Enduring images NORTH PINELLAS Edition

• Published in: St. Petersburg times (Saint Petersburg, Fla. : 1921)
• Main Author: Bennett, Lennie
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: St. Petersburg, Fla Times Publishing Company 04.12.2005
• Subjects: Steichen, Edward; SARASOTA

An echo of it drifts through "Picturing What Matters: An Offering of Photographs from the George Eastman House Collection" at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. This exhibition is smaller, with a scope limited to the United States, though its chronological reach of more than 150 years is much broader. But its organization around themes and a blatant purpose to shepherd us into the common fold of human aspirations, loss and love invokes [Edward Steichen]'s grand opus. The shows also have similar, cataclysmic motivators: Steichen was responding to McCarthyism and the Cold War; Eastman House organizers state theirs is a response to 9/11. The Icons gallery seems surprisingly small given the range of interpretations organizers give it. But as they do elsewhere in the exhibition, the photographs are often used as compelling associations. For example, [Alvin Langdon Coburn]'s take on the Grand Canyon makes us think about [Ansel Adams]' series. We look at the dramatic photograph from the 1968 Olympics in which the gold and silver medalists, both African-American, raise their fists in protest on the podium and then see Steichen's portrait of Martha Graham, completely shrouded, who also raises her hand, only the fingers peeking out, in another form of iconoclasm. Dorothea Lange's haunting migrant mother looks as if she never spent a day without worry while Nikolas Muray's Babe Ruth looks as if he doesn't know what the word means. Benedict J. Fernandez, Dr. Martin Luther King Address the Crowd Outside the United Nations, April 15, 1967, gelatin silver print.; Joe Rosenthal, Old Glory Goes Up Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, 1945, gelatin silver print.; W. Eugene Smith, The Walk to; Paradise Garden, 1946, gelatin silver print.; Thomas E. Franklin, Three Firefighters, 2001, photographic print.; Photo: PHOTO, George Eastman House Collection, (3); PHOTO, The Record (Bergen County, N.J.)