Homer Page: Lost and Found

New York, August 11, 1949, Homer Page/Images: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

ABC

So I'm flipping channels last night, and I come across a reality-competition show in which someone's been rushed to the hospital after drinking too much in a hot tub. Business as usual, right? Something on MTV, or maybe Big Brother? No: I was watching Fine Living Network. Which, though how this slipped under my radar is beyond me, is now airing From the Ground Up, a home-design competition show, complete with confessional, challenges, and, evidently, the requisite hot tub. Fine Living Network? Really? Is there a hot tub in America that a reality show contestant has not passed out in? Is Eternal Word Network airing America's Next Top Priest now? At least Fine Living Network is capable of getting my attention, though. As opposed to the broadcast networks, which at this point in the summer have pretty much stopped trying. ABC, for instance, aired Wanna Bet?, in which "celebrities" including Tom Bergeron and Corbin Bernsen place bets on whether people can perform unusual feats. One young man (above), for instance, said he could kick himself in the head 45 times in a minute. He did. At which point he was brain-damaged enough to be in the target audience for Wanna Bet? Warning: Both network-website links above are to pages which, in an annoying online trend, start playing a loud video unprompted once the page loads. I don't need my web pages speaking to me unless I tell them to. The Internet needs to shut up!

I’ve taken an interest lately in The Photographs of Homer Page, the catalogue of a show that just opened at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. It amounts to a rediscovery, almost a disinterment, of a photographer who was prominent enough in the late 1940s to get featured treatment a few times by the Museum of Modern Art. But just when he seemed poised to produce a career-making book of New York photos, the fruit of a one-year Guggenheim grant, Page clutched. He never completed the book and over the next years disappeared into a contented but fairly anonymous life in photojournalism and commercial photography. He was living with his third wife in rural Connecticutt when he died in 1985 at the age of 67. The Nelson-Atkins show, and the book that accompanies it, is effectively the book he never produced.

New York, May 11, 1949, Homer Page

Well, it may not have come to that yet. But Miley Cyrus, after releasing an album under her own name and totally unintentionally distancing herself from her child-star image in Vanity Fair, has now told E! Online that "We’re thinking this [the upcoming third season] is our last season." Disney begs to differ, noting that no mortal may terminate a signed contract with the Dark Lord Satan it has an option for a fourth season of the show and that "We look forward to the Hannah Montana feature film coming to a theatre near you in Spring 2009." So nothing's settled yet. But let's hope the Jonas Brothers and their freedom-hating scarves are warming up in the bullpen.

In his catalogue essay, Keith F. Davis, the Nelson-Atkins photo curator who organized the show, makes what seems to me the essential point about Page’s work of 1949-50, the year that the show is concerned with. Namely, that Page was one of the several American photographers who were doing work around that time that marked a transition from the more straightforward documentary photography of the Depression and war years to the more personal style that we would eventually identify with Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and so on. As it happens, Page had a close connection for a while with one of the great figures of the older documentary style, Dorothea Lange. In the late ’40s Page and his first wife lived for a time in a garden cottage on the property of Lange and her husband. He revered Lange, but he was after something very different in his own work.

The mood in a lot of Page’s work is enigmatic. The “subject” is very often simply the dreamy inwardness of people walking or standing on the streets of a great city. And his best pictures are truly forward looking. Some of his street work, men and women caught up in private reveries, anticipates the great spontaneous portraits that Harry Callahan started making in 1950 of anonymous women walking around in downtown Chicago. Some of Page’s other pictures adopt a jittery blurred style that William Klein would start using in the 50s. And long before Pop Art came along he an eye for the ironic juxtapositions of the pop culture landscape — check out the picture above of a man in front of some billboard advertising.

New York, June 18, 1949, Homer Page

You may think that the recent Gallup/USA Today poll—which was the first in a long stretch of national polls to show McCain with a lead, among likely voters—is right on. You may think it's bogus. You may think it's the first to accurately detect a backlash against Obama. You may think it's an anomalous outlier with a suspect method of determining "likely" voters. I'm not a pollster, and I'm not going to touch that one. But the poll has gotten a lot of attention in the press (partly because it disagreed with another Gallup poll, the daily tracking poll). And in a followup, exploring answers in the same survey about Americans' reactions to press coverage of the trip and the campaign, Gallup posits an interesting theory:

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact causes of any of these changes. But the available data show that Republicans are strongly convinced that the media are much too positive in their coverage of Obama and too negative in their coverage of McCain. The media's coverage of Obama's foreign trip, coupled with a strong reaction from McCain and other conservatives, may have created the seemingly paradoxical effect of increasing Republicans' energy and excitement about voting for McCain. If this is the case, the degree to which this is short-term versus long-term is still not clear.

Again, I can only guess whether this is right, or just a reach to explain Gallup's poll numbers. But I do agree that press bias—or the effective attempt to portray the press as biased—can have unpredictable effects.

Page was wrong not to finish that book. It wouldn’t have been a ground breaking volume like Robert Frank’s The Americans. There’s a darkness and a nasty edge in Frank’s work that Page wasn’t entirely ready to find in himself. But it would have gained him a deserved place in the history of photography, a place that the Nelson-Atkins show should go some way to secure for him belatedly.