Display case 7 (Frank, Steiner)

  Most viewers familiar with the photographer Robert Frank's magnum opus The Americans will know that the images on the two book covers shown here aren't his, but not necessarily without first experiencing a moment of déjà vu.

  There are, no doubt, an endless number of photographs that depict roads leading off into nowhere, many taken by important photographers. While Robert Frank is hardly the first to have produced such a picture, the bleak, poetic beauty of U.S. 285, New Mexico has made it one of the more popular and quoted versions of the genre.

  Rosanne Wilson's drawing for the cover of Freya Manfred's book of poems, American Roads appears to have been modeled after Frank's image. Although the road lines in Wilson's drawing have been flipped, the oncoming car is closer and telephone poles have been added, the image proportions are virtually identical to those of Frank's photograph.

Title: American Roads

Author: Freya Manfred

Publisher: Overlook Press 1979

Designer / Illustrator: Rosanna Wilson

  The cover photo for The Assault on Tony's (credited not to an individual but 'courtesy of [the photo agency] Photonica') appears generally derivative of Frank’s influential vision, and specifically reminiscent of Bar, Gallup, New Mexico. The setting, the tilt, the way the image is contained by its edges, and the heightening of tension by obscuring detail all find their source in the 26th picture in Franks landmark book.

  A final detail worth noting: the publisher of this book is Grove Press; the same house that, 37 years earlier, published The Americans.

Title: The Assault On Tony’s

Author: John O’Brien

Publisher: Grove Press 1996

Designer / Illustrator: John Gall

Photographer: ‘courtesy of Photonica’

  American Rural Baroque, made by Ralph Steiner in 1929, is one of his best known photographs, predating Grant Wood's American Gothic by one year. In addition to being a sterling example of Modernist photographic formalism, it serves to portray, and preserve, an archetype of rural Americana. From the warmth of the light to the carefully crafted intricacies of the chair back, one feels a sense of peace, but also of melancholy.

  Designer Kathleen Digrado's photo, also of a chair on a front porch, calls Steiner's image to mind. It is used for the cover of Michael Winerip's 9 Highland Road, a book about metal illness and institutionalized living. In Digrado's photo, the empty chair and its shadow serve as a symbol of absence (both literal and emotional) as well as representing the threshold between confinement and freedom. While the shadow of Steiner's chair manifests itself as an engaging optical puzzle, the chair on the cover of Winerip's book casts the ominous shadow of bars on a stone wall.

  Was Kathleen Digrado in some way influenced by Ralph Steiner? Was she consciously aware of his work, or did she subconsciously absorb it, conceivably from a slide presentation in a photo history class, or while paging through an anthology? Or, perhaps just as likely, is there no connection whatsoever? To see an object and its shadow as a potential picture does not, after all, require a genius-level aesthetic sensibility; it is a common enough visual motif, even for beginning photography students. What is it, in this case, about the nature of substance and shadow that compels the image-maker to commit it to film?

Title: 9 Highland Road

Author: Michael Winerip

Publisher: Vintage Books 1995

Designer / Illustrator: Kathleen DiGrado

General view of display cases 8 - 10

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Display Case 8 (Gibson, Kertész)

  By concentrating on the visual fragment and artfully intentional, edge-conscious composition, Ralph Gibson has, for more than thirty years, produced photographs which elicit in the viewer a sense of déja vu (the title of one of his early monographs); they seem at once fleeting and hyperreal, mysterious and mundane. While suggesting the presence of a narrative, they in fact reveal very little. Despite, or perhaps because of these qualities, Gibson's vision has become a much imitated stylistic trope on photographic book covers from the mid 1980s into the present.

  The two covers here call to mind two images from his second, and perhaps most important, monograph, The Somnambulist.

Title: Letters from London

Author: Julian Barnes

Publisher: Vintage International 1995

Designer / Illustrator: Susan Mitchell (Art Direction)

Photomontage: Jenny Lynn

Title: The Weight Of Nothing

Author: Steven Gillis

Publisher: Brook Street Press 2005

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

  In 1926, André Kertész made a series of photographs in Piet Mondrian's Paris studio. Modernist in form, they also serve as symbolic portraits of this pioneer of abstraction. In particular, the image Mondrian's Glasses and Pipe isolates dark objects (Mondrian's pipe, a shallow bowl and two pairs of his signature round spectacles) against the white ground of what is most likely a tabletop (Mondrian's own work, of course, was much more compositionally rigorous than that of Kertész: He would never have allowed, for example, diagonal or round shapes to corrupt the theoretical purity of his compositions).

  In Ed Marquand's cover image for Israel Rosenfeld's book, Freud's round eyeglasses and the white triangular background echo Kertész. There is no pipe in the picture, but Freud preferred cigars, and to include a cigar on the tabletop would be, well, too freudian. Instead, there is the title text, in correct perspective, which the glasses seem to be observing as if it were a patient on a couch.

  It seems unlikely that Marquand would be completely unfamiliar with Kertész's Mondrian pictures, but let us assume for the sake of argument that he had never even heard of Kertész. How, then, do we parse Marquand's personal and intuitive sense of form, tone and balance from the Platonic forms; ie, the visual templates that float in the ether of our collective subconscious? In simpler terms, how do we explain the coincidence?

  In large part, the question is rhetorical. To actually explain the coincidence, if there was a coincidence, might be interesting and possibly illuminating, but ultimately a footnote to the larger issue of how the past influences the present.

Title: Freud’s Megalomania

Author: Israel Rosenfield

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company 2000

Designer / Illustrator: Debra Morton Hoyt

Photographer: Ed Marquand

Display Case 9 (Avedon, Brigman, Rothstein)

Beginning in the late 1960s, photographer David Hamilton gained some notoriety for his suggestive, soft-focus color photographs of young women in various states of undress. As cultural standards for nudity were becoming more relaxed in the United States and Europe, Hamilton's work was published in a number of monographs with titles like Sisters and Dreams of a Young Girl.

David Caute's racy, 1989 political thriller Veronica uses one of Hamilton's more discreet, but no less suggestive images for it's cover. Once one gets past its Vaseline-tinged eroticism, one may notice an interesting resemblance to Marella Agnelli, December 1953, a well-known photograph by Richard Avedon.

The resemblance is 'interesting' in part because there are major formal and, let us say, 'atmospheric' differences between the two images. Avedon's spare, black & white portrait of the Italian-born Socialite, with its hauteur and icy beauty, simultaneously draws and distances the viewer, whereas the gauzy, come-hither look of Hamilton's cover girl is characterized by an unremarkable lack of ambiguity. Nevertheless, the general outline of the pose (bent knee excepted), the orientation of the lighting and the direction of the gaze is remarkably similar in both photographs. The comparative form and location of each woman’s 'garment' (Agnelli wears an expensive looking designer dress; Hamilton's model clutches what is most likely a bedsheet) makes the resemblance that much more intriguing.

Avedon, a legend in his own time, had an enormous influence on both portrait and fashion photography. There is no question that Hamilton, who began his career as a graphic designer and art director for a number of magazines, including Elle and Photo, would be extremely familiar with the work of the older, considerably more celebrated Avedon.

One final observation: Avedon's portrait of Agnelli was the cover image for his 1978 monograph Photographs 1947-1977. Notice how the large ‘A’ of Avedon's signature compliments the curve of Agnelli's shoulder, while the ‘V’ in the title of Caute's book echoes the model's bent knee.

Title: Veronica, or The Two Nations

Author: David Caute

Publisher: Arcade Publishing 1990

Designer / Illustrator: Robert Reed

Photographer: David Hamilton

Title: Richard Avedon:Photographs 1947-1977

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1978

Designer: Elizabeth Paul Avedon

At Window of Log Cabin in Gee's Bend 1937, by FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein, is one of the better-known images from the Great Depression. The picture on the cover of Dorothy Spruill Redford's Somerset Homecoming clearly recalls Rothstein's photograph. Redford's book is a memoir in which the author reclaims her slave ancestry and African-American heritage. As the cover photo suggests, the girl has become an adult.

Title: Somerset Homecoming

Author: Dorothy Spruill Redford

Publisher: Doubleday 1988

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

To one familiar with the genre, the cover photograph for Yvonne Vera's novel, The Stone Virgins, exhibits an almost uncanny resemblance to the work of the the early West Coast pictorialist Anne W. Brigman, (in particular, it recalls her images The Heart of the Storm 1912, and Nude by Tree 1915). But the cover photo is not by Brigman, it is by Paige De Ponte, a contemporary photographer and filmmaker. Although De Ponte's photograph, entitled Devil's Peak, South Africa, was made with a sharp lens and lacks some of the sentimentality and romantic sfumato characteristic of Brigman's pictorialist aesthetic, there is no denying a correspondence in content and style.

What makes Devil's Peak intriguing within the context of this exhibition is that when De Ponte made the photograph, she was entirely unfamiliar with Brigman and her photographic work. So, is the resemblance merely coincidental, a product of the 'Great Minds Think Alike' school of thought, or is the idea of a woman taking shelter beneath a gnarled tree in a barren landscape a visual template from some Jungian image bank in our collective unconscious?

Title: The Stone Virgins

Author: Yvonne Vern

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003

Designer / Illustrator: Lynn Buckley

Photographer: Paige Deponte

Display Case 10 (Lange)

  Two covers that reference the FSA work of Dorothea Lange:

  Lange's Tractored Out, Texas 1938 is probably second only to her Migrant Mother in recognizability. An image whose visual potency has burned itself into our collective visual memory bank; it now serves as a cultural cipher with many imitators. For Bobby Louise Hawkins' book of poems, Back to Texas, it has been rendered quite accurately as a drawing, wrapping around the books front and back covers.

Title: Back To Texas

Author: Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Publisher: Bear Hug Books 1977

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

  Eudora Welty wrote about the American South, the place where she was born and lived most of her ninety-two years. The cover artwork for Thirteen Stories is an appropriate, if somewhat generic, reference to the simplicity and old-fashioned gentility which exists in many stereotypes of that region, along with, perhaps, a suggestion of menace in the driver's expression. Compare John Alcorn's cover drawing to Dorothea Lange's Ditched, Stalled and Stranded, made in California's San Joaquin Valley in 1935. One can have little doubt but that Lange's photograph is the source. The filthy clothing and torn interior upholstery have been cleaned up, and the drivers hat and face have been replaced. This is as it should be: In Lange's image, the man sits limp-jawed and glassy-eyed; stunned, as if he is trying to recover from a knockout punch, which, in effect, he is. That is the strength of Lange's vision, but it would be far too powerful, and far too specific, for this book's cover.

Title: Thirteen Stories

Author: Eudora Welty

Publisher: Harvest/HBJ [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich] 1965

Designer / Illustrator: John Alcorn

General view of display cases 11 - 15

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Display case 11 (Hine, Kasebier, Feininger)

  In these three covers, the original photograph, or portion thereof, has been used as the basis for a drawn or painted illustration. In the process of transformation, details are lost and details are added; whatever best serves the illustrator or designer in creating what they feel to be a visually compelling cover that in some way conveys the feelings or ideas which lie within the pages of the book.

  For the cover of Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought, illustrator Leslie Evans has isolated a central detail of Lewis Hine's Breaker Boys working in Ewen Breaker of Pennsylvania Coal Co., 1911. The result is stylized but clearly recognizable.

Title: Social Darwinism in American Thought

Author: Richard Hofstadter

Publisher: Beacon Press 1985

Designer / Illustrator: Leslie Evans

  Here is Hine's image with the appropriated area highlighted:

  In Kate Atkinson's quirky novel, Human Croquet, a painting based on Gertrude Kasebier's 1902 photograph of Evelyn Nesbit is featured prominently on the books dust jacket, even though Nesbit, the early twentieth century beauty and mistress of the architect Stanford White, is not a character in the book. The central circular shape and it's shadow form a rather obvious visual pun on the books title.

Title: Human Croquet

Author: Kate Atkinson

Publisher: Melissa Barnes 1997

Deisgner / Illustrator: Henry Sene Yee

  Last, and perhaps most unusual, The Photojournalist, Andreas Feininger's 1951 portrait of photographer Dennis Stock has been transformed to create a bizarre amalgam of human and old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape deck for Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens, a 1973 report (by an advisory committee appointed by Richard Nixon's former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Elliot Richardson) whose purpose, according to its preface, was to investigate "growing concern about the harmful consequences that may result from uncontrolled application of computer and telecommunications technology to the collection, storage, and use of data about individual citizens." Perhaps an interesting document to look back on in the light of The Patriot Act.

Title: Records, Computers, And The Rights Of Citizens

Author: Various

Publisher: MIT Press 1973

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

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