Photography Exhibit
Fritz Henle's work goes beyond beauty

By Yvonne Puig
Special To The American-Statesman
Thursday, April 2, 2009

The work of German photographer Fritz Henle, on exhibit through Aug. 2 at the Harry Ransom Center, cannot easily be summed up or categorized, but at its center it is indeed pursuant to beauty. To the extent, in fact, that the curators have named the exhibition, "Fritz Henle: In Search of Beauty." And though you will find beautiful photographs here, the label is not strictly reflective of the work.

The Ransom Center exhibition encompasses five decades of Henle's career, from his early magazine work (his first published photograph, of a Munich policeman at the Odeonsplatz, appeared in 1931 in the German periodical Muchner Illustrierte) to his later, stunning color photography in the Virgin Islands. The show also features a display of Henle's cameras as well as clips from his journals, all of which make for a compelling portrait of a busy, inquisitive man.

"Henle championed photography during the period of the rise of the American picture press and the golden age of the popular photographic magazines," said Roy Flukinger, curator and author of the companion book ($55, Ransom Center and the University of Texas Press). "He wrote columns, did picture stories, participated in major art exhibitions, advanced photographic technology, displayed proficiency in both color and black and white, encouraged amateurs and professionals alike, collaborated successfully with contemporaneous editors and designers, networked with fellow artists, photographers, photojournalists, and finally expanded his work onto a world stage during the last decades of his life."

Born in 1909, Henle had his interest in photography piqued by his father's scrapbooking habit. In school, he was ribbed about his "toy" camera, the twin lens Rolleiflex, but Henle went on to become known as "Mr. Rollei," a pioneer of the square negative.

A curious aspect of magazine photography is that it bridges the gap between the art and commerce of the medium. Henle's images record a time when photography was not an instant art and when the market for magazine work was thriving. His pictures resist dubious grouping because, although Henle was often shooting for an intended audience (the periodical reader), there's a joy, stillness and range in his shots that show he was not simply performing a task. This was a man who loved to take pictures.

"Consider our current period of history in which many newspapers and magazines are going under," says Flukinger. "Fewer photographic jobs are out there, and many more photographers are losing their positions. Fritz Henle remained an independent photographer throughout nearly all his career, making his way and creating his art, through the combined talents of creativity, hustle, planning, organization and sheer will."

A few standouts in the exhibition (reprinted gorgeously in the book): The figure of a woman wearing all black, seen from above, carrying a black umbrella, Siena, Italy, 1931. The blissful, coiffed graduates of Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio, running down a hill, 1938. The white sails of a yacht cast against a black sky, 1955. This is beauty sought and captured not for aesthetics' sake, but for the deeper complexity of it - beauty in simplicity, beauty in solitude, beauty in humanity.

"Beauty lay at the heart of Henle's photographic quest," says Flukinger, "but he felt that this goal was universal regardless of the nature of any particular photographic assignment or final application of each of his bodies of work."

There is little suffering in Henle's work, which shares similarities with the work of French photographer Jacques Henri-Lartigue. Henle shares a thirst for life with Lartigue, but unlike Lartigue, Henle had to make a living, so his work occasionally lacks the spontaneity of his French counterpart. Perhaps because of this, it often has more documentary power. Henle's shots of oil refineries and pipelines are some of his best.

The show is structured chronologically, with enlarged prints - each about 4 feet in width - included throughout. "The enlargements used in the show are there in part because Fritz was one of the first photographers to use such very big enlargements in his exhibitions, going all the way back to his first one-man show in 1936," says Flukinger, "and in part because they represent various turning points in both his practical career and in his creative life." This element doesn't work as well with abstract photographs. An enlarged image of New York City at night, a series outwardly spinning circles of light, is muddled by the enlargement.

Both vintage and modern prints hang in the exhibition, the modern prints completed by a printer schooled by Henle himself. It's interesting to note the differences between the two. Where the vintage prints are rich, the modern prints can be stark, not necessarily to their advantage. The most expressive photographs of the show are the portraits, which come at the end.

Henle, who died in 1993, succeeds in capturing the intricacy of human emotion - the beauty, yes, but also the feeling and torment - in his subjects. A 1961 close-up of Harry Truman is worth several quiet moments of observation. More arresting is Henle's 1982 color portrait of Pablo Casals in his music room. The musician is practicing, the face of his cello in deep shadow. Only the side of the instrument, its sinuous line, is illuminated. Between darkness and light, one can almost hear the music.

'Fritz Henle: In Search of Beauty'

Where: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas campus, 21st and Guadalupe streets.

When: Through Aug. 2. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays; noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Cost: Free

Information: 471-8944 , www.hrc.utexas.edu

Back to top

The Oxford Project
Their town, our town

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
April 10, 2009

For a family to have its individual members photographed is not unusual. Schools routinely take individual portraits of the student body. But an entire town having its picture taken? Twice?

That's the unlikely premise of the Oxford Project, an exercise in social documentation begun by photographer Peter Feldstein 25 years ago, when he had the impulse to capture on film every one of the 676 residents of Oxford, a rural community in Eastern Iowa just 16 miles down the road from the University of Iowa, where Feldstein was teaching photography. It was, to Feldstein's mind, the ultimate in democratic documentation: everyone in town photographed in the same no-frills full-body shot, without regard to age, race, creed, or social standing. Getting all his neighbors – Feldstein lived in Oxford, too – to step before the camera took a few months, but the photographer eventually succeeded in making portraits of 99.9% of the population. He exhibited the images in the town's American Legion Hall, then put them away. But in 2005, Feldstein had the idea of revisiting the project and making updated portraits of the people he'd photographed in 1984. Over two years, he tracked down 100 of the original subjects and not only photographed them but had a writer, Stephen G. Bloom, interview them about their lives. The results were collected in a book, The Oxford Project, published by Welcome Books in 2008.

The book is at once strikingly intimate and expansive. The townspeople of Oxford do little to hide themselves from Feldstein or Bloom; they look directly into the camera, and their words are as open and frank as their gazes. They own their lives – every wrinkle, every pound, every joy, every sorrow – and share them as freely as they would a cup of sugar with a neighbor. Some of what they share affirms the virtues of life in an American small town; some of it reveals heartbreaking secrets. Everywhere, we see the passage of time and how it works on us, for good and ill, and the fact that we see this across the span of a generation and throughout an entire community gives the Oxford Project the sweeping scope and power of Our Town or Spoon River Anthology. It's both personal and historical, which makes Feldstein's achievement doubly absorbing and doubly affecting.

This week, the photographer comes to Austin to talk about Oxford in a Focus on Photography event at the Ransom Center. On Thursday, April 16, 7pm, Feldstein will narrate a slide presentation and read from The Oxford Project, plus answer questions from the audience and sign copies of the book. The event is free, but seating is limited. To hear a live webcast, visit www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/webcast. For more information, visit www.hrc.utexas.edu.

Back to top

Lordy Rodriguez sees new states of America

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Friday, April 10, 2009

It's been a long road trip for Lordy Rodriguez.

The Phillipine-born Texas-raised artist has spent ten years systematically re-mapping the United States state-by-state according to his creative imagination.

Now Rodriguez's 55 imaginative maps — he added the five new states of Disney, Hollywood, Internet, Monopoly and Territory — fill the walls at the Austin Museum of Art through May 17.

Rodriguez's maps are immediately familiar. Who hasn't seen similar vividly colored hand-drawn maps in an atlas, on the walls of a school room or held in the lap during a road trip? And Rodriguez has all the expected cartographic components there: the topographical symbols, the road numbers and river names, the border lines, the formal typeface.

But these maps are also deliberately absurd. What if Kansas collided with the Southeast? What if Texas bordered New Jersey? What if every state in America had a port? What if there were new borders, new bodies of water, new mountain ranges?

By re-imagining the entire country, Rodriguez considers the deeper meaning of place in the 21st century. He situates our nation's capital half-way between the newly imagined states of Hollywood and Monopoly. The names of the towns and cities in Hollywood are taken from the movies; in Monopoly, cities are named after the cites that headquarter Fortune 500 companies.

We long to define ourselves by where we are from, where our families came from or where we choose to live. But in today's mobile, shifting world, place is more fluid than ever before.

The lacklustre installation at AMOA disappointments and doesn't do justice to the potency of Rodriguez's richly imaginative ink drawings.

That's too bad. Because in his charming, beguiling colorful maps, Rodriguez — who himself has perhaps the ultimate multi-cultural, multi-national background —ask trenchant questions. And perhaps the most important is. how would you map your world?

"Lordy Rodriguez: States of America"
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, (Thursdays until 8 p.m.), noon to 5 p.m. Sundays through May 17
Where: Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress Ave.
Tickets: $4-$5
Information: 495-9224, www.amoa.org

Back to top

What if FEMA deployed artists?

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Friday, April 24, 2009

What if, along with re-building efforts after a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake, artists were invited to be a part of a community's re-building effort?

New York artist Paul Villinski thought about that as he got ready for an exhibit in New Orleans in 2006. He wanted to create some kind of artistic response to the devastation wrought on the city by Hurricane Katrina.

But to do so, Villinski, who builds beautiful sculpture out of discarded materials, realized he would need to transport his entire studio the New Orleans. And so he created the Emergency Response Studio, a mobile self-contained sustainability solar-powered live-work artist's studio.

Through May 2 the Emergency Response Studio will be on view outside the Long Center for the Performing Arts, co-sponsored by Arthouse and the Fusebox Festival.

Hours are 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through May 2, noon to 7 p.m. Sunday-Wednesday. Admission is free.

Villinski salvaged a 30-foot Gulfstream Cavalier travel trailer identical to the ones distributed throughout the Katrina afflicted areas by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He gutted the trailer, replacing the interior with sustainable eco-sensitive — and health-sensitive — materials. Solar panels on top charge 1.6 kilowatt system that powers all the trailer's electrical needs along with the power tools in a small workshop. A geodesic dome on top sheds natural light throughout the trail and a section of the trailer wall folds out becoming a porch, a work platform or possibly even a stage.

Villinski said he wasn't suggesting what artists should do in a post-disaster area, but rather, his project is aimed at suggesting a means for artists the flexible means to be able to live and work some place that lacks power.

"I think artists have something to bring to a post-disaster situation," said Villinski on Wednesday as he installed his mobile studio. "I'm not saying artists can save the world, but artists can solve problems in really unorthodox ways. And we shouldn't be on the fringe of our communities. The world would be lost if we didn't have art."

Back to top