Andreas Feininger's The
Photo Journalist (1951)
'Composition,' as John Ruskin reminds
us, 'is the arrangement of unequal
things.' What draws me back again and
again to this particular photograph, one
of the finest in Christopher's collection,
is the sense of mystery suggested by the
juxtapositions. There is something here
that cannot quite be put into words, an
exploration of the unusual or the uncanny
that also pertains to the photographs by
Ritts, Leatherdale, and Thomas Barbèy.
No matter how much the Hyland
Collection has grown, it has at its core
a canonical group of photographs that
stress the virtues of clarity, structure,
and the sophisticated employment of
chiaroscuro and of positive and negative
space. As Christopher has himself
observed, 'every brilliant photograph
has a geometry every bit as complex as
the geometry which created the floor of
the Parthenon,' and he clearly values the
strong visual structure that informs a
photograph.
During the past five years, however,
Christopher has moved in other aesthetic
and intellectual directions, and he has
done so in his characteristically decisive
style. We can see this both in what he has
HYLAND
