Still in Awe, After All These Years

"Wow."€ I just kept saying it. Out loud. I couldn't help it.

By far one of the most wondrous and enjoyable things about the ICP's Martin Munkacsi show Think While You Shoot! is how clearly it represents the locus of not only contemporary fashion photography, but of sport and news photography as well.

I'd been wanting to see the show since it opened, expecting it to highlight the master's fashion work, with which he is credited with releasing models from static studio poses and for promoting the image of the athletic, independent American woman. I was looking forward to some glamorous masterpieces from when Harper's Bazaar hires like Munkacsi were photography's superstars.

And the Harper's photos were there, usually as original prints and as they appeared in vintage copies of the magazine. And they were beautiful, often with a stark simplicity that I hadn't expected.

But what I really didn't expect was how Munkacsi would have taken innumerable photos—more than 60 years ago—that were precursors to the stock and trade shots of today's sports and news photographers. The footballer upside down in a kick at the moment his head makes crushing impact with the ground. How much more amazing is this shot when we consider it was taken without super-fast zoom lenses or auto-focus? Or the shot of a dead soldier's feet protruding from a bloody blanket. Despite the countless duplicates of this image from conflicts around the world, Munkacsi's original still packs a distressing punch.

Yet another of the Hungarian photographer's images left me awestruck: a simple candid of Der Fuhrer, looking like an average German Joe in his long winter coat, yet still obviously in command of all that he sees. Like many of the gems in this Munkacsi collection, the initial power of the image is simply visceral, with shivers of recognition building from there as the layers historical context pile on.

Speaking of historical context, it is enjoyably mind-boggling to see a quote like this from photojournalism forefather Henri Cartier-Bresson about Munkacsi's famous picture of three Liberian boys in the surf: "I couldn't believe such a thing could be captured with a camera. I said, damn it, and I went out into the street."€ A time when the great HCB couldn't even grasp the full range of a camera's abilities must have been an exciting time indeed.

And by venturing onto the ICP's lower level, we can move past that cusp of discovery, into the meat of Cartier-Bresson's own work, as collected in more than 350 photographs from the master's scrapbook for his "retrospective"€ show at the MoMA in 1947.

Now, if I had any complaint about the exhaustive collection of postcard-size prints, it would be that it is...exhausting. The prints, small so as to be easily pasted into his scrapbook, are nonetheless dense in Cartier-Bresson's signature way. And then there are just so many of them. I recommend scanning them until something stops you in your tracks—as many images undoubtedly will. There are captions with famous names: Giacometti, Camus, Dior. Or the pleasantly whimsical: sheep napping beneath a Hyde Park bench, Matisse drawing with one hand the dove he holds in the other. And, my favorite, the inexplicably arresting, like one of a Mexican woman with her baby at her breast, at first indistinguishable because it is swaddled in a translucent black shroud.

In a daze of visual overload and the excitement of being near masterpieces, I push into the freezing air on the street outside the ICP. I'll continue to support whatever the next photo-revolution turns out to be—but I've come away with a new certainty that we will forever be circling back toward these Aristotelian ideals of the photographic image.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Martin Munkacsi, "Fun at the beach."/Courtesy International Center of Photography)