AUDREY FLACKS PHOTOGRAPHS
AN APPRECIATION
When I ook at the photographs of Audrey Flack, I w The photogmphs are scaled to create the same effect in the pri
vacy of the connoisseur's study. And unlike the photographs of
seems to me that the photographs alreacy say everything that Degas and Eakins, which are the merest preliminary sketches,
the merest scribbles compared to the finished pairtings, Audrey
why she goes to the trouble of making partings from them. It
It is true that they ane, though large for photographs, machFlack's photographs are finished works coamplete in themscives
smaller than the paintings, which are immease. It is true that the
As a photographer Audney Fack wocks in an ancient tradi
format is sometimes different-for exampie, the photograph en tion. Some of the very irst photographs, by LJ.M. Daguerre,
were carefully arrarged studio stil lifes, and during the 19th cen-
teledLeonardo's Lady square, while the parting is somewhat
wider than it is high, and incdudes a heavy brocaded ribbon on the
eft thet does not appear in the photograpi. It is also true thal ton) composed and photograıhed elaborate still ltes. The
eatly photographers liked still life because it erabled then to
achieve artistic effects they could not achieve with ive models or
painting is greenish. And it is true that the phatographs do ot ut of doors "on location." Their equipment was heawy and buly
and their process slow, and it was only when working in the su-
dio with inanimate objects that they could achieve sobething like
the control over picture making that comes naturaly to coeipe-
here are, in sbort, differences between the painnings and nt painters. Even when equipment became handier and proo-
esses faster, stil life remainerd the area where the photographer
which at their greatest might be compared to the differencesas the most control, and in the 20ch century, with the advent of
stye and feeling between the rge-scale tbeatricabty of Italian color photograpby and coor peinting, it began to ourish in the
magazines where it was employed to celebrate the good things ot
there are sometimes color changes-the background in the pho-
tograph Tine to Saw is reddish, whie the background in the
hiarve the gn or striped borders of many of the paintings, and
therefore ack the trowpe l'ot cfect of objects bursting out of
the picture into real space that these borders malke possible.
the photograpbs, besides the obvicus dierence of medium,
Barcque mural painting and the stmall scale dkmesticity of Dutch
easel painting. And yet these differences seem to me to be mini
life from fne watches to food
Audrey Fack has drawn on these photographic traditions.
Though the photographs are mach smaller tham tbe paint- Bu to them she has added something that dates back to the
great dags of still ife painting in the 17th century: a sense of oral
ngs, the cbjects in them are still sumewhat rertha life sie
and when they are viewed from the normal viewing distance foe
photographs-less than ams length the photograpbs fill up the
ern magazine photagraphs, celebralions of the good things of lifice
ield of visicm, and seem immense, Even without the borders, the ut they olten also includked a memenbo mori- a skull, a burning
candle, a butterly, a wer-something to remind the viewer
color are on the whole insignificant. Viewed froem the right dis that life, though sweet, is short, and has a higher purpose than
rompe lorsd elects are strilking, and the differences in focmat and
tance, the photograph World war Π is as disturbig as the paint
ing. Never mind that the little drops of candle wax at the bottom
of the picture are different. The eSect is the same
Audrey Flack's potographs do the same thing today. They
are stulled with 20th century guodies in bright, even glaring cul
This should not be surprising, because the photographs were ors, Eke the advertisements in a consumer magazine. But they
also imchode a death's head, a buttery, a photograph of prisoners
as and Eakins, who on occasion also painted from photograpts,intration camp reminders that all the good things of Fe
come to an end with death, and that, kor some, lHe itself is a kind
of death. Tus is something quite diflerent fromm the current fad in
more than gigantic enlargenments made by hand rather than by ar photogaphy for "appeopriating the images of the mass me-
dia, something more unsettling, something more truthful, some-
thing chser to the grand traditions of painting of which
taken to be painted from, and unike such earlier painters as De
Audrey Fack aimes in her paintings for a photographic look, In-
deed, it sometimes seems to me that her paintings are nothing
photographic methods. She does not agree, and I do not press
the point, because in the end it soems to me to be irrelevant. The
paintings are scaled to create their effect in large piblic spaces.
