It's Loengard's LIFE

In a snap, showing zooms in on photographer's style, work

Mary Voelz Chandler, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 28, 2005 at midnight

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If life at times can seem like a series of rugs being pulled out from under you, John Loengard knows all about it, metaphorically at least.

Loengard, a longtime LIFE magazine photographer (when it was the old weekly LIFE) and the first photo editor of People magazine), has said that he wants his photos to appear to pull the rug out from under the viewer.

So what, exactly, does that mean?

Loengard, in Denver recently to open "Life Through His Own Lens," a show of his work at Gallery M, looked up, and then around him, at walls holding a selection of his work spanning almost 40 years.

"A good photograph shows one thing and means another," said Loengard. "I'm not disposed to take a photograph that shows something expected. There is the conflict between a photograph that is completely literal in what it shows, but the effect is not literal."

The native New Yorker took up the camera as a child, but then began to make money with it as a freelancer after graduating from Harvard University. He joined LIFE in the early 1960s, and began to find his place in a pond filled with big photographic fish.

In one assignment, he recalls, he accompanied a writer on an interview with jazz great Louis Armstrong. But the end product was anything but traditional portraiture.

"I had no absolutely no interest in that, because it would have been a dull picture," Loengard recalls. Instead, in an extreme close-up, he captured the musician rubbing salve on his lips. "It was just lips and fingers. It was peculiar and unexpected."

He said one of his children, young at the time, thought the image was an eyeball. "It becomes a landscape."

That image is on the gallery wall, along with other definitions of the word landscape: the rigid geometry of a line of marching cadets, an otherworldly view of sheep flocking around a huge Henry Moore sculpture, artist and furniture maker George Nakashima flanked by dozens of planks of wood, the shot of the Beatles bobbing in a pool (or, make that the four Beatles' heads), and works from his series on photographing photographers and, in a twist, their negatives.

That project, the book Celebrating the Negative, began when Loengard visited the archives of pioneering photographer Paul Strand.

"They said his prints were insured for $150,000, but his negatives were insured for $150. I thought that was strange. So I started photographing negatives."

What Loengard learned was that with the advent of digital photography, the negative was, well, perhaps obsolete. "It's an industrial artifact whose time has passed. It's not the question of a steam engine or a diesel engine, it's that no one needs an engine anymore."

In the exhibit, Loengard's image of Alfred Eisenstaedt Holding His 'Ice Skating Waiter' Negative hangs directly across the room from a print of the actual photograph, since gallery owner Myrna Hayutin has augmented "Life Through His Own Lens" with prints by other LIFE alums, including Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Nina Leen.

"Loengard has been an integral part of the LIFE legacy," Hayutin said of his work. "Of course his contact with other majors - Avedon, Liebovitz, O'Keeffe, Abbott, Brassai, Salgado, Moore and Bresson - reveals his role as a historian of the lens. His take on a personality encompasses the environment of the subject."

Beyond the negatives, though, does photographing photographers become tense?

"Because of competition?" Loengard asked. Well, no, because it becomes photographer on photographer.

"It is important to photograph what you are familiar with," he responded. "Andre Kertesz, you couldn't photograph him. It was like bouncing off somebody. Eisenstaedt, he was really a ham. Cartier- Bresson, he hated to be photographed."

Eventually, Loengard took four or five images of him.

"Every photographer I knew thought he or she was the best photographer in the world."

The show consists of all black-and-white photography, chosen by the gallery from Loengard's archives.

"I have experience in the printed page, and with editors and with photographers," Loengard said. "I have no experience with people who sell and buy prints. This is a learning experience."

The exhibition comes on the heels of publication of his book As I See It, with an introduction by writer Ann Beattie. A photograph of her and her husband in an impromptu dance is in the book, as are many of the photographs in the exhibition.

Asked what he was working on now, Loengard said, "Flogging the book."

There have been others, including Georgia O'Keeffe at Ghost Ranch, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw and Pictures Under Discussion. There is another book he wants to see done, but not by him.

"It would be a tremendous book. I hope someone from the Wall Street Journal would do it, look at the money made in photography in the last 30 years, 40 years."

One of the forces that drove modern photography was LIFE magazine, where Loengard worked as a photographer until it ceased publication in 1972.

"LIFE stopped when it was a wonderful publication," he recalled. But that left, as he put it, "a lot of good people sitting around with nothing to do."

The answer: start a new magazine. After all, he said, there were all those wire service photographs coming in, with no place to put them.

And thus People was born, in a series of mock-ups, then a magazine that debuted in 1974.

"It was nice to start again. The magazine brought no baggage with it. We hoped the photography would develop and transmute the style of the magazine, but it was so instantly successful, as LIFE was, that that sort of froze the style of the magazine."

That "style" was an irreverent, even fizzy type of photography and writing, in a publication that in its early years was focused more on people with a tale to tell and less on celebrities.

The desired reader "was the sensibilities of someone in their 30s who came from Illinois. It was a direct voice, having fun, while trying to be interesting."

Loengard was involved with the monthly LIFE magazine that emerged in the late 1970s. But "it sat around for a month, and people had a different attitude toward it. The weekly had been a mix of news and things that were not news, but were topical."

And then there is the new LIFE weekly, which appears as a supplement in many Friday newspapers, though he noted it sort of avoided news.

"In a snap, it could be really good, but it is rather bland."

Which is not his style.

"Many of my colleagues were interested in stopping the moment, stopping action in a wonderful way," Loengard said. "I want to get resonance out of a subject, something resonant about the moment.

Life Through His Own Lens

• What: A selection of photographs by John Loengard

• Where and when: Gallery M, 2830 E. Third Ave.; through Jan. 31

• Information: 303-331-8400

Mary Voelz Chandler is the art and architecture critic. Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2677.

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