The real world
Jerome Liebling's works celebrate the strength of the everyday
That two shows of Jerome Liebling's photographs are currently running just a few hours apart off I-91 is accidental. Would that all accidents were so happy.
Liebling has been a tutelary deity in the Pioneer Valley since the early '70s, when he arrived to teach at Hampshire College. He helped make Hampshire a hotbed of documentary film and photography. His best-known student was Ken Burns. So the Smith College Art Museum's "Jerome Liebling: Seeing Real Things" (great title) is in the way of neighborly tribute.
The occasion of the Yale University Art Gallery's "Everyday Monuments: The Photographs of Jerome Liebling" (not a bad title either) is Yale's recent purchase of more than 40 Liebling prints. So let's hear it for pride of ownership.
Liebling is 84. Looking at the dozen vintage prints at Smith from the late '40s, one can see how far he's come as an artist. He was good then - Liebling shot what may be his most famous image, "Butterfly Boy," in 1949 (it's in the Yale show) - but his work is so much richer and more variegated now. Getting older is not the same thing as getting wiser. It has been for Liebling, though.
As a young man, Liebling studied with Paul Strand, who had studied with Lewis Hine. The artistic lineage is apparent. Both Hine and Strand were profound humanists, as Liebling is, their humanism grounded in the dignity of the mundane - or as Liebling puts it, in a Smith wall text, "an eloquence of the real." No less than Hine and Strand, Liebling reveres strength - the strength of nobility, not might: that which endures rather than that which enforces.
It's the strength of trees and tools and also hope and faith. Liebling is surprisingly partial to trees. The Smith show has a great spreading one from New York City, as well as apple trees and a beautiful willow from the Pioneer Valley. Liebling likes trees with lots of branches: trees that are active and busy and grow. Not for him stately showiness. In the same way, he likes faces with lots of life both in them and on them. Even concealed by a screen door - its gauzy texture like Renaissance sfumato - the matter-of-fact moral weightiness of the woman in "Miner's Wife, Hibbing, Minn." is at once unmistakable and deeply moving.
Liebling is also partial to workers. What may be his greatest picture, "Slaughterhouse Worker with Knife, South St. Paul, Minn." is, as a study of the intersection of character and vocation, worthy of August Sander. It's terrifying, sad, indelible. How could it be otherwise? Here is a man who earns his living by killing, a contradiction achingly visible in his slightly stunned expression. Howlin' Wolf sang about being "down on the killing floor." Liebling shows just how far down down is.
There are also farm workers, miners, camp counselors, even writers. They're workers, too. Liebling folds his partiality toward writers into his partiality for the past. He shows us Emily Dickinson's dress, a couch from Mark Twain's house, Herman Melville's desk (all in the Yale show). The desk is solid, serious, worn. As presented by Liebling, it's not a piece of furniture. It's an implement, mightier than any harpoon.
The physicality of labor should not obscure the fact that Liebling has a distinct Transcendentalist streak. Almost abstract, "Barn Doors, Peru, Mass." juxtaposes the manmade geometry of the door with the divinely made generosity of the light. There's the sheer delicacy of his apple orchard pictures or the near-otherworldliness of "Church, South Amherst, Mass.," all in the Smith show. (The whiteness of the whale haunted Melville - the whiteness of the wall transports Liebling.)
It makes a kind of sense that this son of Brooklyn, by way of Minnesota, should fetch up in the heart of New England. "I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons," Emerson wrote. Liebling could say the same. (There's a picture in the Yale show of Emerson's fishing hat; it has the deadpan playfulness of one old pal poking another.)
The one thing Liebling reviles is any diminution of the human. At Yale, there are three pictures of manikins (Liebling's spelling), and they're the most anomalous thing in either show. You can almost feel the photographer's squeamishness before them, even distaste. Humanist that he is, Liebling responds to human life - even when that life is an aftereffect, as in the death masks of Sacco and Vanzetti, a lock of hair from Dickinson's nephew, or a cadaver. The manikins are, at best, imitations of life - at worst, mockeries of it.
There's another picture like that, actually, also at Yale. "Harriet Beecher Stowe Home, Hartford, Connecticut" is part of his series on artifacts of 19th-century New England writers. The photographs show a set of knickknacks from "Uncle Tom's Cabin." They're like lawn jockeys, only worse. Even more than their vulgar racism and artistic crudeness, what bothers Liebling is how reductive they are.
Part of the impact of the Stowe picture comes from the figurines' garish colors. It's highly unusual, and truly exciting, to see a photographer who's as good at black and white as he is at color - and, what is not quite the same thing, so at ease with both.
Liebling's partiality to the past extends to his own. Each show has several color photographs Liebling took in the '80s of his old neighborhood. They're the most exuberant work he's done. "Woman and Peaches, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, N.Y." (it's in both shows) is gloriously vivid. The excessive floral pattern of the woman's dress merges with the colorfulness of the piled-up bounty of fruit. They're visual kin, the kissin'-cousin equivalent of camouflage.
By comparison, "Woman & Scarf, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, N.Y," at Smith, is a study in restraint - yet at the same time exalted. The look on the woman's face, the halo placed atop her head by her white hair and the light's radiance: This is what sainthood must look like.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
