Arresting Time:
Erich Lessing
Reportage Photographs
1948 - 1973
Alastair Crawford, Editor
(Quantuck Lane Press/Norton)
Erich Lessing
Reportage Photographs
1948 - 1973
Alastair Crawford, Editor
(Quantuck Lane Press/Norton)
One of the things we ask again and again is ... how do they do it? How does a good novelist come up with the story-line, the dialogue, the characters? How does a playwright know to get the people on the stage and off the stage at the right time, much less putting words in their mouths? How does a poet know the economy, the end-stops, the rhythm for the perfect sonnet?
How did Michelangelo know where to cut and where not to cut when he was forming David? How did Renoir know the exact amount of cinnabar and turquoise (not to say black or white) to put in the milkmaid's hair, face, eyes, nose, blouse? How did Beckett know what word to put in, what to leave out, when he constructed the greatest play of all time, All That Fall?
How did Frank Lloyd Wright know how to cut and align his true great works of art: the chairs and tables and doors and windows in his various houses? And how, we ask now (we could go on; let's stop) how did Erich Lessing come up with such fine black-and-white photographs...
...photographs that tell a story, not too little, not too much? How many shots did he have to make in his twenty-five years of reportage to come up with the 400 or so that appear in this book? Which did he print, which did he cut, which did he throw away? Will we know, will we ever know? (and does it even make any sense to ask)?
...and the unknowns: workers building housing in Bytom, Poland, a fashion show in Vienna, a Bar Mitzvah in Krakow, brokers at the Bourse, West Germany, miners in Rhein, Altenessen, American Secret Service agents, Geneva (summit conference)...