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Award-winning photographer
Erich Lessing has captured some outstanding moments in history
and, as one of Magnum's earliest photographers, influenced
the editorial coverage of significant international events.
This exhibition focuses on Lessing's vast photographic career
and diversity of work made during the 1950s - from the powerful
documentation of the devastation of post-war Europe to the
richness and creativity of human expression as seen in the
portraits
of painter Oskar Kokoschka, mime artist Marcel
Marceau and John Houston
on the set of Moby Dick.
The post-war period of the 1950s saw the growth of the professional photographer
in search of a story. While many stories were arranged by editors who gave exact
instructions on how a feature should be illustrated, many photographers, including
Lessing, used their own speculation on what might make a good photo-story to
sell - the photographer could be his own journalist. Lessing was to work for
some of the most distinguished magazines such as Life, Picture Post, Quick Magazine
and Paris Match. While photojournalism could imply that photography's attribute
is the interruption of actual time at
a strategic moment, an idea also encapsulated
in the speed of its process, nevertheless photographs seem to become more richly
meaningful well after the time of their making. Only then can we see more clearly
- see more clearly our own reflection new expressed as a history - a photographic
history.
Around 1953, Magnum's involvement with documenting cinema was formed. Lessing
extended this relationship with cinema into the 1950s photographing artists and
musicians, dancers, actors and directors, which in contrast to his previous series
of works, proved to celebrate a new golden age. The writer and curator Alistair
Crawford refers to one of Lessing' iconic photographs created
on the set of Moby
Dick: 'My special meaningful image is of Captain Ahab tied to Moby Dick, made
for John Houston's film, released in 1956. An unreal photograph - there is no
whale, a made-up reality, derived from another man's made-up fiction, a tall
tale spun by a long since gone Herman Melville. In this image, Lessing, and John
Houston, produce the very essence of Melville's density of language, its complexity,
suffocation, that dark, trembling fear, those rich longed for passions struggling
to liberate themselves from the embroidered yet censored, language of their
birth. Who thinks this story is about a whale?'
The exhibition is supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum. |
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| All images © Erich Lessing |
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