I posted his item first sometime in 2024, but it has disappeared from the blog for some unaccountable reason, so here it is again. The timing is fortuitous by accident: there are interesting comparisons with The Illuminations post of 24th August.
It’s sometime in the mid-1970s and world-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt (b. 1907) is grudgingly working with curator Frank Fusco on a grand retrospective of her oeuvre. As Frank rummages through her archives, the images disinterred from the eponymous Picture Palace awaken suppressed memories of her extraordinary life, her famous subjects and contemporaries and the dark secret that has driven her. Theroux constructs a narrative that does not just use photography to comb through Pratt’s life; it explores the nature of photography and the relationship between the art and the artist.
In 1917 Maude uses a Kodak Brownie camera for the first time to photograph her family. She quickly realises that the camera gives her a license to stare in a world where it is impolite to do so. Then it becomes a way to attract her brother, Orlando, to seduce him as he becomes the focus of her incestuous obsession; and she becomes a photographer pursuing a fame that she hopes will bring Orlando to her.
Pratt photographs a wide range of unconventional subjects: black servants (‘boogie men’), who she shows as human beings; blind people (a nod to Paul Strand’s Blind Woman, New York, 1916); and the local community and life on the streets. She gives the pictures titles like Stoker, Alligator Wrestler, Clamdiggers: Welfleet, Junk Shop Window, Orthodox Jewish Boys, Yarmouth Madonna and Negro Swimming to a Raft. She befriends a circus troop in Florida and photographs the notorious ‘Pig Dinner’, at which the acrobats are made to perform in the nude – the pictures seal her fame.
Pratt also builds her reputation by taking portraits of famous figures in the arts, Ezra Pound to Paul Robeson (her first ‘boogie-man’ and ‘he had more moods than anyone I had known’), Loretta Young to T S Eliot, Picasso to Thomas Mann and a score of others. She is often waspish in her recollections of them: Gertrude Stein ‘looking like a saloon-keeper’; D H Lawrence ‘weasel-faced’; Robert Frost an ‘utter egomaniac’.
Maude’s work positions her as a pioneer of strait photography that flourished for 50 years after the publication Paul Strand’s pictures in Camera Work in 1917. She is dismissive of clichés and avoids the picturesque and ‘embalming quaintness’. She rejects ‘conceptual junk’ and ‘ghoulish photo journalism’. Her work spans the period when the great picture magazines like Life, Picture Post and Munchner Illustrierte Presse flourished and whose decline Maud laments in an age that requires pictures to have news value.
Her contemporaries in the American photographic world are widely referenced, from Ansel Adams to Margaret Bourke White, Edward Weston to Berenice Abbott and Wegee to Imogen Cunningham. Among European photographers she acknowledges Brassai, Cecil Beaton and Angus McBean. She knows her photographic history too, with allusions to Nicephore Niepce, Samuel Bourne and Julia Margaret Cameron. As with the subjects of her portraiture she can be delightfully disobliging about her fellow practitioners. Alfred Stieglitz (who had refused to exhibit her work in New York): a ‘devious’ man ‘of small importance’; and ‘a man who had bamboozled a doting group of people with his lugubrious attentions’. Walker Evans: ‘how that man liked a mess’. Diane Arbus: ‘“That freak show.” I said. “Poor gal needed her engine tuned.”’; and ‘Arbus is all comedy, or at least farce.’ She despises those who seek patronage, especially grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (she was refused one).
There is a tease running through Picture Palace: who is Maude Coffin Pratt, is she based on a lightly disguised version of a real person, if so who? Theroux reinforces this subtly by the way he describes her work, particularly portraits of T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Che Guevara and Alfred Stieglitz: they call to mind pictures we have seen and therefor make her seem more real. But Pratt’s life does not fit with any known photographer and is at best a composite figure. Theroux allows Pratt to reveal that she is uniquely herself: ‘And, as so often happens, my fame became an aspect of others’ – the general public confused me with other women photographers of my own vintage: Margaret Bourke-White, Imogen Cunningham, Ann Brigman, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, and even older ones like Gertrude Kasebier.’ She disowns her own celebrity and prefers to remain anonymous: ‘No portraits of me existed. I vowed not to allow myself to be photographed.’ So successful is she in hiding behind the camera that she is not recognised at the opening of her own retrospective. In this desire for anonymity, if in no other, she resembles Henri Cartier Bresson as much as anyone.
The technical side of Maude’s photography mixes tradition with modernity. She used a Kodak Box Brownie box camera until 1923, a folding camera (type unspecified) until 1938 and then moved on to a Speed Graphic. She is still using the latter in a last assignment to photograph Graham Greene in the 1970s, which seems anachronistic. But she is dismissive of what she refers to as ‘that Japanese capsule, the size of a tranquilizer, with a tiny pinhole eye … a camera so small you could swallow it at noon and photograph your breakfast.’ Why Japanese cameras in particular when small models like the Leica had been used since the 1930s? She occasionally uses flash. On the road she processes film and makes prints in her hotel bedroom. In her work she experiments with flare, solarisation, halation, long exposures, negative prints and shooting into the sun.
She works anonymously, apart from in portraiture. ‘The trouble with cameras is that people see them a mile away and they get self-conscious and sneeze out their souls and put on that numbed guilty expression and act as if you are going to shoot them dead. Or worse, they pose … As a photographer I was embarrassed to be caught with that contraption in my mits, like an elderly pervert …later I was proud of the way I could conceal my intention and, long before the Japanese produced their tiny instruments, I could disguise my camera – as a shoe box or a handbag or as a ridiculous hat.’ The latter mirrors techniques used by Paul Strand for his New York street pictures around 1916-17 and Walker Evans for his subway passengers of 1939-41.
Taking portraits, she engages with the subjects, gives them time to reveal themselves and uses distraction techniques to get the look she’s after, often just one shot more when she knows she has what she wants. She says, ‘A great portrait to me was intimate knowledge. … There is self-destruction, suicide’s wince, in the eyes of my Marilyn and my Hemingway.’ But sometimes there are regrets. Using a paparazzi approach to ‘do’ Raymond Chandler in a restaurant, she repents: ‘Already I regretted the pictures, they were perhaps the cruellest ones I had ever done, taken in a most hammer-hearted way – faultless timing, nastily motivated.’
For all her commitment to photography over a lifetime, Pratt can be ambivalent about its wider significance and its importance to her. She says: ‘As a photographer I considered my camera indistinguishable from my eye … My life was in my pictures.’; ‘As soon as I leave home my eyes start working.’; ‘Photography had taught me to see.’; and, ‘My photographs were memory … I could portray what was unspeakable.’ Yet, ‘Photography wasn’t an art, it was a craft, like making baskets.’ And at the same time ephemeral: ‘My photographs were miles away. I stalked them and saw at the moment of discovery how temporary they were, and how the instant I snapped them they changed and vanished like smoke, or ceased to sing, like a lark in a snare. The life of a picture was that stinging second: there wsa nothing more.’ Then in contradiction she looks at her pictures: ‘I saw new features in them, a significance I had missed before … there were pictures within pictures … My camera had seen more than I had. … I’d only half understood my best pictures.’ She becomes a proponent of deep reading of images.
Some of her observations may find a place on a compendium of photographic aphorisms.
‘Photography lied and mistook light for fact.’
‘Surely a picture had to be more than subject?’
‘Subject is everything and technique only something to conceal.’
‘The pretensions of photography, the inexact science that was sometimes an art and sometimes a craft and sometimes a rephrased cliché.’
‘Why is it that people expect photographers to be talkers? Photography is the most inarticulate of the arts – it’s probably not even an art’
‘Good pictures invite you to explore.’
‘Everything I needed to know about critics: a critic wsa someone you wanted to hit.’
And what seems a very post-modern observation:
‘I’ve never seen Marilyn like that before,’ a critic once said to me.
That’s not Marilyn,’ I said. ‘It’s a picture.’
Picture Palace is one of the most complete examples of photography in fiction, a biography and a treatise on the photography that captures and preserves moments of time. Theroux understands photography. Maude’s pursuit of Orlando, the romantic element, if that’s what it can be called, is incidental (and unsuccessful) and is no more than a sensationalist peg on which to hang a much more interesting story. It is notable that Theroux should have written the novel in the late 1970s, predating by 40 years the recent growth in interest in the historical and contemporary role of women in photography. Maude herself comments on the way women are treated: ‘As women photographers we were either ignored to the point where it did us absolute good, or else courted in that sexually testing way that turned every approach into a flirtation.’ But she is tough, blunt, single-minded and, where necessary, unprincipled enough to succeed. Is it a realistic picture of a woman photographer at work at that time? A comparative analysis based on a critical reading of the lives of Lee Miller, Helen Levitt, Marion Post Wolcott, Lisette Model, Vivian Maier, Eve Arnold, Inge Morath might answer that question.