The Mexican Suitcase at ICP

I'm not sure why looking at black and white pictures of Spanish Civil War soldiers sitting casually against the landscape of their homeland is so poignant to me. They're laughing and smoking, or looking vacant, or marching, all with the distinctive barren and rocky backdrop of Spain (or how I imagine it beyond Madrid, the only part of the country I've ever seen with my own eyes). The photographers who captured these images are Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Chim, all Magnum war photographers who put their lives in danger to show the world what Franco was up to during the 1930s. The show is "The Mexican Suitcase" which is running at the International Center of Photography through January 9, 2011.

The epic story of the "Mexican Suitcase" is a long and confusing yarn. Three small cardboard boxes that disappeared from Paris shortly after World War II, and which contained 126 rolls of film taken by the three photographers, resurfaced after decades in Mexico. Robert Capa's brother, Cornell, was able to see greet the finale of his long quest in 2007 when he was 89 years old and rapidly nearing the end of his own life.

The result of his dogged search for the negatives is an exhibit chock-full of evocative old photo ephemera: worn rectangular manilla envelopes, labeled by Capa in pencil: "Taro: Sierra" and old notebooks filled with tiny developed contact sheet images, arranged by the photographers to tell the story of which images were used in which publication. There's Capa's 1939 Press Card. Old covers of yellowed magazines splashed with the confidence of handsome Spanish generals. Even a haunting film shot by Henri Cartier Bresson, a founding member of Magnum, of American volunteers in Spain.

My favorite images were the ones where civilians are living their lives with the war falling naturally into the backdrop: life goes on with an old woman selling sardines straight from the ocean's edge. We're also given the choice, for the first time, to examine the published prints against the surrounding images on the contact sheets. Take, for example, the picture of a little girl with saucer brown eyes, a refugee who sits on a bed clutching her toy bears staring off into space. Now you can see that in the surrounding images she looks more like a child than a shell-shocked war veteran, her eyes actually engaging with the camera. Those pictures, in the end, didn't make the cut.

Bonus: Take a minute to soak in the only known photograph from the show, shown above, of Capa and Taro together in the first blushes of their tragic romance.

Miroslav Tichy at the ICP Museum

Ending May 9th at the International Center of Photography is a retrospective show of Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy. This is the first North American exhibit of the 80-year-old photographer's work.

During Communist-era Czechoslovakia c. 1950s, Tichy was prone to psychotic episodes following his tenure at an art school in Prague. He lived in a the town Kyjov, and became known by townspeople unaware of his artistic history for being creepy. Citizens of Kyjov didn't believe the cardboard tubes and broken camera parts he carried around were real; his tools of choice were the absurdly rustic cameras made by his own hand using spare parts and found objects, like the elastic from sweatpants, or empty spools of thread, or metal bottle tops. Rather they thought he was only pretending to take pictures of people in public spaces, like swimming pools, squares, and parks. Now, he's well-known for capturing slivers of the jubilant daily life of a repressed time (note: his objects culminate largely in a collection of Lolita-esque girls).

In some ways, critics have found a way to make his work political. Moving through the show, I wasn't stricken by this aspect of his work, though there's no doubt truth to this given the climate of the day. Maybe these anti-Communist themes didn't leap out at me because a recurring theme of my own life has been accidentally befriending the odd recluses others shy away from. I don't see them as bucking the system politically, but rather as being mentally ill, unable to conform and function with clarity in the world around them. Not to say they don't carry throughout their lives the occasional special stamp of artistic brilliance.

I went to see this show with two of my Parsons independent study students, both of whom weren't particularly impressed by his work. I can sort of see why-- many of the tattered black and white images would alone have a snapshot quality that make you feel like you're looking at someone else's grandparents' Heyday Shots. There are black and white photographs of laughing girls with their arms around each other, sometimes posing for the camera, but more often than not the images are of women walking away from him, oblivious of their role as Muse. Together, the collective sum of all the photographs shown, along with the foreboding cases of simultaneously brilliant and insane makeshift cameras, stuck in my mind for days.

The 2004 82-minute film by Tichy's longtime neighbor, psychiatrist Roman Buxbaum, loops in a room off of the main show. The film offers up a space for another side of Tichy's legacy; his charm and humor. He's fully aware and in command of his eccentricities, and beautifully unapologetic about them. "Something perfect and beautiful is of no use to anyone," he says in the film.