Peter Frank on Mathew Brady & John Phillips

In his latest series of paintings and drawings John Ransom Phillips trains his psychologically keen and historically informed eye on a figure at once central and peripheral to American art, the photographer Matthew Brady.

Reflecting on Brady’s notable but in some regard overrated role in the photographic documentation of the Civil War, as well as his prominence before and after as a New York-based portrait photographer whose clientele was top-heavy in the rich and famous, Phillips teases out the pathos, and the bathos, underlying Brady’s artistic achievement and social persona.

As well, Phillips casts Brady against the figure of Walt Whitman, contrasting the poet’s bold aesthetic and personal gesture against the photographer’s more conventional social role – a role that, nonetheless, Brady’s artistic achievement transcended.

Phillips proffers this dialectic as a quintessentially American problem in art: the bold or the safe? The challenging or the acceptable? Thoreau or Emerson? Ives or MacDowell? Ginsberg or Warhol

Peter Frank is the Art Critic and Senior Curator for Riverside Art Museum.
Walt Whitman Holding Mathew Brady, 2005, oil, 62 x 46"

Brady of Broadway

I was Brady of Broadway or, as everyone used to say, “the photographer of decision–makers.” (Today you would call them “players.”) I had a studio in lower Manhattan (and later in Washington City) centrally located. A special entrance for my clients to be photographed brought them to a spacious, light filled space (the skylight was tinted blue) and this assured the sitter of a more noble countenance. Creating a trend, I stripped the space of foolish and unnecessary details, only depending on a few classical references suggesting our young republic.

And the chair – oh, don’t forget the chair: A splendid Victorian seat in walnut with elegant curved lines and graceful proportions. They all sat in this chair, Lincoln, Grant, Walt Whitman, all players. I connected all these illustrious Americans together with this chair, which thankfully remains silent.

In the 1840’s, I hit on the idea of creating a photo catalogue of only the most distinguished Americans. I was not documenting, history but creating, shaping our national identity. Quickly, I became the master of the celebrity machine.

Some commentators have compared me with Andy Warhol. I am uncomfortable with this: yes, we both created factories for the making of art; we both assured the sitter of importance (fame?) through identification with the photographer; and, yes, both of us were uncomfortable with human feeling, nuance, and self-expression, resulting in the same work of art repeated over and over. And certainly we were both uncomfortable with unpleasantness.

Andy took the most horrific images of his age (the atomic bomb, prison executions, traffic accidents) and, by repeating them, removed their power to provoke any emotional reaction. He trivialized them. I admire that.

When I did go to photograph war, I purposely arrived late so the battlefield was free of bodies. General Reynolds was shot in a wheat field called McPherson Woods in 1863. I waited until the landscape had been returned to nature, clean and pristine with no hint of human altercation. I focused then on the quiet of the place, the sense of landscape, and placed myself in the foreground so that you knew I was here and that my perception was your perception.

But a comparison with Andy? No, I never needed a wig. My hair was always full and luxuriant (I was good-looking and earnest in expression). I did not attract a following of strange people, but only respectful employees (up to twenty-five, I think). They arranged the composition, posed the sitter, adjusted the lighting. Then at my direction my assistants inserted into the camera the sensitized glass plates on which the negative would be exposed.

What resulted was art itself – an act of theater, if you will. An invitation for spectators to create a reality that would fit their need of what a work of photographic art should look like. I collected images much as a merchant galvanizes his inventory, and I like to think, I poeticized peoples’ collective thoughts. I managed their reality and made life more real than real, (what reality really is). My badge was a straw hat and linen duster.
















Photography as Performance (5 moveable panels), 2006, oil on canvas, 70 ◊ 94 inches overall

Phillips Off to Egypt

Phillips and Companions Off to Egypt.

“i am going to egypt with mark twain and edgar poe, invading their dreams and exploring their half hidden perspectives from places not my own.

This journey will explore some of the spiritual mysteries surrounding Tutankhamun..

See Book of the Dead