His most recent works, currently on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, depict Indian widows and girls who have found themselves to be outcasts in a culture where female infanticide still regularly occurs.
[2. The current exhibition being reviewed.]

3. In between, Sheikh has worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, and the Netherlands, documenting the displaced and the persecuted—people whose basic human rights are at stake.
[3. The range of work that has been produced since the aforementioned beginning and the current show in question.]

4. A compact, engrossing survey of this work at Pace/MacGill couldn’t look less like photojournalism.
[4. Back to the present with mention of a second current show, and a short but powerful description.]

5. Sheikh’s subjects are not anonymous victims; all but a few are identified by name.
[5. The subject matter and approach of the work being shown.]

6. At once descriptive and loving, and warm rather than cool, the photographs are extraordinarily moving portraits in the classic mode (think Julia Margaret Camera and Irving Penn), whose aesthetic weight is multiplied by the power of their maker’s concern.
[6. Summary of the attitude of the work. This becomes the kicker sentence, where one uses the most glowing terms one wants.]

6 sentences, 154 words

What these brief columns provide is a chance to hear the voice of the critic as ‘guide,’ one of the most useful roles a critic can play. They guide one into the landscape of a genre, a medium, and in this case in particular, a truly gifted artist and his exhibition.

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