Philip Brookman Livres

Piet Mondrian behind his easel, Igor Stravinsky at his piano, Max Ernst sitting smoking on his throne-like chair: Arnold Newman's photographs are classics of portraiture. His subtle arrangements constituted the foundations of ""environmental portraiture."" His photographs integrate the respective artist's characteristic equipment and surroundings, thus indicating his or her field of activity. The enormous fame of Newman's portraits can be ascribed to their daring compositions and sometimes astounding spatial structures. The photographer's beginnings, on the other hand, were none too promising. During the Great Depression Newman had to abandon his art studies for financial reasons. Between 1938 and 1942 he concentrated on socio-documentary photography in the ghettos of West Palm Beach, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. One might think that being forced to earn his living in a photography studio would have stifled his artistic potential: Newman portrayed up to 70 clients a day. Yet he still succeeded in developing a very personal touch and establishing himself in the New York art scene of the early 1940s. His subjects included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Alexander Calder. With his unmistakable style, Newman became the star photographer of artists, writers and musicians.

Redlands weaves together an intimate sequence of photographs and a short story by Philip Brookman, set in California, Mexico, and New York City during the unsettled decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Brookman uses fiction and images from his own photographic diaries to create a first-person account of Kip, an artist who wanders back and forth between farmworkers and poets – between California and New York – seeking to question the meaning of his mother’s death. When Kip learns that he can’t trust the eyewitness accounts of his sister, he picks up a camera to find meaning in his own experience. By juxtaposing the oppositional strategies of fiction and documentary practice to find an invented narrative, Redlands questions the veracity of logical observation and embraces the poetry of the real world.