An Unerring Vision
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| Press Release: April
2009 Over a career that began in the late 1940s, Paul Himmel produced several bodies of work, bringing his unique vision to subjects as varied as dance, the circus, New York City, European cities, and the human figure, as well as the beaches where he summered with his family for most of his life. Paul’s immense talent was evident from the outset. He was always experimenting, and one gets the sense that he photographed for the joy of seeing what his images would look like captured on the two-dimensional plane. With his pioneering spirit, he created work that is still every bit as fresh as it originally looked more than a half-century ago. Among his most powerful subjects were the streets and landmarks of his hometown, New York. He captured the iconic sights of Manhattan and Brooklyn, rendering classic scenes in an elegant and timeless manner. Himmel’s early studies with the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch engaged him in a lifelong interest in capturing human movement in still images. In 1947, he took a series of experimental photographs in Grand Central Terminal’s main concourse. The scene captured is a sea of humanity in motion, surging past frozen figures, positioned by the photographer to test the viability of using posed models amid a mass of moving figures in fashion photographs. One of the series is featured on the cover of Himmel’s highly acclaimed 1999 book, simply titled Photographs; another is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His spare photographic study of the Brooklyn Bridge is an exercise in simplicity. With its three basic elements, the New York skyline, the bridge’s diagonal cables, and a lone figure of a man peering across the East River toward Manhattan, it has become the photographer’s signature image. Although the picture shows us only a few details of the bridge, it reveals just enough to allow one’s memory to fill in the blanks and recall the bridge in its entirety. Another remarkable image is Himmel’s moody soft-focus night view of Rockefeller Center at Christmastime. Although this darkened scene is captured as a blur of golden lights, there is sufficient visual information to produce an immediately recognizable sight remembered from one of Manhattan’s great annual traditions, the towering tree in Rockefeller Center. Paul Himmel retired from the photographic scene in the late 1960s to pursue a second career as a psychotherapist. His reputation was revived in the 1990s by the photo-historian Martin Harrison, resulting in a book and exhibition that successfully re-introduced his significant bodies of work to a whole new generation. Paul died on February 8, 2009, in his ninety-fourth year, having lived a rich and fruitful life highlighted by his later discovery as a significant artistic talent. His photographic legacy enriches immeasurably the medium as an art form. |