When Life Gets in the Way of Art - NYTimes.com

When Life Gets in the Way of Art - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/weekinreview/26kennedy....
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September 25, 2010
When Life Gets in the Way of Art
By RANDY KENNEDY
The photographs of Ernest C. Withers — of the Little Rock integration battle, of the Emmett
Till murder trial, of the aftermath of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
— are among the most powerful records of the civil rights movement. They have lived on in
dozens of books and museum collections.
But would these images be seen differently if the captions noted that Mr. Withers was
known in some circles not by his name but by an Orwellian cipher, ME 338-R — the code
used by the F.B.I. to identify him in the reports he filed for many years as a paid informer?
The revelation that he spied on the very leaders who gave him unequaled access to the
movement’s inner workings, published this month by The Commercial Appeal in Memphis
after a two-year investigation, has shocked many friends and admirers of Withers. He died
in 2007 after a long, distinguished career that also included taking important images of
Negro League baseball and of the pioneers of the blues.
But beyond issues of personal betrayal, the news raised much more difficult and
fundamental questions — ones central to photography and documentary work but to the
history of art and popular culture as well — about artistic intent, about the assumptions and
expectations of the viewing public and about the relationship between artists and their
work.
There has been no shortage of reminders recently about the rockiness of this terrain. In
July, word came that the painter Larry Rivers — no paragon of virtue, but generally seen as
a kind of genial playboy of the New York School — had pressured his two adolescent
daughters into appearing in films and videos in which the girls were naked or topless,
interviewed by their father about their developing breasts.
This news cast a shadow over perceptions of his work, but should it, any more than Picasso’s
deep misogyny or Caravaggio’s murderous temper has over theirs? Any more than T. S.
Eliot’s anti-Semitism or Rimbaud’s probable connection to the African slave trade has over
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When Life Gets in the Way of Art - NYTimes.com
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their poetry?
Or in an example with closer parallels to Withers, should we think “On the Waterfront” a
lesser movie, or even see it in a different light, because it was directed and written by two
men, Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg, who named names before the House Un-American
Activities Committee?
On a comic, or maybe tragicomic, level the issue of deception and critical reception was also
raised recently by “I’m Still Here,” the movie held out by its director, Casey Affleck, as a
documentary of the unsightly celebrity disintegration of the actor Joaquin Phoenix, who is
seen snorting drugs, abusing underlings and doing other things most people suspect all
celebrities do.
Prompted in part by its disappointing debut at the box office, both Mr. Affleck and Mr.
Phoenix confessed last week that it was all an act, an attempt to explore celebrity and media
and the mutually abusive relationship the two have long had, with the public as their
codependent child.
As a documentary — one in which uncertainty about its veracity or at least discomfort about
its supposed honesty was meant to supply most of the energy and seemed to be, in fact, the
motivating idea — the movie received generally horrible reviews.
Now that the switch has been flipped, and Mr. Phoenix’s crackup will be viewed as pure
performance, the movie could become less interesting because it is less real. Or, perhaps,
more interesting, because the destructive lengths both men went to in service of their
critique has now been revealed.
The movie actually performed better in its second week of release, after the confession, than
it did in its first. Part of that was undoubtedly due to the publicity, but maybe authorial
intent, as scrambled as an egg in this case, doesn’t count for much after all, as it shouldn’t
count in judging Withers’s work.
Mr. Affleck, appropriately, enlisted the words of Picasso in his defense: “Art is the lie that
tells the truth.”
In one sense, there is no question in Withers’s photography that he was telling the truth and
that the way he told it helped propel the movement he was documenting. As a lifelong
Tennessean whose great-great-grandfather had been lynched and who was beaten by the
police while covering the funeral of Medgar Evers, he had experienced the oppression of the
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When Life Gets in the Way of Art - NYTimes.com
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South as fully as many of its black residents. And his best-known pictures — one of a crowd
of black strikers in 1968 all bearing boldfaced signs proclaiming “I Am a Man” — were
powerful indictments of that oppression.
But now there are lots of questions: how could he make such pictures while at the same time
selling information he knew might hurt or at least hinder those fighting to end the
oppression? Were there pictures he could have taken or published but didn’t because of it?
Perhaps he kept the two lives somehow separate, a much more difficult idea to accept when
thinking about the work of socially engaged artists.
“I think that we hope they’ll be the pure expression of that inner voice that most of us have
that wants to better the world,” said Deborah Willis, chairwoman of the department of
photography and imaging at New York University and an expert on the history of African-
American photography. “But life is complex.”
Ms. Willis, who knew Withers for more than two decades and considered him a mentor, said
that even if the many open questions about his involvement with the F.B.I. are answered to
his detriment, “the photographs, I believe, will prevail; it doesn’t change the images.”
Brett Abbott, the curator of an exhibition now on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los
Angeles, “Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since the Sixties,” said the
revelations might prompt some scholars to sift back through the entire body of Withers’s
work to re-evaluate it in light of his work as an informer.
But he cautioned that even when dealing with art whose intentions appear to be relatively
straightforward — as some documentary photography and film can, seeking to right a
wrong, further a cause, stop a war — it is always “treading on dangerous ground” to try to
locate the value of the work in the life of the artist or in his sense of morality.
“The ‘I Am a Man’ image is one of the enduring images of the civil rights movement,” he
said. “And when you’re dealing with icons, it may not matter all that much what the
biographical context of the person making that image was. Pictures like that take on a life of
their own.”
Withers, whose work will soon be enshrined in a museum named after him on Beale Street
in Memphis, is no longer around to speak for himself. But many other photographers and
activists whose work helped define the civil rights movement are, and several have spoken
up in his defense. Bruce Davidson, who documented the struggles in the South for four
years, beginning with the Freedom Rides in 1961, said in an interview that even
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When Life Gets in the Way of Art - NYTimes.com
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photographers who think they understand their motivations often end up having to separate
them from their work.
“I once took a picture in 1962 of a very poor black girl in Shelby County, Tennessee, holding
a big white doll,” said Mr. Davidson, who is white. “And I didn’t publish it for many years
even though it was a powerful image and something I thought told the story. I didn’t put the
doll there. I didn’t even say to the little girl, ‘Can you hold it a little higher?’ It was a true
moment, but I didn’t know if people would believe it because it almost seemed too good to
be true. And then a lot of years passed until it almost seemed like something someone else
had taken. And that’s when I finally put it out, because then the time was right.”
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