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Brancusi: The Photographs

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A question relevant to contemporary concerns quietly resonates in the elegantly understated show of 30 or so vintage prints shot by Constantin Brancusi in the 1920’s and 30s, currently showing at Bruce Silverstein gallery in New York, and it is namely one of intent. What are we to make of photographs taken by an artist known as a sculptor? What purpose were these photographs intended to serve? To whom were they addressed? What has the passage of time wrought on them and on our interpretive efforts?

The gut reaction is to see the photographs as simply documentation. However, even a cursory stroll through demonstrates that there is more going on than just Brancusi photographing sculptures for his consumption alone.

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Francesca Woodman: Nothing but Herself

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Upon parting ways with the 120 or so vintage photographs, artist books and short videos installed in the Guggenheim’s Francesca Woodman retrospective, I found myself feeling, oddly, a little more solid in my own skin.  Because these photographs emphatically exclude any sense of exterior setting, color, narrative, time, the weather even, and, in withholding anything that could be considered photographic information, they draw one in – literally, these prints are intimately sized about 5 inches square, so you’ve got to get your face into them – to focus one’s gaze on a particular young woman who, in print after print, conjures forth herself amidst natural light, scuffed wood, crackling paint and peeling wallpaper.  And she does it masterfully, each time getting to exist, just more so, in a way that only the physical, photographic print seems to have managed do for her, until she killed herself at the age of 22 in 1981 in New York City.