by David Kastan
Is there, then, some truth that can be told by white? Other, that is, than the truth that it lies? Though that one, it must be said, is hardly insignificant.
There is a least one person who looks for its truths and tells them. Again and again. The American artist Robert Ryman has made a career painting white and painting with white. White is both his subject and his medium. There are no truth claims in his art, except for the many muted, subtle, experiential truths of how paint may be applied to a surface. These are no stories, no images, no allusions, no metaphors. Just paint on surfaces. Different whites, applied differently, applied to different supports, and then differently mounted. But never a pure white, whatever that might mean; only the many impure whites that tell us, like Ellison’s “optic white,” that white’s purity is a lie. Only whiter shades of pale, and paler shades of white. And, of course, the evidence of Ryman’s obsession with the color (Figure 41).
Ryman is no less obsessive than Melville’s Ahab, but he’s obsessive about his white as material rather than metaphor. It’s paint. It is remarkable what he does with the white paint, what he makes the white paint do. But he doesn’t make it mean anything or let it mean anything; and so his white doesn’t lie.
The price of its honesty may be the austerity of the visual field of Ryman’s paintings: the absence of the exhilaration of color. But to call these white paintings, for all their severely restricted chromatic effects, “taciturn,” as some art critics have done, crucially misses the point. They don’t speak, even laconically. They don’t speak at all. Language is the domain from which the lies come from. The truths are visual. They come from the color, not the color of something and not a color that means something. Just the color. Just white, which repeatedly serves Ryman as a self-imposed restraint demanding all the artistic energy and intelligence that make these paintings “too perfect for words,” as another critic has said.14
FIGURE 41: Robert Ryman, Untitled #17, 1958. Oil on stretched cotton canvas, 54¾ × 55 in. (139.1 ×139.7 cm). The Greenwich Collection Ltd.
That’s it exactly.
Ryman’s white is a white freed from language and symbolic meanings. The paintings are saturated with color, not with significance. “The painting should just be about what it’s about, and not other things,” Ryman said.15 And this is about white. This is white that really is an “optic white,” precisely because it’s not about “other things.” It’s not symbolic. Symbols must be learned before they can be recognized. This white asks only to be seen. It’s a white that is neither classical nor Christian—a white that is unburdened with anything other than Ryman’s artistry.
The paintings aren’t about anything, except about his taking pains and giving pleasure, about what can be made and what will endure.16 This might be the only solution to the mystifying “incantation” of whiteness: to peel away the film of significance from the color in order to see it just as it is, though for most of us there isn’t any such unmediated seeing to be done. It is almost always impossible to keep color from being tinted with other things. But certainly Ryman tries.
Ryman’s contemporary Frank Stella once impishly said that he merely “tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.”17 But both Stella and Ryman always make the color better, better by understanding what color is and what it is not—and helping us understand. For them, it is what is there on the canvas, before our eyes, not what we think is supposed to be there before we have looked. But clearing our vision is not very easy. It takes time.
For about twelve years, Melville’s Moby-Dick served as the organizing focus of Stella’s artwork.18 Between 1985 and 1997, Stella created 275 pieces in a variety of media: sculpture, relief, painting, collage, engraving, and lithograph. Each took its title either from one of the novel’s 135 numbered chapters or the three additional unnumbered sections. He told a newspaper reporter that after seeing some whales at an aquarium, “I decided to go back and read the novel, and the more I got into it, the more I thought it would be great to use the chapter headings of the novel for the titles of the pieces.”19
The allusive titles no doubt invite us to “read” Stella’s abstract creations, seeking their meaning in some relation to the novel’s details and its deeper implications. But it’s not exactly clear how much he “got into” Moby-Dick—or out of it. Stella obviously had read the book—at least well enough to know the names of its chapter titles, but his work is not a reading of Moby-Dick or a set of illustrations of the novel (which might well be the most often illustrated novel of all time). It isn’t really an artistic response to it. His interest is in forms and colors, not words and meanings. The work is no more about Moby-Dick than Monet’s water lilies are about flowers. It is about art. There’s nothing more in it than what meets the eye, although an awful lot does.
The exuberant grandeur of these pieces marks a sharp turn from the cool glamour of Stella’s early paintings and prints. Geometry gives way to gesture. Squares to swirls. Protractors to pinwheels. In The Whiteness of the Whale we see the curvilinear wave and whale shapes that reappear throughout his series, but also other irregular forms painted yellow, orange, red, blue, gray, and black in between (see Figure 38). White, instead of being the familiar background on which “real” color sits, is forced to the foreground here, but as an indistinct white area, mapped out with squiggles and lines. It looks as if it wants to recede to the familiar place where it “belongs,” but it can’t.
The title of the piece tells us that this white form must be the whale, but even Stella doesn’t seem so sure: “I have one piece titled after the famous chapter, The Whiteness of the Whale, in which at least the wave is all white,” he said to the reporter. Maybe he just misspoke, or the reporter misheard—or maybe it just isn’t very important which shape is white. “I keep trying to make pieces that are black and white but they always get very colorful,” he said about his creative process. Nothing here about whales or the incantation of whiteness.
But maybe it’s better that way: at least trying to keep the color “as good as it was in the can” and just leaving it to “its own meaning.” Otherwise it lies.
CHAPTER TEN
Gray is the sad world
Into which the colours fall.
DEREK JARMAN, Chroma
Gray
AREAS
FIGURE 42: Nicéphore Niépce, enhanced and retouched version of the oldest surviving photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras, c. 1826
Photographs,” said Susan Sontag, “really are experience captured.”1 The “really,” however, poses a problem. “Experience captured,” yes, but for a long time it was an experience captured only in shades of gray. Is that “really” the way experience looks? What happened to its color?
John Berger, the brilliant art critic (whose recent death has robbed the world of one major source of its conscience), more accurately has said that photographs “are records of things seen.”2 He’s right. It is precisely that they are the records—not the images—of those things, at least if they are in black and white (to say nothing of their other usually unremarked formal conventions: their reduced scale and two-dimensionality). Yet from the moment of the invention of photography, the striking absence of color from its images was almost always ignored. Even later, when high-quality color photography had become possible, most of the great modern photographers still eschewed color for their serious work. William Eggleston, who could be said to have given color photography respectability with his 1976 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, recalls with some delight a comment made to him by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: “You know, William, color is bullshit.”3
Most were not as forthright. Still, it seems to be what most serious photographers thought. They could have shot their pictures in color, but usually they didn’t: Cartier-Bresson, of course, but also Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen, Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans (who in fact did take color photographs, though not for his often heartb
reaking recording of rural poverty but only, with some obvious irony, for his commercial work for Fortune)—and later Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Mary Ellen Mark, and Robert Adams. “The mirror with a memory,” in Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s elegant definition of photography, was pretty much color-blind.4
From the beginning, however, almost no one noticed. Photography shows us “the perfect image of nature,” as Louis Daguerre, one of the technology’s inventors, proclaimed in 1839.5 And a century later, Paul Valéry would say that photographs show us “what we would see if we were uniformly sensitive to everything that light imprints upon our retinas, and nothing else.”6 The photographic image is “perfect,” and the precision of the new technology perfects our inadequate visual system.
But for all of photography’s celebrated perfection, capturing the color of the world didn’t seem to be a part of it, and that limitation was rarely even remarked upon. Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph and an early enthusiast for the new technology, was among the very few who even thought to comment, praising the exactness of the photograph’s “definition,” but acknowledging that it appeared “in simple chiaroscuro, and not in colors.”7 But he reported this merely as a fact rather than as a flaw.
There was no color. What is usually identified as the oldest surviving photograph (though its inventor called it a “heliograph”—a sun drawing) is known as View from the Window at Le Gras (see Figure 42). A blurry, grainy image fixed on a pewter plate in 1826, it is a view from the attic window of the country house of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a Frenchman, who had been for well over a decade experimenting with various ways of preserving projected images on light-sensitive materials. The original, now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, is virtually indecipherable. The image can be made out only in the copy made by Eastman Kodak for Helmut Gernsheim in 1952, and then improved by Gernsheim with watercolor—so what is often reproduced, as here, is not exactly what it is usually claimed to be.8
Niépce seems to have been attempting to capture this exact image from the window for at least ten years. In 1816, he described it in a letter to his brother: the view over the courtyard of the estate, with the loft of a dovecote on the left, the slanting roof of a barn hovering in the center, with a pear tree rising between and behind them, and a wing of the country manor on the right, all set against a horizon. Niépce’s photograph, however, is a ghostly abstract of planes and shadows. And although Niépce claimed that his technique was “eminently suitable for rendering all the delicate tones of nature,” those delicate tones are only shades of gray.9
They are not even what they are usually said to be: “black and white.” Zebras are black and white. Photographs are not. Hyphenation maybe helps a bit: “black-and-white.” But not enough. “Black to white” might be a more accurate term, recognizing the infinite gray scale of the color tones existing between black and white that so-called black-and-white photographs depend upon. But what they are is gray. “Gray” photography is what it should be called. That is what it is.
For a long time the grays were enough. No one seemed to care that there was no color. People continued to discuss photography as a technology perfectly recording what was seen and even able to reveal what the unaided eye was incapable of seeing (as in Eadweard Muybridge’s remarkable studies of motion). The twentieth-century French film critic André Bazin said that photography is the “true realism”; it gives “significant expression to the world both concretely and its essence.”10
“Its essence” is the key term here (though “concretely” might well raise its own questions). The world’s essence, though, seemingly was gray. Color was not essential to it, or to its representation. Color was understood as something secondary, decorative, maybe deceptive, and always distracting, so its absence could be imagined as a purification of the world that photographers sought to record. Photography was seen as a form of mechanical drawing: “the pencil of nature,” as an early experimenter with the technology called it.11 In the long history of the contest in the visual arts between the claims of line and the claims of color, photography was initially placed on the side of line. Color doesn’t matter.
The world, however, isn’t gray (and it is certainly not black and white). Of course, for a long time there wasn’t a reliable technology to generate color photographs. Unsurprisingly, some people noticed the lack of color, and some tried in various ways to provide it: hand-coloring photographs, using toners that could bind with the silver grain to color the black and white or, most significantly, attempting to produce durable color photos almost from the moment photography was developed. The first color photograph was made in 1861, but there wasn’t a widely available color film until the 1930s with the introduction of Kodachrome.
But initially these were all curiosities. Black-and-white photographs were almost always what people saw, and their absence of color was not thought to be deserving of comment. It was just a matter of fact—but of course that is exactly what it is not. Perhaps the most salient “fact” about “reality” is that “it comes in color,” as the great photographer Pete Turner insisted in 2010: “Maybe that’s exactly what makes it bearable. So why don’t we shoot it that way?”12
Although at first the obvious answer was simply that they couldn’t, even once they could, most photographers didn’t. And many still don’t. By the 1960s, color had replaced black and white as photography’s default condition, but even then black and white didn’t go away. In fact, the near ubiquity of color both for family pictures and for advertising newly encouraged the use of black and white for art photography. Many photographers and art critics began to insist (defensively?) that black-and-white photographs allowed a control of tone and precision of detail impossible with color film. This may sound a bit like the early protests about the use of sound from defenders of silent movies. But many photographers did—and still continue to—insist that “black and white are the colors of photography,” as Robert Frank said, and that its gray scale can successfully stand in for the rest of the colors, without their distractions.13
It is, of course, now a choice—and probably too easily becomes a cliché. Black and white becomes a self-conscious gesture, either retro or artsy: a simulacrum of authenticity, an assertion of artistic seriousness, and, too often, an affectation, designed to produce what the poet Stephanie Brown calls “a nostalgia for feelings we never had.”14 Black and white becomes a “look.” When Paul Simon first recorded his song “Kodachrome” in 1973, buoyed by the charm of the color effects possible with the new film stock, he sang: “Everything looks worse in black and white.” By the time he recorded the song for The Concert in Central Park in 1982, however, he was singing: “Everything looks better in black and white.” Along with sepia (which just adds brown tones to the gray scale of the original print), it had become the color of our memories. Not of what we remember but the color of memory itself, which is always, at least in part, a kind of amnesia.
This may even be the case (or at least became the case) when the memories were of recent nightmares: the black-and-white photographs of the rural poverty of the Dust Bowl, the images of the internment of Japanese Americans, or the scenes of inhumanity recorded as Allied soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camps. These pictures are gray. And if their grayness authenticates their veracity, over time it works to sequester their images securely in the past. Once color becomes the predictable formal condition of photography, monochrome photographs begin to lend their subjects a comforting patina of age, robbing the image of much of its historical specificity, as it becomes merely past. Their modulated gray tones remove the image from lived experience, thereby weakening our moral engagement with their content. The gray scale releases their images’ hold on us or, rather, forges a different one. An image that was designed to show “now,” often demanding a moral or a political response, becomes the idiom of “then,” mainly triggering emotional and aesthetic ones.
Think about one of the best-known bla
ck-and-white photographs, maybe the single best known: Dorothea Lange’s portrait of a careworn itinerant farmworker, now usually known as Migrant Mother (Figure 43).
Lange’s famous photograph was taken at a campsite for migrant pea pickers in Nipoma, California, in March 1936. Lange, who had worked for a long time in San Francisco as a portrait photographer, was at that time employed by the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration). This was a New Deal governmental agency, much of whose work involved relocating families from the dust bowls of the American Southwest to relief camps in California. Lange was hired, along with other photographers (including Walker Evans and Gordon Parks), to work in the agency’s “Historical Section,” a photodocumentary project designed to record the administration’s activities and build popular support for them.
Migrant Mother was one of a series of six photographs Lange took of a woman and her children.15 The success of the picture has made the image impossible to avoid and yet hard to see clearly through the sheen of its now-iconic status. It has become the great cliché of the Depression: the carefully composed dignity of a family’s poverty. The two older children frame their mother as they burrow behind her head, avoiding the camera’s intrusion, and the infant on her lap is swathed in a dirty blanket. The light on her forearm leads the viewer up to her pinched face. The deep-set eyes of the thirty-two-year-old woman (Lange had asked her age, not her name) stare off to her right, her brow furrowed, the fingertips of her right hand anxiously touching the corner of her turned-down mouth.16
FIGURE 43: Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936, Candid Witness series, George Eastman House
Maybe it is just too good a photograph. Picture perfect. Posed and flawless (the stray thumb on the tentpole at the lower right was later edited out of the image). Remember that Lange had been an extremely successful portrait photographer for San Francisco high society. Roy Striker, who was also a photographer and Lange’s boss at the Farm Security Administration, said of this portrait: “She has all the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage. You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal.”17 You can, and she is: determined, distracted, disaffected, dignified, defensive, distressed, defiant. Her eyes narrow and focus somewhere in the middle distance, but what she is feeling we don’t know; we can’t know.