Saturday, December 13, 2003

By Mary Thomas, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

You feel it as soon as you enter the gallery -- that mix of expectation, curiosity, human interest, discovery and connection that used to arrive with the new issue of Life magazine in its heyday, the middle of the last century.

	"Waiting Room: Back to Back," taken at the Greyhound Bus Terminal in New York City, is part of a series photojournalist Esther Bubley (1921-1998) took while traveling by bus in 1947. It's in an exhibition of 51 of her photographs at Silver Eye Center for Photography, South Side. Click photo for larger image.

"We're in the land of the photo essay," says Linda Benedict-Jones, executive director of Silver Eye Center for Photography, where "Esther Bubley: American Photo-Journalist" is showing.

The exhibition gives overdue attention to a photographer who stood professionally in the company of greats like Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith. But at its heart, it's a chapter in the story of the relationship of the photograph to American culture.

"Life magazine brought people stories visually," Benedict-Jones says. "This show really pays tribute to that era when the photo essay was an integral part of American homes and American lives. We don't have that any more. It all faded with the advent of television."

Bubley, who worked for Life from 1951 to 1965, lived from 1921 to 1998. She was thrice chosen for exhibitions organized by Edward Steichen when he was director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, including the landmark 1955 "The Family of Man."

	This striking photograph, "Gasoline Plant, Tomball, Texas," taken in 1945, illustrates Esther Bubley's proficiency with composition and strong aesthetic sense. Click photo for larger image.

The 51 mostly vintage photographs displayed represent the period between 1945 and 1965 and begin with four from her 1945 documentation of Tomball, Texas, where oil was struck in 1933. Images of farmers in work clothes exchanging news on storefront benches are reminiscent of Farm Security Administration photographs, but she also shows modernist leanings in the clean, sweeping S-curve composition of a gasoline plant photo.

In the post-9/11 era, viewers may feel nostalgia for the innocent world recorded in the wide-eyed girls and bemused policeman of "Johnnie Ray Fans" of 1954; the evolution of an ingenue in "A Teen-age Fledgling Starts to Grow Up," for Life in 1956; or the repercussions of "When a Boy Quits School," for Ladies' Home Journal in 1951. The elegant composition of "Onion Fields, Wotowicz Farm, Hadley, Massachusetts," two women bent in harvest, is reminiscent of Jean-Francois Millet.

The photograph that best illustrates Bubley's insightful observational skill is "Waiting Room: Back to Back," one of a series taken in the Greyhound Bus Terminal, New York City, in 1947. Two men reading newspapers sit back to back, separated by the soft diagonal of their benches, against a background of a wall of lockers. One, gray-haired with glasses, is obviously professional; the other, younger, wears a worker's cap and jacket. Bubley draws attention to the gap between the men's worlds, but also to the equality of this shared, democratic space and of the source of information that is available to each of them.

	Esther Bubley showed the evolution of an ingenue in "A Teen-age Fledgling Starts to Grow Up" for Life magazine in 1956. Click photo for larger image.

Three color photographs, while atypical of her work, show her progress with a new way of visualizing, from a compositional structure still dependent upon light and shadow in the manner of black-and-white photography to one in which color is an integral part of its vitality.

The traveling exhibition opened at UBS PaineWebber Art Gallery in New York City, a larger venue that accommodated more images. But Benedict-Jones has carefully tailored it for Silver Eye, selecting photographs representative of Bubley's career, as well as requesting an archive search that turned up pictures of an "Emergency Tracheotomy" at Children's Hospital in 1952, well before Pittsburgh was on the national map as an important medical center. The local connection paid off in a very personal way when the daughter of one of the surgeons involved visited the show and recognized her father in a photograph.

The way Bubley depicted celebrities is also notable and antithetical of today's norm. Albert Einstein, his famed shock of white hair contained under a knit hat, strolls along a rural road near his New Jersey home. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne Moore visits the Bronx Zoo. The great walk among us, Bubley seems to say, and the grandeur, suffering, striving and achievement she captured are all elements of a common cloth.

"I feel human again," an early visitor to the exhibition wrote in the center's guest book.

It's easy to understand how these images could generate such a response.

Members' Gallery

In the Members' Gallery, Monika Merva shows "Hungary's City of Children," color photographs of parentless children in a community in Fot, Hungary, that speak across cultures. Also, Robert Alter exhibits large color digital prints of the sides of multistoried apartment buildings, finding bold patterns within bland institutional repetition.

A panel discussion, "Photo-Journalism: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow," will be held from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Jan. 17 at Silver Eye, followed by a 1 to 2:30 p.m. tour of the Post-Gazette's photography department. Panelists are PG photojournalists Martha Rial and Bob Pavuchak, and WDUQ news director Kevin Gavin is moderator. Fees, for both programs or either, are $16 ($12 students and members) or $10 ($7). Reservations required; tour limited to 20. Documentary films on Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham will be shown at 7 p.m. Jan. 22, with discussion and refreshments ($5, members $3).

"Bubley" remains at 1015 E. Carson St., South Side, through Jan. 31. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and until 9 p.m. Thursdays. Admission is free. For information, call 412-431-1810 or visit www.silvereye.org.

Lawrenceville art

Last week, I wrote that Gallery on 43rd Street displays work by Southwestern artists and artisans. I meant to say, of course, Southwestern Pennsylvania. And while I mentioned that Picturesque Photography & Gifts, Buckets of Joy and Emma's Art & Coffee Emporium exhibit artwork, my observation that they are, however, foremost a photography studio, a gift shop and a coffeehouse, respectively, was omitted.

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