Imitation, Influence... and Coincidence

Imitation, Influence... and Coincidence: online tour

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Welcome to the online tour of Imitation, Influence... and Coincidence, an exhibition developed by Covering Photography, currently on view at the Boston Public Library. The real world version is up through January 31st, 2009 in the BPL's Rare Books and Manuscripts exhibition space (the Boston Public Library is located at 700 Boylston St., Boston MA. Hours are Mon - Fri, 9 - 5)

The purpose of this site is to take the viewer through the show, display by display, using photographs of the exhibition space and details of the books, covers, source images and accompanying text. The books are displayed in a total of 17 display cases (Note: The introductory text for this exhibit is a bit too long to place in this space, so I have linked it, for those interested, here).

Although I have used a blogging application for this virtual tour of the show, it is not actually a blog; instead it exists to give an idea of the exhibit to those who are unable to see it 'live', so except for comments and responses - which are welcome - I won't be adding to it.

As much as I've tried to reproduce the feel of the show here, there is truly no substitute for the real thing. In most cases, the small size and low resolution of the photographs virtually guarantees that important details will be vague at best, with the result that comparisons between cover illustrations and source photographs may be difficult to read. [click on any of the images to view them enlarged]

Finally, the exhibition in its entirety takes up three separate pages on the blog; once you get to the bottom of each page, you must click on 'Older Posts' in order to see the remainder.

So, to begin: a general view of the first group, cases 1 - 7 (right to left), in the Boston Public Library's Rare Books and Manuscripts exhibition space:

Now on to the details of each case, and the covers themselves...

Display case 1 (Brandt)

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The two book covers above may be seen to symbolically define the parameters of this exhibition. Both cover illustrations, it may be argued, have a greater or lesser connection to photographs taken by the British photographer Bill Brandt. The cover drawing for George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier is clearly a stylized copy of Brandt's 1937 photo Coal Searcher Going Home to Jarrow, and serves as a fitting metaphor for Orwell's politically charged book about coal miners in England's industrial north.

Title: The Road To Wigan Pier

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Harvest/HBJ Books 1958

Designer / Illustrator: John Alcorn

The inspirational source for the cover of Karen Robards' steamy thriller Bait is not as obvious. Seen next to Nude, London 1952, one of Brandt's most popular and widely-reproduced images, there does seem to be a similarity, but is it a case of influence or merely coincidence? Photographers do, after all, look at each others work, and can't help having their vision shaped by the icons of photo history. And if the resemblance is coincidental, just what is it about the combination of raking side-light and the undulating crook of the subject's arm that made both photographers trip the shutter?

Title: Bait

Author: Karen Robards

Publisher: Signet 2005

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

Display case 2 (Kertész, Abbott, Smith)

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Three cover illustrations and the photographs from which they are derived:

For the 1964 paperback edition of Colette's novel, The Shackle, illustrator Jacqueline Schuman has produced a line drawing based on André Kertész's 1915 photograph Lovers, Budapest. Schuman (who has illustrated scores of book covers, including Violette Leduc's in the next display case) has here adopted a drawing style somewhat reminiscent of Jean Cocteau, a friend and contemporary of Colette.

Title: The Shackle

Author: Colette

Publisher: Noonday (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 1976

Designer / Illustrator: Jacqueline Schuman

The Arrow softcover of The Big Kiss-Off of 1944 cribs storefront, barber pole and sign from Berenice Abbott's Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, Manhattan, October 24, 1935. The two figures in the cover artwork have been imported from elsewhere.

Title: The Big Kiss-Off Of 1944

Author: Andrew Bergman

Publisher: Arrow Books 1976

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

Finally, another edition of Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (see previous display case for the first copy). The source for this edition's cover artwork is documentary photographer W. Eugene Smith's 1950 image, Three Generations of Welsh Miners. In the drawing, however, one generation has been removed, and the row houses in the background have been replaced by factory smokestacks.

Title: The Road To Wigan Pier

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Harvest (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, Inc.)

Designer / Illustrator: Hal Siegal

Display case 3 (Brassai, Sander)

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Two covers based on photographs by the Hungarian-born, Paris-based Brassai:

The Fat Woman's Joke, Fay Weldon's novel about female stereotypes and body image employs a painted illustration taken from Brassai's Streetwalker Near the Place d’Italie (ca.1932).

Nadine Michi is listed as the designer for this cover, but the artwork is uncredited.

Title: The Fat Woman’s Joke

Author: Fay Weldon

Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers 1986

Designer / Illustrator: Nadine Michl

The cover for Violette Leduc's bestselling memoir, La Bâtarde presents a more intriguing case since, unlike the Weldon illustration, it is not a direct copy. Rather, Jacqueiline Schuman has taken the woman from Brassai's Lovers Quarrel, 1936, opened her eyes, removed the curl from her forehead and given her bangs. The right-hand image above the books shows a composite of the Schuman's cover illustration and Brassai's original:

Title: La Batarde

Author: Violette Leduc

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1976

Designer / Illustrator: Jacqueline Schuman

For the cover of Yael Dayan's fourth book, Death Had Two Sons, the legendary designer and illustrator Milton Glaser has drawn a loosely interpretive facsimile of Widower, 1914, one of the best known portraits from August Sander's landmark publication, Menschen Des 20.Jahrhunderts. As psychologically complex as it is visually straightforward, Widower depicts a middle-class, middle-aged German man and, presumably, his two sons. In contrast to their father's rotund physique, both boys are thin, forlorn and pale to the point of anemia. In Sander's photograph, the man is looking toward the taller boy, while the other, ignored, turns his hopeless gaze to the camera.

The image is a good choice for Dayan's novel, which tells the story of a man forced by the Nazis to choose the life of one of his sons over the other. Glaser has taken artistic license, however, by making the father thinner and more aristocratic. Additionally, and more important, the subtleties of interaction and expression are lost, and the personalities of all three individuals have virtually disappeared. In reducing the specificity of the photograph, Glaser's drawing has also taken away much of it's life.

Title: Death Had Two Sons

Author: Yael Dayan

Publisher: McGraw-Hill 1967

Designer / Illustrator: Milton Glaser

Display case 4 (Evans, Lange)

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First, two books with covers based on well-known photographs by Walker Evans:

The Italian edition of James Baldwin's If Beale Street could Talk uses Walker Evans' Atlanta, Georgia, 1936 as the source for its cover artwork. The influence may be seen primarily in the middle and right-hand houses. In Evans' original, the poster on the fence is an advertisement for the film Love Before Breakfast, on which someone has painted a black eye on the portrait of its star, Carol Lombard.

Title: Se La Strada Potesse Parlare (If Beale Street Could Talk)

Author: James Baldwin

Publisher: Rizolli 1979

Designer / Illustrator: Paolo Guidotti

Another Walker Evans image, also from 1936, has been referenced for the cover of Caddie Woodlawn, by Carol Ryrie Brink. Evans' portrait of Lucille Burroughs, albeit stylized and redone in pigment, is the model for Brinks' title character.

Title: Caddie Woodlawn

Author: Carol Ryrie Brink

Publisher: Collier Books 1970

Designer / Illustrator: J. McMullan

Here is a panel which composites Evans' original portrait with the cover illustration:

Sometimes a work of art by one artist is appropriated by another artist and remade into a new work of art. An obvious example might be Andy Warhol's use of DaVinci's Mona Lisa. In that case it is a matter of quotation; Warhol challenges our preconceptions about the nature of 'high' art and 'low' art.

The cover of Mark Kline Taylor's Remembering Esperanza presents some similarities. In 1983, Elizabeth Catlett (an important artist in her own right) took one of Dorothea Lange's better-known photographs, Ex-Slave With a Long Memory, Alabama 1938 and hand-copied it as a linocut, flipping it horizontally in the process. The 'new' image was subsequently exhibited and published, under Catlett's name, with the title The Survivor. Seven years pass, and this new translation finds its way onto the cover of Taylor's book, now reduced in size, compromised in detail, shifted in color; that is, not quite the same work that would be found on gallery or museum walls. Since Lange's 'original' was made while she was working for the Farm Security Administration, it is 'owned' by the Library of Congress, and therefore free of most copyright restrictions. Catlett may use the image as she pleases. Her interpretation of Ex-Slave may be seen as transformative and skillful, and it can even be argued that, as an African-American, Catlett may claim a symbolic form of 'ownership' to a picture that references slavery. In transforming the image, Catlett has also made it her own from a legal standpoint; the picture's caption in the book informs us that it appears 'courtesy of Hancraft Studios. All Rights Reserved'.

While this may pose an ethical dilemma for some, in terms of this exhibition it is not a problem at all; rather, it is an example, in a didactic sense, of issues that may surface when an image undergoes the process of translation (in this case, more than one translation) from 'original' to book cover.

Title: Remembering Esperanza

Author: Mark Kline Taylor

Publisher: Orbis Books 1990

Designer / Illustrator: Alicia Zoda

Display case 5 (Wulz, Blumenfeld, Steichen)

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Italian artist Wanda Wulz, known primarily for 1932 photomontage Cat and I, clearly the inspiration for Lester Krauss' cover photograph for Florence Stevenson's novel,

Ophelia.

Title: Ophelia

Author: Florence Stevenson

Publisher: New American Library 1968

Designer / Illustrator: Lester Krauss

Erwin Blumenfeld's stylized Surrealist simplification of a woman's face to a single mascara'd eye and painted pair of lips captivated the fashion world in 1950 when it appeared on the cover of Vogue's January issue. The picture was a product of it's time (a number of photographers had been using high contrast imagery in their fashion work; Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and William Klein, to name several), but it may have had an impact on the world of book cover illustration as well. That same year, for example, William Morrow first published The Case of the One-Eyed Witness, a Perry Mason thriller by Erle Stanley Gardner. Five years later, Blumenfeld left Vogue, and Pocket Books reissued One-Eyed Witness in paper with a cover illustration by James Meese that looks startlingly familiar.

While there is no connection between Blumenfeld's exit from Vogue and the release of the Perry Mason paperback, there may be a trail of influence leading from Blumenfeld's photograph to Meese's illustration. Or, it may simply be a striking coincidence. A third possibility is that both were influenced by an even earlier image, done by someone else.

Regardless of it's provenance, the woman's face, whited-out but for eye and lips, has figured a number of times over the years as a motif for covers of mass-market books involving sexy dames with a taste for danger.

Title: The Case of the One-Eyed Witness

Author: Erle Stanley Gardner

Publisher: Pocket Books 1955 (1^st ed 1950)

Designer / Illustrator: James Meese

One might be justified in wondering if the photographer for J. Randy Taraborrelli's 'unauthorized' biography of Diana Ross, or even Miss Ross herself, had Edward Steichen's classic 1928 portrait of Greta Garbo in mind when shooting the cover image. It is not necessarily out of character for a celebrity with Ross' public persona and temperament to want to emulate a diva from a bygone era.

Title: Call Her Miss Ross

Author: J. Randy Taraborrelli

Publisher: Birch Lane Press 1989

Designer / Illustrator: Steven Bower

Hand Tinting: Joanie Schwarz

Photographer: Wide World Media

Display case 6 (Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson, Lange)

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The resemblance of the pictures on these three book covers to their 'source' images seems to hover between the spheres of 'influence' and 'coincidence'. Certainly there exists a visual correspondence in all three cases: The cover image of The Mammoth Book of Erotica calls to mind Nude, 1919, part of Alfred Stieglitz's collective portrait of the painter (and his wife) Georgia O'Keeffe. The young woman sitting with legs crossed in Binnie Kirshenbaum's novel Hester Among The Ruins is reminiscent of Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1968 portrait of the photographer (and his wife) Martine Franck. Finally, the image on the cover of Bear Me Safely Over has a strong similarity to Dorothea Lange's 1958 image of a priest's feet in Burma.

Were the the photographers who made the cover images influenced by Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson or Lange? Or are the subject's poses archetype, appearing in the visual arts long before the invention of photography?

Title: The Mammoth Book of Erotica

Author: Maxim Jakubowski

Publisher: Carroll & Graf 1994

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

Title: Hester Among the Ruins

Author: Binnie Kirshenbaum

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company 2002

Designer / Illustrator: Julie Metx

Photographer: Gary Isaacs

Title: Bear Me Safely Over

Author: Sheri Joseph

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press 2002

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

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Display case 7 (Frank, Steiner)

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Most viewers familiar with the photographer Robert Frank's magnum opus The Americans will know that the images on the two book covers shown here aren't his, but not necessarily without first experiencing a moment of déjà vu.

There are, no doubt, an endless number of photographs that depict roads leading off into nowhere, many taken by important photographers. While Robert Frank is hardly the first to have produced such a picture, the bleak, poetic beauty of U.S. 285, New Mexico has made it one of the more popular and quoted versions of the genre.

Rosanne Wilson's drawing for the cover of Freya Manfred's book of poems, American Roads appears to have been modeled after Frank's image. Although the road lines in Wilson's drawing have been flipped, the oncoming car is closer and telephone poles have been added, the image proportions are virtually identical to those of Frank's photograph.

Title: American Roads

Author: Freya Manfred

Publisher: Overlook Press 1979

Designer / Illustrator: Rosanna Wilson

The cover photo for The Assault on Tony's (credited not to an individual but 'courtesy of [the photo agency] Photonica') appears generally derivative of Frank’s influential vision, and specifically reminiscent of Bar, Gallup, New Mexico. The setting, the tilt, the way the image is contained by its edges, and the heightening of tension by obscuring detail all find their source in the 26th picture in Franks landmark book.

A final detail worth noting: the publisher of this book is Grove Press; the same house that, 37 years earlier, published The Americans.

Title: The Assault On Tony’s

Author: John O’Brien

Publisher: Grove Press 1996

Designer / Illustrator: John Gall

Photographer: ‘courtesy of Photonica’

American Rural Baroque, made by Ralph Steiner in 1929, is one of his best known photographs, predating Grant Wood's American Gothic by one year. In addition to being a sterling example of Modernist photographic formalism, it serves to portray, and preserve, an archetype of rural Americana. From the warmth of the light to the carefully crafted intricacies of the chair back, one feels a sense of peace, but also of melancholy.

Designer Kathleen Digrado's photo, also of a chair on a front porch, calls Steiner's image to mind. It is used for the cover of Michael Winerip's 9 Highland Road, a book about metal illness and institutionalized living. In Digrado's photo, the empty chair and its shadow serve as a symbol of absence (both literal and emotional) as well as representing the threshold between confinement and freedom. While the shadow of Steiner's chair manifests itself as an engaging optical puzzle, the chair on the cover of Winerip's book casts the ominous shadow of bars on a stone wall.

Was Kathleen Digrado in some way influenced by Ralph Steiner? Was she consciously aware of his work, or did she subconsciously absorb it, conceivably from a slide presentation in a photo history class, or while paging through an anthology? Or, perhaps just as likely, is there no connection whatsoever? To see an object and its shadow as a potential picture does not, after all, require a genius-level aesthetic sensibility; it is a common enough visual motif, even for beginning photography students. What is it, in this case, about the nature of substance and shadow that compels the image-maker to commit it to film?

Title: 9 Highland Road

Author: Michael Winerip

Publisher: Vintage Books 1995

Designer / Illustrator: Kathleen DiGrado

General view of display cases 8 - 10

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Display Case 8 (Gibson, Kertész)

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By concentrating on the visual fragment and artfully intentional, edge-conscious composition, Ralph Gibson has, for more than thirty years, produced photographs which elicit in the viewer a sense of déja vu (the title of one of his early monographs); they seem at once fleeting and hyperreal, mysterious and mundane. While suggesting the presence of a narrative, they in fact reveal very little. Despite, or perhaps because of these qualities, Gibson's vision has become a much imitated stylistic trope on photographic book covers from the mid 1980s into the present.

The two covers here call to mind two images from his second, and perhaps most important, monograph, The Somnambulist.

Title: Letters from London

Author: Julian Barnes

Publisher: Vintage International 1995

Designer / Illustrator: Susan Mitchell (Art Direction)

Photomontage: Jenny Lynn

Title: The Weight Of Nothing

Author: Steven Gillis

Publisher: Brook Street Press 2005

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

In 1926, André Kertész made a series of photographs in Piet Mondrian's Paris studio. Modernist in form, they also serve as symbolic portraits of this pioneer of abstraction. In particular, the image Mondrian's Glasses and Pipe isolates dark objects (Mondrian's pipe, a shallow bowl and two pairs of his signature round spectacles) against the white ground of what is most likely a tabletop (Mondrian's own work, of course, was much more compositionally rigorous than that of Kertész: He would never have allowed, for example, diagonal or round shapes to corrupt the theoretical purity of his compositions).

In Ed Marquand's cover image for Israel Rosenfeld's book, Freud's round eyeglasses and the white triangular background echo Kertész. There is no pipe in the picture, but Freud preferred cigars, and to include a cigar on the tabletop would be, well, too freudian. Instead, there is the title text, in correct perspective, which the glasses seem to be observing as if it were a patient on a couch.

It seems unlikely that Marquand would be completely unfamiliar with Kertész's Mondrian pictures, but let us assume for the sake of argument that he had never even heard of Kertész. How, then, do we parse Marquand's personal and intuitive sense of form, tone and balance from the Platonic forms; ie, the visual templates that float in the ether of our collective subconscious? In simpler terms, how do we explain the coincidence?

In large part, the question is rhetorical. To actually explain the coincidence, if there was a coincidence, might be interesting and possibly illuminating, but ultimately a footnote to the larger issue of how the past influences the present.

Title: Freud’s Megalomania

Author: Israel Rosenfield

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company 2000

Designer / Illustrator: Debra Morton Hoyt

Photographer: Ed Marquand

Display Case 9 (Avedon, Brigman, Rothstein)

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Beginning in the late 1960s, photographer David Hamilton gained some notoriety for his suggestive, soft-focus color photographs of young women in various states of undress. As cultural standards for nudity were becoming more relaxed in the United States and Europe, Hamilton's work was published in a number of monographs with titles like Sisters and Dreams of a Young Girl.

David Caute's racy, 1989 political thriller Veronica uses one of Hamilton's more discreet, but no less suggestive images for it's cover. Once one gets past its Vaseline-tinged eroticism, one may notice an interesting resemblance to Marella Agnelli, December 1953, a well-known photograph by Richard Avedon.

The resemblance is 'interesting' in part because there are major formal and, let us say, 'atmospheric' differences between the two images. Avedon's spare, black & white portrait of the Italian-born Socialite, with its hauteur and icy beauty, simultaneously draws and distances the viewer, whereas the gauzy, come-hither look of Hamilton's cover girl is characterized by an unremarkable lack of ambiguity. Nevertheless, the general outline of the pose (bent knee excepted), the orientation of the lighting and the direction of the gaze is remarkably similar in both photographs. The comparative form and location of each woman’s 'garment' (Agnelli wears an expensive looking designer dress; Hamilton's model clutches what is most likely a bedsheet) makes the resemblance that much more intriguing.

Avedon, a legend in his own time, had an enormous influence on both portrait and fashion photography. There is no question that Hamilton, who began his career as a graphic designer and art director for a number of magazines, including Elle and Photo, would be extremely familiar with the work of the older, considerably more celebrated Avedon.

One final observation: Avedon's portrait of Agnelli was the cover image for his 1978 monograph Photographs 1947-1977. Notice how the large ‘A’ of Avedon's signature compliments the curve of Agnelli's shoulder, while the ‘V’ in the title of Caute's book echoes the model's bent knee.

Title: Veronica, or The Two Nations

Author: David Caute

Publisher: Arcade Publishing 1990

Designer / Illustrator: Robert Reed

Photographer: David Hamilton

Title: Richard Avedon:Photographs 1947-1977

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1978

Designer: Elizabeth Paul Avedon

At Window of Log Cabin in Gee's Bend 1937, by FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein, is one of the better-known images from the Great Depression. The picture on the cover of Dorothy Spruill Redford's Somerset Homecoming clearly recalls Rothstein's photograph. Redford's book is a memoir in which the author reclaims her slave ancestry and African-American heritage. As the cover photo suggests, the girl has become an adult.

Title: Somerset Homecoming

Author: Dorothy Spruill Redford

Publisher: Doubleday 1988

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

To one familiar with the genre, the cover photograph for Yvonne Vera's novel, The Stone Virgins, exhibits an almost uncanny resemblance to the work of the the early West Coast pictorialist Anne W. Brigman, (in particular, it recalls her images The Heart of the Storm 1912, and Nude by Tree 1915). But the cover photo is not by Brigman, it is by Paige De Ponte, a contemporary photographer and filmmaker. Although De Ponte's photograph, entitled Devil's Peak, South Africa, was made with a sharp lens and lacks some of the sentimentality and romantic sfumato characteristic of Brigman's pictorialist aesthetic, there is no denying a correspondence in content and style.

What makes Devil's Peak intriguing within the context of this exhibition is that when De Ponte made the photograph, she was entirely unfamiliar with Brigman and her photographic work. So, is the resemblance merely coincidental, a product of the 'Great Minds Think Alike' school of thought, or is the idea of a woman taking shelter beneath a gnarled tree in a barren landscape a visual template from some Jungian image bank in our collective unconscious?

Title: The Stone Virgins

Author: Yvonne Vern

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003

Designer / Illustrator: Lynn Buckley

Photographer: Paige Deponte

Display Case 10 (Lange)

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Two covers that reference the FSA work of Dorothea Lange:

Lange's Tractored Out, Texas 1938 is probably second only to her Migrant Mother in recognizability. An image whose visual potency has burned itself into our collective visual memory bank; it now serves as a cultural cipher with many imitators. For Bobby Louise Hawkins' book of poems, Back to Texas, it has been rendered quite accurately as a drawing, wrapping around the books front and back covers.

Title: Back To Texas

Author: Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Publisher: Bear Hug Books 1977

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

Eudora Welty wrote about the American South, the place where she was born and lived most of her ninety-two years. The cover artwork for Thirteen Stories is an appropriate, if somewhat generic, reference to the simplicity and old-fashioned gentility which exists in many stereotypes of that region, along with, perhaps, a suggestion of menace in the driver's expression. Compare John Alcorn's cover drawing to Dorothea Lange's Ditched, Stalled and Stranded, made in California's San Joaquin Valley in 1935. One can have little doubt but that Lange's photograph is the source. The filthy clothing and torn interior upholstery have been cleaned up, and the drivers hat and face have been replaced. This is as it should be: In Lange's image, the man sits limp-jawed and glassy-eyed; stunned, as if he is trying to recover from a knockout punch, which, in effect, he is. That is the strength of Lange's vision, but it would be far too powerful, and far too specific, for this book's cover.

Title: Thirteen Stories

Author: Eudora Welty

Publisher: Harvest/HBJ [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich] 1965

Designer / Illustrator: John Alcorn

General view of display cases 11 - 15

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Display case 11 (Hine, Kasebier, Feininger)

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In these three covers, the original photograph, or portion thereof, has been used as the basis for a drawn or painted illustration. In the process of transformation, details are lost and details are added; whatever best serves the illustrator or designer in creating what they feel to be a visually compelling cover that in some way conveys the feelings or ideas which lie within the pages of the book.

For the cover of Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought, illustrator Leslie Evans has isolated a central detail of Lewis Hine's Breaker Boys working in Ewen Breaker of Pennsylvania Coal Co., 1911. The result is stylized but clearly recognizable.

Title: Social Darwinism in American Thought

Author: Richard Hofstadter

Publisher: Beacon Press 1985

Designer / Illustrator: Leslie Evans

Here is Hine's image with the appropriated area highlighted:

In Kate Atkinson's quirky novel, Human Croquet, a painting based on Gertrude Kasebier's 1902 photograph of Evelyn Nesbit is featured prominently on the books dust jacket, even though Nesbit, the early twentieth century beauty and mistress of the architect Stanford White, is not a character in the book. The central circular shape and it's shadow form a rather obvious visual pun on the books title.

Title: Human Croquet

Author: Kate Atkinson

Publisher: Melissa Barnes 1997

Deisgner / Illustrator: Henry Sene Yee

Last, and perhaps most unusual, The Photojournalist, Andreas Feininger's 1951 portrait of photographer Dennis Stock has been transformed to create a bizarre amalgam of human and old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape deck for Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens, a 1973 report (by an advisory committee appointed by Richard Nixon's former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Elliot Richardson) whose purpose, according to its preface, was to investigate "growing concern about the harmful consequences that may result from uncontrolled application of computer and telecommunications technology to the collection, storage, and use of data about individual citizens." Perhaps an interesting document to look back on in the light of The Patriot Act.

Title: Records, Computers, And The Rights Of Citizens

Author: Various

Publisher: MIT Press 1973

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

Please click 'Older Posts' (below) to continue viewing exhibit...

Display case 12 (Cartier-Bresson, Sander, Stock)

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Three solitary figures; isolated in unremarkable landscapes, appear on the covers of these three books:

The cover image for John Galsworthy's The Man of Property, presumably depicts Soames Forsyte, the novel's protagonist. This illustration of Forsyte, portrayed in the book as a wealthy solicitor during England's late Victorian period, has been lifted from the elderly bourgeois gentleman in Henri Cartier-Bresson's photograph, Allees du Prado, Marseilles 1932. He has been made younger on the cover of Galsworthy's novel, and has lost his his bowler hat and cigarette holder; his cape is gray instead of black. His outline and proportions, however, are a precise match with Cartier-Bresson's original.

Title: The Man of Property

Author: John Galsworthy

Publisher: Signet Classics 1967

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

The composite below illustrates the connection between the two figures:

The tiny, dark, glowing figure in Alice Thomas Ellis' novel, Fairy Tale, seems to have its source in August Sander's 1926 portrait of German painter Anton Räderscheidt. Among other indications, the length and cut of the figure's coat and the bowing of the knees make a convincing argument for Sander's photograph being its source. That said, the original image is unrelated to the content of the book.

Title: Fairy Tale

Author: Alice Thomas Ellis

Publisher: Akadine Press 2001

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

Below is a schematic showing how Sander's original image was reduced in size, blurred and given an 'outer glow' to match the book cover image:

Finally, those with any knowledge of post World War II popular culture will recognize Bill Summer's photograph for the cover of former tennis star and enfant terrible John McEnroe's autobiography as a direct and intentional re-staging of Dennis Stock's portrait of actor cum legend James Dean in Times Square, NY. Intentional because McEnroe wants us to see him as Dean, an idol and iconoclast. At once self-mocking and self-aggrandizing, McEnroe challenges us to be in on the joke. After all, 'You cannot be serious'...or can you? It is worth noting that Summer's photo is 'reprinted courtesy of Nike, Inc.' (a reference to McEnroe's bright white footwear). Money talks, and James Dean walks... again.

Title: You Cannot Be Serious

Author: John McEnroe

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons 2002

Designer / Illustrator: Lisa Amoroso

Photographer: Bill Sumner

(reprinted courtesy of Nike, Inc)

Display case 13 (Man Ray)

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Man Ray was one of the more influential American artists of the 20th century. Even those with moderate knowledge of his work may have difficulty viewing these three book covers without being reminded of his photographic studies of women. How familiar the photographers who made the cover images were with Ray's imagery is another question, but it is not the only question. One may also wonder whether this particular subject matter originated with Man Ray. The answer, I suspect, is probably not; curve of neck, curl of hair, sudden movement of fingers to lips have all received various forms of attention throughout, at the very least, the history of representational painting. What Ray seems to have contributed to is the isolation of shape, pushing it toward abstraction while preserving the ambiguity of its emotional content. And it may be this ambiguity that allows the form of the image to be pressed into service as an illustration for various kinds of content, including book jackets.

Title: Spectator

Author: Rachel Salazar

Publisher: Fiction Collective 1986

Designer / Illustrator: Abe Lerner

Title: Flesh And Blood

Author: Jonathan Kellerman

Publisher: Ballentine Books 2002

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

Title: Slow Emergencies

Author: Nancy Huston

Publisher: Steerforth Press 2001

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

Display Case 14 (Riefenstahl, Davidson, Sisikind)

2008-10-17T21:32:00.002-07:00

A swan dive is a swan dive; if perfectly excecuted, each dive should, in theory, look just like all the others.

That said, Rob Clifford's cover photo for The Last Girls is so strikingly similar to Leni Riefenstahl's image from the 1936 Berlin Olympics that one can almost hear the scratchy voice-over from Triumph of the Will. Of course, the content of Lee Smith's novel, described by Publisher's Weekly as "The Big Chill meets Huckleberry Finn", has nothing to do with the Nazis or Riefenstahl's brilliant cinematic propaganda. Did Clifford have the Riefenstahl photo stored somewhere in his subconscious, or is this just the best angle from which to shoot a swan dive?

Title: The Last Girls

Author: Lee Smith

Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2002

Designer / Illustrator: Anne Winslow

Photographer: Rob Clifford / Photonica

Theories about imitation and influence get a bit slippery when it comes to documentary photography, chiefly because it requires the presence of the 'real world', which is constantly in flux and often reluctant to cooperate.

That being said, it is hard to imagine that Jonathan Blair did not have Bruce Davidson's bittersweet 1958 portrait of Jimmy Armstrong, a dwarf who worked as a clown for the Beatty-Cole-Hamid Circus, somewhere in his mind when he made this cover photo for The Circus in Winter. Not only is the content comparable, but the compositional balance of figure and striped tent call Davidson's image immediately to mind.

Title: The Circus In Winter

Author: Cathy Day

Publisher: Harcourt 2004

Designer / Illustrator: Vaughn Andrews

Photographer: Jonathan Blair/CORBIS

Cracked, peeling paint probably made its debut as a photographic subject somewhere in the 1930s or 1940s, roughly simultaneous to the evolution of abstract painting itself. High modernist photographers like Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Minor White revealed new worlds when they trained their large-format cameras on a few square feet of weathered wall or fencing (at the very least, they brought the subject to our attention as something worthy of a photograph).

Aaron Siskind, whose circle of friends and influences included many Abstract Expressionist painters (Franz Kleine in particular), may have given this subject the most thorough investigation to date. Certainly his images of old walls are some of the more widely circulated and better known examples of his work, so much so that they may have helped inspire hoards of photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, to turn the subject into a cliché.

We don't know whether Tanya Gillman, who took the cover photograph for Taking the Names Down from the Hill, was influenced by, or has even heard of, Aaron Siskind. In either case, it is difficult to look at the cover of Philip Kevin Paul's book of poems without being reminded of Siskind's 1949 image, Jerome, Arizona 21.

Title: Taking The Names Down From The Hill

Author: Phillip Kevin Paul

Publisher: Nightwood Editions 2003

Designer / Illustrator: Silas White

Photographer: Tanya Gillman

Display Case 15 (Fuss, Goldin, Baldessari)

2008-10-17T21:32:00.001-07:00

In his recent series My Ghost, contemporary artist Adam Fuss produced photograms of smoke and other artifacts, including 19th century children's dresses. The transparency of the dresses lends the work a haunting fragility.

The cover design for Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter may not have been as likely without the prior influence of Fuss's work.

Title: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

Author: Kim Edwards

Publisher: Penguin 2006

Designer / Illustrator: Gregory Mollica

Photographer (dress): Liz Magic Laser

Photographer (snow): Roy Mehta/Photonica

For the Harper Perennial edition of 1959, Thulani Davis' coming of age novel set in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, Honi Werner (a designer and illustrator who often raids the icebox of art history for imagery to work with) has rendered an impressionistic copy of a small, central detail in Nan Goldin's dreamlike Sun Hits the Road, Shandanken, NY 1983. This cover is proof that even the smallest detail of a photograph may provide grist for the designers mill.

Title: 1959

Author: Thulani Davis

Publisher: Harper Perennial 1993

Designer / Illustrator: Honi Werner

In the composite below, Werner's cover had the center image removed and was then laid over a copy of Goldin's original:

As part of his modus operandi, Los Angeles-based artist John Baldessari has obscured the faces (and other parts) of people in publicity photos and film stills for more that two decades. His work leans strongly toward the conceptual, and raises issues involving appropriation, 'high' art versus 'low" and the mediation of images.

In The Color of a Dog Running Away, it is Baldessari's style that is appropriated for its high-impact color and visual punning with the book's title. In other words, it is used to make a book cover that will be noticed.

Lia Chee's cover design for this book is so close to the look of a work by Baldessari that, until I checked the books back flap, I thought it actually might be one. The relationship between color, relative size and psychological distance in the red, green, yellow and blue circles is not unlike Baldessari's smart, funny and playfully absurd sensibility. Interestingly, the photographic component of the cover is actually a composite of the work of three photographers, including George Rodger, one of the founders of Magnum.

Title: The Color of a Dog Running Away

Author: Richard Gwyn

Publisher: Doubleday 2007

Designer / Illustrator: Gretchen Achilles

Display case 16 (Muybridge, Warhol)

2008-10-17T21:30:00.001-07:00

Edweard Muybridge

The thousands of photographic motion studies Edweard Muybridge made in the middle 1880's, collectively published in 1887 as Animal Locomotion, have served as standard reference works for those interested how mammals move. Such groups would include scientists, doctors and visual artists. Now, more than a century later, the pictures have acquired a campy patina, due perhaps to a tension between the sober, scientific nature of their initial purpose and the surreality of having nude adults perform everyday tasks in front of a large grid.

The two sketched figures treading on the title type of Philip Slater's Footholds appear to be taken from Muybridge's Man Walking at Ordinary Speed and Woman Picking Up and Throwing Baseball, while the sequences on the cover of Time Management for Christian Women seem to be based on Woman Walking and Woman Leaping from Rock to Rock. Unlike the Muybridge original, the female model here is fully dressed, perhaps due to the religious underpinnings of the book, which, according to its jacket blurb, "...run[s] basic time management principles through a Bible filter to distill excellent advice on doing your best work and being your best self for the Lord".

Title: Foot Holds

Author: Philip Slater

Publisher: E.P. Dutton & Company 1977

Designer / Illustrator: Tom Lulevitch

Below is a section of one of Muybridge's plates from Animal Locomotion which may have been the basis or inspiration for the cover image:

Title: Time Management For Christian Woman

Author: Helen Young & Billie Silvey

Publisher: Zondervan 1990

Designer / Illustrator: Not listed

Below is a section of one of Muybridge's plates from Animal Locomotion which may have been the basis or inspiration for the cover image:

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol, not a photographer in the classic sense, was, rather, an artist who made great and radical use of photography as part of his practice. Like Edweard Muybridge (but for different reasons), much of his work involved the multiple and the grid.

Warhol's Electric Chair series of the 1960s achieved a degree of notoriety that reached well beyond the confines of the art world. It would not be unusual for a cover designer of that period or later to appropriate his bold, graphic style (which itself appropriated the graphic styles of advertising and popular culture).

Title: Cruel And Unusual

Author: Michael Meltsner

Publisher: Random House 1973

Designer / Illustrator: John Sposato

The cover photo of singer/songwriter/poet Kevin Max is actually by Norma Jean Roy & Greg Gorman (Gorman is a well-known portrait and editorial photographer, with several monographs of his work published). It is difficult to know without asking the subject or photographers whether or not the similarity to Andy Warhol's later silkscreened self-portraits, from the black turtleneck to the wild silvery hair, is intentional, but the resemblance is too close to let pass without comment. The book's back cover even makes visual reference to Warhol's use of the multiple as pictorial strategy. The image here is a double exposure or print.

Title: The Detritus of Dorian Gray

Author: Kevin Max

Publisher: Blind Thief Publishing 2003

Designer / Illustrator: Melissa Barnes

Photographer: Greg Gorman

Display Case 17 (Kruger)

2008-10-17T21:29:00.001-07:00

Before she became an '80s art star, Barbara Kruger made her living as a graphic designer (she worked, in fact, for the photography journal Aperture in the 1960s). Content aside, her photo and text-based works reflect a solid grounding in modernist design, the Bauhaus and the colors of Constructivism. Part of what is interesting about her aesthetic is her ability to adapt her signature red, black and white, Futura Bold Italic style to everything from postcards and matchbook covers to billboards and room-sized installations.

The cover design for Susan Rubin Suleiman's book, Subversive Intent, is an intentional copy of one of Kruger's best-known pieces, Untitled (Your body is a battleground) 1989, and is adapted with the artists permission. Wade Clark Roof's A Generation of Seekers, on the other hand, constitutes a more generic interpretation. Although the design mainly involves type and a vertical dividing line, it nevertheless echoes Kruger's visual style.

Title: Subversive Intent

Author: Susan Rubin Suleiman

Publisher: Harvard University Press 1990

Designer / Illustrator: Gwen Frankfeldt

Title: A Generation of Seekers

Author: Wade Clark Roof

Publisher: HarperCollins 1993

Designer / Illustrator: Raul Cabra