Through the Lens, Anagogically

The Peter Lindbergh photograph of model Bianca Balti (right) is much indebted to the works of Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968) and Dorothea Lange (1895-1965).

Lindbergh's strong suit is emotive, dystopian photography that often captures, as does that of both Weegee and Lange, the darker side of the human coin.

Jean-Paul Satre posited that humans self-deceive (mauvais foi), and in this belief we see the core premise of most glossy fashion photography. Editors understand our need for escapism through pageantry and theatricality, coloring the represented objects in tired, unshaded strokes. The reactions to the December cover of Vogue Paris are an example of this type of presentation. Why, asked Riz at Mode et Utopie, must we have the redundant and solipsistic imagery of woman as pretty feathered trinket?

The sacrifice of spirituality to chimera is so prevalent in art direction that it becomes a thing of dullness, creating a need for the manufacture of shock value, grotesquerie, and perversion in order to raise further reaction. When this occurs, the objects become so superfluous that they are rendered meaningless and without provocation.

Contrast the Vogue cover to the photographs of Weegee, of which the most famous is The Critic* (left). Weegee was a freelance photographer who coaxed the palette of human pathos from hiding in plain sight. His turf was the pavement of Manhattan and that great city's social disparities. Murders, accidents, fires, drunks, midgets: all were treated with a clinical eye that sought out essential truth as it played out on the stages of the metropolis.

As a populist artist, and particularly in his photographs of calamity, Weegee shared a core value system with Dorothea Lange, whose own photographs of the Great Depression addressed the ignis fatuus inherent in the last threads of human effort. The calcified face of the migrant mother may appear to be exhausted of hope, yet the very strain signals otherwise; where there is the burden of worry, there is further reason to exist. Both artists took the view of the human as responsible for the creation of his unique world, a trait lacking in the Vogue cover, which addresses only the externalized and the subjective. Charlotte Gainsbourg's feathered prey is dominated by what rests in the unseen focal point beyond the lens, and her pose and expression are a result of this influence.

Lindbergh's photo shares qualities with both: The face is Lange and the setting is Weegee. Balti broods in a fictitious landscape that she both controls and despises. There is a flip side to the timeless skein of pathos, not an outward manifestation of art-directed inhumanity.



Photos: Foto Decadent, Peter Lindbergh
©Dorothea Lange
©Weegee
*The Critic was later revealed to have been staged.