SIMPSON KALISHER
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM KALISHER'S LATEST BOOK "THE ALIENATED PHTOOGRAPHER'
SEPTEMBER 23 - NOVEMBER 5, 2011

SCENES FROM THE STREETS: Photo exhibit a riveting look into the past
by DOUGLAS BRITT

Getting downstairs from the upper level of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Caroline Wiess Law Building takes longer than it would if reaching the lower level quickly were the only reason to take the stairs. Resourceful curators, eager to fill every inch of usable exhibition space, have proved adept at using the passageway to show off works from the collection that make visitors slow down, stop and look.

MFAH photography curator Anne Wilkes Tucker has done it again with Simpson Kalisher: The Alienated Photographer, a collection of riveting black-and-white photos taken mostly in the 1950s and 1960s.

Machine politicians huddle secretively in one picture, their broad backs leaving no room for a glimpse of whatever it is viewers sense they might be covering up.

In another, a man's cigarette dangles from his mouth as he tries to push his car out of the flooded part of a street. He confronts the viewer with a gaze that seems more annoyed than pleading, as if to ask, "Are you going to just stand there or give me a hand?"

Kalisher, 85, belongs to a generation of American street photographers whose snapshot aesthetic captured a shifting social landscape with striking immediacy. A recent gift of 100 Kalisher photos by Gloria Richards, a longtime supporter of his work, bolsters the MFAH's already substantial street photography holdings, which include works by Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank and Ishimoto Yasuhiro.

The exhibit includes 59 pictures from Richards' gift and one from Railroad Men, Kalisher's first photojournalism series, which marked his departure from early attempts to emulate the format of Life magazine picture stories, in which photos illustrated the stories captions told.

Assigned in 1950 by a men's adventure magazine to photograph railroad workers in a freight marshalling yard, "I performed as a true journalist. I simply captured the action before me," Kalisher writes in the catalog. "The effort produced the most satisfying photographs I had ever taken."

Rather than continue doing picture stories - which he saw as "no more than soap opera: a young widow left with children to raise on her own (but do not include pictures of the boyfriend); sailors on shore leave (for whom I had to get some girls to be their dates to satisfy the story's point)" - Kalisher turned to "advertising, where at least everyone knew the photographs did not represent the truth" to make a living. Off-duty, he wandered New York streets "in search of meaning," he writes.

What he found speaks to his use of the term "alienated" to describe his sensibility. Like the passersby captured in his lens, he finds "the inconsistencies in modern living intolerable," he writes.

"Hypocrisy, greed and ambition are seen everywhere, and the alienated find it impossible to play along. They participate with great difficulty or drop out altogether."

Thus Kalisher shows us loners on subways and pedestrians glaring their way through crowded sidewalks. We often feel we're intruding on people who, after all, are not as comfortable as our generation with the omnipresence of cameras.

"What is art? I don't think anyone really knows," Kalisher writes. "We make it up as we go along."

-DOUGLAS BRITT