Art: Two shooters, two sensibilities

Art Sinsabaugh and Gordon Parks approached photography from opposite ends of the spectrum. Yet they share the distinction of having contributed significantly, in markedly different ways, to the modern history of the medium.

Sinsabaugh, subject of a retrospective exhibition at Haverford College, was born in 1924 to prosperous white parents in Irvington, N.J. He studied photography with such masters as László Moholy-Nagy and Harry Callahan at the Institute of Design in Chicago.

Through wide-angle landscape photographs inflected by modernist design, Sinsabaugh revealed the spatial complexities of the horizon. His panoramic views force viewers to absorb every detail along the demarcation between earth and sky.

Gordon Parks, who died in 2006 at age 93, was the quintessential photojournalist. Born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kan., he was the 15th and youngest child of a poor black farmer. After dropping out of high school, Parks taught himself photography, in part by studying magazines he found in railroad dining cars while working as a waiter.

In 1942, when photographing for the federal Farm Security Administration, Parks made what is perhaps his most memorable image, a portrait of an African American cleaning woman posed with a mop and broom in the manner of the farmer in Grant Wood's equally iconic painting.

Being hired by Life magazine in 1948 catapulted Parks into the public arena. Over 25 years he became famous for photo essays about the civil rights movement, urban and rural poor people, and organizations such as the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers.

The exhibition of 73 photographs by Parks at the Delaware Art Museum represents the major phases of his career with a collection formed by the Capital Group Foundation after consultation with Parks and curators at Stanford University, where the show began.

"Bare Witness" is organized thematically, with several sections devoted to a single subject, such as the Fontenelle family of Harlem, the Da Silva family of Rio de Janeiro, and black leaders such as Malcolm X. Though some of these pictures were posed, they deliver tough, honest journalism.

In fact, one is surprised to discover how powerful they can be as social documents. Parks became a master of the photo essay, and he didn't try to airbrush the harsh reality of life near the bottom of the social pecking order. This is especially noticeable in his photos of the shantytown Da Silva children, the grimiest urchins imaginable.

Through his photojournalism, Parks opened a window on minority culture for Life's middle-class - and presumably mostly white - readership. He portrayed the aftermath of violence and the degradation and desperation of poverty. Yet he never compromised the dignity of his subjects.

He showed a gentler, nostalgic dimension to his vision in a series of pictures made in his hometown of Fort Scott. And he "went backstage" with his

American Gothic

heroine, Ella Watson, to show her at home with her grandchildren.

Charwoman Watson hangs nearby in all her iconic glory, holding the tools of her trade in front of a large American flag. This image is easily the most propagandistic photo in the show, as well as the most famous. Today it looks overcooked - Parks didn't need a mop

and

a broom - but 66 years ago it validated the contributions of less-visible members of American society.

Another major revelation is Parks' versatility. He was a sensitive and insightful portraitist on both sides of the color line. Examples include artists (Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti), musicians (Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington), writers (Langston Hughes), and movie stars (Ingrid Bergman).

The portraits also include contrasting studies of boxer Muhammad Ali. The candid black-and-white version depicts him as sweat-dappled and intense, while a color portrait captures him in uncharacteristic repose.

After photography, Parks went on to earn further plaudits as a novelist, poet, filmmaker and composer. Yet the foundation of his reputation as an artist must derive primarily from the images and human stories he created as one of America's most effective photojournalists.

Art Sinsabaugh didn't enjoy a comparable level of public fame, but he entered history by inventing a radical form of landscape imaging that he developed through several extended series. The most notable of these are included in the Haverford exhibition, although in abbreviated form.

Like Parks, Sinsabaugh began to photograph as a young man, but he didn't reach his career turning point until 1958, when he acquired a "banquet camera" that exposed a plate 12 inches high by 20 inches wide.

Such a format allowed photographers to make undistorted pictures of large groups. Sinsabaugh realized that this bulky, tripod-mounted instrument would allow him to capture the spatial expansiveness of the rural Midwest and the elongated streetscapes of urban neighborhoods.

The retrospective, organized by the Indiana University Art Museum, consists of nearly 100 photos, the majority lent by the Sinsabaugh archive at the university. The earliest, from the late 1940s and early '50s, are formalist student exercises. While not individually remarkable, they indicate that Sinsabaugh had a keenly intuitive eye for patterns and environmental details.

He developed these skills more fully some years later in his most important series, the "Midwest Landscape Group" of the early 1960s and the "Chicago Landscape Group" of the mid-'60s. The first series produced the strip images that made his reputation.

Sinsabaugh would focus on the horizon, print the negative as a contact sheet, then severely crop the sky and foreground until only the "clothesline effect" of the horizon remained.

Some of these prints are only an inch high, by 20 wide. The extreme format not only emphasizes the flatness and openness of the Midwest landscape, it also calls attention to the natural and man-made structures that define the horizon, like notes on a musical scale.

The Chicago cityscapes are cropped less radically, to about six inches high, but they likewise tend to describe the city through its skyline and through such ground-level features as railroad tracks, parking lots and freeway loops. They're a modernist version of Eugène Atget's documentary views of Paris.

Later in his career, Sinsabaugh attempted a far more ambitious project, the

"American Landscape Group," which he envisioned as a "visual census" of the entire country. He worked on it for 15 years, until he died of a heart attack in 1983 at age 59.

Some of the most affecting photos in the show hang in this section. They record impressions of landscapes in New England, New York State, the border South, and the Southwest - hardly comprehensive of the country's geographical variety, but sufficient to validate the concept.

What unites all his subjects is Sinsabaugh's precocious ability to project a 19th-century romantic spirit though a 20th-century modernist lens. He was essentially a photographer of places and spaces, not people or events. This first complete survey of his work is a delightful and thoroughly satisfying examination of a distinctive creative eye.

"American Horizons: The Photographs of Art Sinsabaugh" continues in the Whitehead Campus Center of Haverford College, 370 Lancaster Ave., Haverford, through Dec. 14. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Free. Information: 610-896-1287 or

» READ MORE: www.haverford.edu/HHC/exhibits

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"Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks" continues at the Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, through Jan. 4. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday and noon to 4 Sunday. Admission is $10 general, $8 for visitors 60 and older, $5 for college students, and $3 for visitors 7 to 17. Free Sundays. 302-571-9590, 866-232-3714 (toll-free) or

» READ MORE: www.delart.org

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