I Didn't Know That — Resident Life at Kendal on Hudson

From The Sissman Chronicles

A Brief Discussion of Photographers

In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of over 500 photographs, called “The Family of Man.” Its enthusiastic reception, followed by foreign showings in most western countries, firmly established photography as an art in addition to being a form of documentation.

The list of famous photographers over the last century and a half is long, and there is not enough room to list them all. One of the earliest Americans was Matthew Brady (no relation to our beloved Kendal photographer, the late Arthur Braady), who created a portable studio with which he traveled to record the carnage of our Civil war battlefields, he also took famous portraits of Lincoln and Grant.

In the 20th century, the most famous and accomplished was Henri Cartier-Bresson, who coined the phrase “the decisive moment” as the important component of his work. Equally accomplished, but much less known, is a Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who roamed South America recording the abominable condition of workers in factories, farms, and mines.

Cecil Beaton portrayed the rich, beautiful, and famous of Britain; his American counterparts were Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter brought us the beauty of America’s wilderness. Adams’ photos were recently featured on a sheet of US stamps.

Among others of note were Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Stieglitz (who is most famous for his remarkable photos of his nude wife, the painter Georgia O’Keefe), Man Ray, Alfred Eisenstaat, Yousef Karsh, and Robert Capa.

One remarkable but little-known figure is Vivian Maier, whose biography has always fascinated me. She worked her entire life as a nanny to the children of New York’s richest families. But on her time off, she roamed the streets of Manhattan with her Rolleiflex, capturing on film citizens of all levels of affluence and of all ages and identities pursuing their ordinary public activities.

After her death, a carton containing thousands of her negatives was discovered. Once they were recognized as extraordinarily beautiful and moving, the best were published in book form!

My favorite photograph, after decades of viewing thousands, is by Salgado. While traveling through Ecuador, apparently, he asked a middle-aged peasant couple to pose for a portrait. They stand side by side in the sun with an out-of-focus mountain behind them. They are dressed in their best clothes, neat but black and shabby. Their faces are lined, probably from long hours farming in the open. They gaze benevolently into the camera. Their faces express a calm, unassuming self-satisfaction with their lives and accomplishments, despite their poverty and isolation—conveyed with total dignity. He is holding in his arms a small white lamb; she is cradling, in her cupped hands, a tiny bird!

Norman Sissman