Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/09/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I once heard an anecdote from a man who'd lunched with Pound in Rapallo after his return to Italy. Pound sat silently through the whole meal: his only comment, after an hour or so, concerned the pasta: "Too tough," he said. I believe, without checking, that at least one of these photos is in Hugh Kenner's -The Pound Era-. I don't think that the comments here need necessarily "diss" HCB as a portraitist. I suspect that the photos selected by the Post writer far more reflect an undergraduate's sense of "who was who" during the main years of HCB's activity than any application of aesthetic judgment. A shame, in my opinion: "As well the well-wrought urn contains/The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs." In effect, HCB is a 'great' photographer, because he happened to photograph 'great' people, which, we all know, is complete nonsense. And, yes, I agree with an earlier comment about the vacuous sterility of Liebowitz's portraits. But, then, I think August Sanders and Avedon are the patron saints of portrait photographers. Chandos At 05:47 PM 9/29/1999 -0400, you wrote: >. I read somewhere that when he was photographing Ezra >Pound in Pound's later, arthritic years, that HCB just wandered around >him making photos, each saying nothing to the other until the session >was over and then he just left. Chandos Michael Brown Assoc. Prof., History and American Studies College of William and Mary http://www.wm.edu/CAS/ASP/faculty/brown