The 'It' Perspective
Photographer Fritz Henle seen through the lens of Austin image-maker Matthew Fuller

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
June 12, 2009

In "Fritz Henle: In Search of Beauty," the Harry Ransom Center has shone a spotlight on a photographer whose work straddled the creative and commercial worlds, who was as likely to be found shooting Texas high school students for Life magazine, Louisiana oil refineries for Cities Service Oil Co., or a swimsuit spread in the Caribbean for Vogue as abstracted urban landscapes or arty nudes. So in looking at the exhibition, which includes 125 images from the photographer's storied 60-year career, it seemed fitting to draw on the expertise of a kindred spirit to Henle. Austin photographer Matthew Fuller has produced images for everything from burger joint ads to museum annual reports, shot it all from architectural interiors to rock star portraits. He's also a respected fine art photographer who has shown locally at Davis Gallery and Flatbed Gallery and in Houston; Santa Fe, N.M.; and Jackson, Miss. Given that he knows intimately what's involved in the composition of a shot, the capturing of a moment in time, the play of light and shadow, the "search for beauty" even in the confines of a commercial assignment, the Chronicle thought Fuller might provide a valuable perspective on the work of this career photographer and the art and business of taking pictures. What follows are excerpts from our hourlong stroll through this expansive and visually sumptuous exhibition.

Austin Chronicle: Did you know Henle's work?

Matthew Fuller: Not really. But there are so many great unsung photographers out there. What I've found in 20 years of photography and 10 years of exhibiting is that the dealers have a pretty tight grip on who gets sold and who gets acknowledged. Mainly because they own a lot of that material, so they're promoting their own material. That's why you hear these names over and over and over, and of course, it's Cartier-Bresson and Avedon and these people, and everybody else gets left out. There's probably 50 names, and there are thousands of great photographers that you never hear of. Sometimes you're familiar with the image and not the person. This image [Nieves, Mexico, 1943] is classic and is on the cover of a 20th century photography collection by the German publisher Taschen.

AC: Do you like seeing other photographers' work?

MF: I love it. In fact, one thing I recommend to people starting out is to see what's out there. It's extremely important to see: Am I reinventing the wheel? Has this been done 50 million times? Seeing stylistic approaches and getting ideas is really important for people starting out. And the [photography] archive here [at the Ransom Center] is one of the best in the world.

MF: Every photographer has tried certain things: foreign city locations, urban landscapes, landscapes, nudes, reportage.

AC: Everyone cuts their teeth on them to some extent.

MF: There are certain subjects that just overwhelm the medium, and the Grand Canyon is certainly one of them. Cowboys and boats are classics. You can shoot 'em any way, and they still have that similarity.

AC: There's that inherent drama that's going to play itself out. At some point, that boat is going to tilt, and that water is going to rush up; the wind will fill the sails. And if you've got horses, horses are gonna run.

MF: [Looking at Cowboys and Oil Derrick, Texas, 1949] And the cowboys' hats and everything, the costume.

AC: And the derricks. You have this nice horizon low in the frame, and the derricks just stick up from the flat land and poke into that big sky.

AC: When you see an image for the first time, is there one thing that jumps out at you?

MF: Composition more than anything, then I see content.

AC: Is this [Policeman in the Rain, Odeons-Platz, Munich, Germany, 1930] an image that would have jumped out at you?

MF: Absolutely. The simplicity of it. It has a really wide range of light and shadow. The form. The line. The lone character in the center. The perspective of the photographer is interesting, too. It's not at street level; it's from a building, from a balcony or something. And it looks like just after a major downpour, and everyone had fled, and this one guy came back out. The light reminds me of that as well. The light from the clearing sky is reflecting on the dark clouds and presenting this reflection onto the wet surface.

AC: If you take the elevated perspective away ...

MF: It's a totally different image. One thing I tell people is that there are a billion ways to approach [creating an image like this]. It could be from the tiny texture of the fabric of his clothes. It could be from underground, in the sewer, looking up. You could move a couple of feet [to the left or right], and it would be a totally different image. So part of the great joy of creating photography is discovering the "it" perspective, the one that works the best. I achieve that by going around and viewing perspectives, seizing on one of interest, and then I look in the viewfinder, and it either tells me that it's right or it's not. I usually don't shoot a bunch of frames of one perspective myself, and I doubt if Henle did either, from looking at this work.

AC: The exhibition text says that Henle usually carried two cameras with him: one with color and one with black-and-white film. Can you see a shot and filter out the color in your mind to see what it will look like as a black and white?

MF: Pretty much. And more than that, when you're using the square-format cameras, everything is backwards, and when you're using large-format cameras, everything is upside-down, so you're composing upside-down. Your mind just adjusts to it. I don't look at contact sheets when I'm judging an image. I look at negatives. Because you're looking at tonal values. Like this image [Fashion Model With Flower Vendor at the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan, Mexico, 1945] would have been much more interesting in black and white, because the tonal values are gray and white. Of course, it's for a fashion magazine and they're trying to bring out the sand colors in her outfit, so it had to be in color for purely commercial reasons. But this [On the Beach, Fredericksted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands, 1948] looks fantastic in black and white.

AC: Do you see in his fashion work some of the same characteristics from his art photography?

MF: Absolutely. Especially in the compositions and scale.

AC: The exhibition shows Henle working through so many styles, areas in which a lot of different photographers specialize. He has a versatility that's kind of astounding to me.

MF: I think in those days it was essential. I don't think photographers specialized much. You were the photographer. You shoot whatever is there. Creative photographers did fashion and reportage for their business and then created images on their own for their personal pleasure. There wasn't a big art dealer scene at that time. So a lot of this kind of material they did when they were on location and had a day off from a shoot or something like that.

MF: This [Coal Miner of the Ruhr Valley, Germany, 1967] stands out. So amazing. Fantastic print. Great subject matter.

AC: There's so much going on there. The white chest hair against the darkened skin. And that incredible balance of the beauty of the image, as it's composed and through the tone and shifts of light to shadow, and the reportage and portraiture. We feel we know everything there is to know about this guy. We know what his life is like.

MF: The glint in this eye and the squint in that one. "It's a tough world, but I'm making it." That's just a hero. A workingman's hero.

"Fritz Henle: In Search of Beauty" runs through Aug. 2 at the Harry Ransom Center, 21st and Guadalupe, on the UT campus. For more information, visit www.hrc.utexas.edu.

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The (new) art of drawing
Today's artists re-consider the art of making their mark

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Wednesday, June 17, 2009

It's about the hand. And the line (curvy or straight). And about an artist making a mark that is distinctive and unique.

Each generation of artists wrestles with its own particular creative concerns. Among the trends of the last half-decade or so has been a re-emergence of the art of drawing and a re-embrace of the sensibilities that drawing demands and projects: directness, intimacy, individuality and an immediate sense of the artist's hand at work.

In art-speak it's called 'mark making' - the essential act of an artist producing the most elemental of artistic identifiers.

Right now, you can make an afternoon of art-going around Austin galleries and museums by following the art of drawing.

At D Berman Gallery, 'Drawn (Not Quartered)' features six Texas artists who pursue the art of drawing in different ways and mediums. Katie Maratta makes black-and-white one-inch-tall Texas panoramic landscapes in miniature detail. Jareid Theis builds delicate, ethereal layers by floating ink drawings that are on transparent vellum on top of sheet music. And the right-handed W. Tucker taps into his inner child by using his left hand to create very rudimentary cartoons on scraps board or discarded book covers. Drawing with his nondominant hand, Tucker says, 'rescues me from over-thinking the work.' Tucker's approach underscores a familiar refrain heard from artists who are delving into the new art of drawing: In our overloaded information age, it's easy to lose track of what's hand-made or what's made viscerally.

Fascinated by the fuzzy intersection between the digital world and reality, Shawn Smith typically makes rather whimsical sculptures from tiny cubes of wood that are tactical, three-dimensional versions of pixelated images - 're-things' is what Smith calls his sculpture.

'I see (the resurgence of an interest in drawing) not as a full rejection, but as the opposite starting point from digital media,' Smith says. 'Drawing has "thingness" to it that's very important. There's a directness and immediacy to its physicality. I can put my hands on it.'

Gallery owner Lora Reynolds has organized a group exhibit at her eponymous downtown art space to open in July that focuses on the ways artists assert their artistic identities through drawing and mark making. And Reynolds offers it as a respite from multimedia art.

'Drawing, as a medium, has always been one of my major interests in contemporary art and it feels like a welcomed contrast to the multimedia direction of much of the art made now,' Reynolds says. 'The immediacy and intimacy of drawing is interesting to me as is the way drawing slows down your looking.'

Slowness, yes, and there's a certain honesty to drawing. too. It is, after all, something created by the fundamental act of an artist's hand and thus the antithesis of the digital smoke-and-mirrors of multimedia art. Then again, a part of today's resurgence in the art of drawing can be attributed to today's younger artists who were brought up consuming animated video of all sorts, particularly video games.

So perhaps the path to understanding today's resurgence of drawing isn't a straight line. More likely it's an expressive one.

Drawn from the past

Prints are traditionally made by artists making their marks directly on a lithograph stone or metal plate. Hence, prints percolate with the immediate sense of the artist's hand. The Blanton Museum of Art's permanent collection of 13,500 prints and 1,500 drawings - one of the most comprehensive of any university art museum in the country - spans more than half a millennium of art history as well as several continents. Three times a year, the museum presents a new set of focused, mini-exhibits. Here's a critic's picks of what's on view through July 5:

'Surrealist Prints: From Europe to the Americas.' Perhaps no other art movement felt so shockingly free-form when it arrived on the scene than surrealism did in the early 20th century. Irreverent, emotive, playful, visceral - surrealism had an immediate appeal both for artists looking to unleash their creative subconscious in bold new ways and for a public eager to break free. On view are small works by, among others, Man Ray, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso.

'1890s: A Decade of Desire.' Consumerism raged in the 1890s, spurred on by the industrial revolution and rapid urbanization. It was an age of going out on the town like no other. Artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured the decadent nighttime revelers in an appropriately fluid, sensual style and also created promotional posters for many a show or nightclub.

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'Off the Edge: The Experimental Prints of Cynthia Brants'
Flatbed Gallery through June 27

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
June 19, 2009

Some souls are just restless. They scarcely settle in one spot before they're scanning the horizon for another territory to light out for. They're ever on the move, driven to seek out the new.

The impression that you get from the 60 works that make up this 60-year retrospective is that Cynthia Brants was such a soul. After poring over "Off the Edge," you'll have a hard time picturing this member of the legendary Fort Worth Circle ever sitting still. Some of that feeling comes from the energy she's invested in individual prints – say, the seemingly boundless varieties of line and texture in her early engravings or the visual tension she sets up through the repeated use of diagonal lines in compositions like Arpeggio, an abstract of crisscrossing angles with the kinetic charge of a Panhandle lightning storm – one that never seems to resolve itself. But most of the restlessness comes through the totality of her work as presented here by curator Mark Smith of Flatbed Press. Brants is constantly roaming from representation to abstraction and back again, on the one hand capturing nature in all its fullness – the massive musculature of a horse, the delicate curve of a flower petal – then stripping it away into the most basic of shapes, the simplest of lines, then restoring it in even fuller fleshiness.

Moving from print to print, you can see Brants clearly pushing for new ways to express herself, not only in form but in color and technique. In the color woodcut Ghost Mining Town, the abstracted mountain landscape is layered with candy-bright pinks and violets and cerulean blues. Her wondrously lush color aquatint Dawn in the Desert captures a daybreak sky just at that instant when it's lightening from indigo to sapphire. And her color collagraph Purple Iris offers a tight view of that flower with all the thick voluptuousness of an impressionist painting – deep-twilight shades of violet against which a pair of dark orange stems glow like hot coals.

Then there's the range of processes that Brants used to make these works. The greater your knowledge of printmaking, the more you're likely to appreciate her versatility and daring in crafting these images. The text that Smith provides goes a long way toward illuminating her approach for the uninitiated. But even an untrained eye will be able to see what a rich variety of techniques she employs – engraving, soft-ground etching, woodcut, monotype, serigraph, collagraph, aquatint, photogravure – and the stunningly different effects she's able to achieve with each: how the soft-ground etching of Leaf and Maiden Hair Fern helps preserve every delicate vein in fog-gray elegance, how the color photogravure Rose heightens this bloom's fragile beauty in uncommonly luminous shadings of pink, how using a woodcut for Hood River Landscape adds rough edges and monumental mass to the mountains overlooking this Oregon waterway, how the color collagraph Summer Shower creates even more vivid contrasts between the white dots covering the surface like snowflakes and the deep blue behind them.

It's so easy to get seduced by the beauty of these images, many of which are quite conventional (especially by contemporary standards), that you lose sight of what makes them, as the exhibition's title notes, "experimental." But Brants was a pioneer, launching her career in the days when modernism was first making its way into Texas, and like many of the pioneers who settled the Lone Star State, she made her own way, often in isolation. Working in Fort Worth and, in her later years, in Granbury, Brants would play with the tools of her trade, teasing out new means of achieving specific artistic effects. According to Smith, she filled some 50 journals with accounts of her experiments; that's a testament to her hunger for knowledge, for restless exploration that all but pours off the gallery walls. At one point, Brants created a woodcut titled Caged Bird, but she was far from one herself. As this fine show reveals, Cynthia Brants flew free and far for 60 years. I'm not so sure there's a cage that could have held her.

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'The Lining of Forgetting'
Thematic exhibit of contemporary art reminds us what we're forgetting

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, June 25, 2009

Our 24-hour digital onslaught of data and information makes for a lot to remember these days. And a lot to forget.

Yes, plenty of technological advances make it possible for us to digitally store and access all that information. But the irony of our information age is that all that artificial memory makes it easier, and more justifiable, for to us forget. Our contemporary conundrum of memory and forgetting is at the heart of `The Lining of Forgetting,' a comely little group of exhibits of contemporary art now on view at the Austin Museum of Art.

Organized by curator Xandra Eden and on loan from the Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina, `The Lining of Forgetting,' like most thematic exhibits, sometimes feels didactic. But when individual works of art resonate, they resonate strongly.

Take, Cody Trepte's `Photo Album.' Some 75 black-bound books line two shelves on the gallery wall, each one with text plate on the front describing a family photograph. But take a volume down and a flip through the pages and you encounter page after page of ones and zeroes, or binary code. There's nothing more sentimental than a family photograph. But today's reality of all those precious moments we snap with our digital cameras is that they mostly exist as virtual files of bytes, not as dog-eared photographs that can be lovingly paged through.

Dinh Q. Le offers a much more sober consideration of the meaning of photographic information. Born in Vietnam, Le escaped with his family at the end of the Vietnam War and settled in Southern California. Now, he creates giant woven photographs - much like traditional Vietnamese woven grass mats - entwining black-and-white archival news photographs of the war with glamor-drenched stills from Hollywood movies like `Apocalypse Now.' The blur is startling and needles away at pop culture's power to gloss over the ugly side of realities.

Less dark but equally critical of pop culture is Mungo Thomson's `The American Desert (For Chuck Jones).' Thomson took `Road Runner' cartoon footage and digitally erased any visual and aural hint of the central characters and their wacky antics. Instead, we get the weird Technicolor version of the landscape of the American Southwest as created by Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones.

So that's the image of the stylized, color-saturated American West that got so embedded in the minds of generations of children who grew up watching the `Road Runner' cartoons - the image that unconsciously informs how with think of the American landscape?

Wonder how many of us had forgotten that?

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