continued Mobile Homes: The Art of Rudy Burckhardt
by Vincent Katz

III.  Photography
From his earliest photographs, Rudolph Burckhardt (as he credited himself in some early films) presents images of formal grace and tranquil invention.  His 1934 photographs from Basel and his early photos in France show Burckhardt acquiring with remarkable facility the gifts that would last a lifetime.  Gazebo(Basel, 1934) invites the viewer in.  One is charmed into this garden of calm delight: that place that Burckhardt, with his classical education, would know as a spot sacred to Faunus.  The curved barrier of the walk, like a sidewalk, brings humans into a nature scene of trees.  By contrast, Grille (Basel, 1934) is a vertical, cut in two by a building’s improbable edge.  It juts into one’s vision just as legs and feet would in his New York photographs four or five years later (even later, in a film, he used a similar shot of a New York building’s edge with clouds streaming by behind it).  There is also a dramatic element, subtly revealing its author to be steeped in the classics of literature and painting.  This is in the garden, hidden by a wall, bringing many images to mind, from Eden to Pyramus and Thisbe to the Unicorn.  At the same time, there seems to be clear evidence that this 20-year-old is aware of (or has an innate feel for) classical tenets of proportion.  The rectilinear division and the rhythm between the verticals and horizontals are already perfect.  This oddly fragmentary view -- of an edge of a building, a wall, and a tree beyond, with its base of road and sidewalk lip -- has such a pleasing relation in its proportions that it can bring to mind the delicate balances of Mondrian’s compartmental paintings.  Belfort (Belfort, France, 1935) is another example of erudite formal skill blended with personal charm. 
            In his first essays with people -- his 1934 photographs from Paris -- Burckhardt adds the remaining element to his formulation: the scattered, jumbled, yet precise, accident that occurs when people are out walking in the street of a city.  Street Fair (Paris, 1934) shows Burckhardt notching up his acumen by stepping into a formalized social scene, insinuating himself into local patterns of behavior, in a situation far from any that could be considered “touristic.”  This again would become a staple of Burckhardt’s modus operandi, a way of penetrating a culture that he would repeat again and again, and which would significantly not impose upon or in any way trivialize the culture it was experiencing.  The acceptance of randomness, and even more, the desire to enter among the people (as well as to look down from above in other photographs) provides an element that counters his classicism, ensuring his work will be contemporary, not drily formal.  This element, that of the strolling intellectual, the flâneur, mentioned earlier, is romantic, and the interaction of these romantic and classic elements, combined with his acute sensitivity to contemporary style -- to what matters to people -- together form the nexus of Burckhardt’s creativity.
            His photographs of different cultures and peoples are acritical.  He makes no judgement on the people he photographs.  Even though he rarely asks his subjects if he may photograph them (rather, having estimated the correct focus, he steps up to his subjects, whips his camera into place, and shoots), he does not violate their privacy.  On the contrary, he makes them an offering.  In a constantly increasing sequence of travel photographs, taken in Ischia, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, and Trinidad, structure echoes and elevates the harmonic resonance of his relationships with people.  The formal harmony he seems easily to grasp reflects a vision of social harmony which is a combination of the ideal inside Burckhardt’s mind and propitious social circumstances that he would find readily in New York and Naples, but that he seems to be able to find almost anywhere that people congregate.
            It is most obvious in the constantly reforming pyramids, diamonds, and cones of Neapolitan children.  It is also to be found in a remarkable photograph, Photo Wall (Mexico City, 1946).  Burckhardt says of the photograph, “This is Mexico City...inside someone's home on the ground floor.  Sometimes the door was open, and I'd just take a picture.  Sometimes the people were there, and they didn't mind to have their picture taken.  They'd hang photographs of themselves, their children, mother and father, on the wall.”    A random sight one might glimpse while casually walking through a city is seized upon by Burckhardt as a subject for a photograph.  It is potentially invasive; he does not ask permission, impulsively penetrating into private space.  Yet, he does so in a manner that disarms the subject, relaxing him into the realization that this -- art -- is simply a normal part of everyday life.  Unlike the studio photographer, whose variables are highly controlled and whose work is largely cerebral, culminating in the click of the shutter, Burckhardt works like a dancer, maneuvering in and out, predicting the optimum interaction of a group of people in real time, then moving in, framing, and shooting in the split second before it dissolves again into ordinariness.
            Of particular interest is the finesse with which he frames people within spatial, architectural, settings.  The two smiling girls of Water Fountain (Spain, 1951) are relaxed in their daily setting, but they cannot see what Burckhardt sees -- the vanishing point perspective behind them, drawn by the sweeping, converging, angles of buildings, which, as often in Burckhardt’s work, lead the eye to other scenes of people in the distance.  By his spontaneous use of depth of field, he is continually ramifying his subjects, presenting their context as fully as he can, in this case by implying that the human drama at the opposite end of his image is of equal interest and beauty to the one we patently see before us.  Of Gateway(Spain, 1951), he observes, “I think this photograph shows the influence of Cartier-Bresson -- people moving in the street against some architecture.”    Cartier-Bresson, who was six years Burckhardt’s senior, was a pre-eminent composer of images, and that is part of their affinity.  Cartier-Bresson was once quoted as saying, “My vision sweeps across life perpetually.  I feel very close to Proust when he says that, ‘life, real life finally rediscovered, is literature.’  For me, it was photography.”   
            What distinguishes Burckhardt is the lack in his photographs of any sense of typicality.  Often, photography has believed itself capable of providing documentary evidence, not admitting that each photographer photographs only what his sensibility allows.  Doisneau’s shots of Parisians tend to be of types -- the poor drunkard, the dancing girl -- and this is a pitfall few street photographers seem capable of avoiding.  Brassai, for all the behind-the-scenes machination of which we know he was capable, actually creates portraits that are less stereotypical.  Part of Burckhardt’s solution is to emphasize architecture, as in Houses (Ischia, 1951), allowing figures elegantly to insinuate themselves, almost invisibly, into the curves and lines of the buildings around them.
            A further refinement in Burckhardt’s treatment of the urban scene -- the long-shot attempt at an overall picture -- is perfected in New York.  1947 saw him shooting the timeless Flatiron Building, Summer (New York, 1947) -- whose shadow swoops down across the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway filled with pedestrians and cars.  As in Times Building  (New York, 1947), of the same year, he was able to take in a contemporary monument, scale it in size to the people walking beneath it, and encapsulate the whole city in a single image.  In 1951, in the photograph Piazetta San Marco and San Giorgio (Venice, 1951), he applies the same treatment to an ancient European city.  This shot, taken from the Campanile of St. Marco, is tantamount to a snapshot.  Many a tourist has taken one from exactly Burckhardt’s position.  He is throwing a glib challenge to academic -- and modernist -- criticism, daring them to say this “tourist shot” is not art.  The instant one actually looks at this photograph, however, the difference is obvious.  One is charmed by the proportion between the heights of the two columns below and the tower on the island opposite and seduced by the drama in the afternoon light on water separating the two land masses.  The expanse of water, which takes up the majority of the image, echoes Monet and even de Kooning, in his aplomb with regard to materials and subject.  Its emphasis on light on water as the subject (revisited in the 1994 photograph Glitter, a reflection on Lowry Pond in Searsmont, Maine) gradually brings one to recognize how Burckhardt underpins his scenes with abstraction.  Again, the romanticism of the dying light, the gondolas waiting to depart on unknown adventures, is present, but its effect is minimized by the grandeur of the overview.  Depending on the moment, Burckhardt can take the point of view of the smallest being present, empathizing with its individuality, or he can take an almost omniscient point of view. 
            Such visual poetry can be found in Playing Ball (Morelia, Mexico, 1946), where the girl’s arms rise up toward the ball, which floats, permanently out of reach, as in Tantalus’ eternal torment; and in the image’s aloofness -- her back forever turned to us, the purpose of her game forever unknown.  In A Venetian Cat (Venice, 1951), the cat’s central position is clarified by a man at a distant edge of the photograph, pushing a wheelbarrow.  The point of view is low to the ground, a cat’s eye perspective.  The strip of buildings which runs horizontally through the image is a miniaturization of the central sights of Venice, in deference to the cat.  This horizontal stabilizes the image, as does a strip of shops going across Astor Place II, huddling under the visual burst of the Coca Cola Goddess. 
            A certain dramatic irony is registered in Astor Place I and Astor Place II, as the people walking in the intersection are unaware of the effect of the great image hovering over them.  Dramatic irony is a classical virtue, outlined in Aristotle’s treatise On Poetry, and so is wit, that particular brand of humor familiar from Mozart’s operas and the poetry of Pope, and which we readily find in Burckhardt’s photographs, for instance those of a group of smiling prostitutes taken in Algeciras, Spain, in 1955.  We are able to look at these women as beautiful, harmoniously composed in their setting, while at the same time receiving Burckhardt’s knowing wink, which implies that we all know what this is.  Other times, the wit is more subtle, as in Gateway (Spain, 1951), where the boy posing in the foreground does not realize that Burckhardt is focusing on the elaborate Moorish forms of the building behind him, or in Madonna and Pants (Naples, 1950), where the day’s laundry shares a wall with a smiling Madonna.  This image is a good example of the layering in Burckhardt’s work.  At first glance, we may smile at the incongruity of the two elements.  A second later, we may be taken aback, as we recall a poem by Horace, which recounts the poet’s hanging up clothing wet from a shipwreck in thanks to the god for saving him (the shipwreck being a metaphor for a destroyed love affair).
            The classic New York photographs of 1938 and ‘39 fall into two major series: the Sidewalk series -- where there is always a bit of sidewalk visible, a planar counterpart to the picture plane -- and the “storefront” series, taken from a distinct position, standing near the curb facing shops and people walking by in front of them.  In the latter group, signs dance before our eyes, proclaiming, “Ham Omelet,” “Reopen Soon,” “Many Tasty Combinations.”  Unlike the photography of Abbott and Evans, the signs are not present to provide evidence of a certain social situation, but rather as evidence of a certain fact of existence.
            As has been suggested, Burckhardt shares certain features with the recognized photographic masters of his period, such as Cartier-Bresson.  A comparison with photographers closer to him in subject and approach will help to isolate his distinctive features.  Two who seem closest to Burckhardt, in their ability to render the vitality of New York’s streets, are Helen Levitt and Gary Winogrand.  Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1913, a year before Burckhardt, and began photographing children playing in the streets of Harlem in 1936, using a Leica.  Strangely, though, while the photographs she took in Mexico City in 1941 have a Burckhardtian casualness, her images of New York seem like those of an outsider.  We never have the feeling of entering into the lives of her New York kids.  Levitt seems intent on showing their poverty and despair, a social interpretation she imposes on her subjects, subtly altering what she sees.  Even her photographs that are less pre-judged, such as Broken Mirror, in which she seems to have been taken almost by surprise, do not have the formal depth and invention of a photographs like Burckhardt’s Boys Playing (Chioggia, Italy, 1951), where the two boats form ancillary planes to the water’s, and he actively groups the figures with the complexity of great boat paintings like Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. 

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