| |
 |
| photo by Charles Harbutt |
| Click photo above to view gallery. |
I can date with some precision my first encounter with the work of Charles Harbutt. I had become closely involved in organizing a benefit auction in March 1975 for London’s pioneering Photographers’ Gallery. A wide array of photographers had been asked to submit prints in the hope that the eventual proceeds of the sale would generate enough money to resolve the perilous financial difficulties the gallery faced. It was make-or-break time for Sue Davies, the visionary director of this young, respected, but precariously underfunded institution. The sale still stands as a historic occasion—the first substantial showing of contemporary photography at auction. It was the very first occasion on which work by many distinguished photographers who are today well established in the marketplace was offered in a specialized sale at auction. Among the offerings were prints by Robert Frank, Helmut Newton, and Irving Penn.
Budget limitations meant that we could not illustrate every picture in the auction catalog. One image that struck me and that I chose was a curiously intriguing street scene, made in Liverpool in 1971. The picture was taken from a high vantage point. The architecture was not intrinsically interesting, yet the anonymous urban moment was inflected with a potent, somber mood. The sky was dark. The buildings had a seemingly gritty texture and bleak tonality. But the gaze was irresistibly drawn, and the imagination challenged, by the bright graphic pattern of street markings and, at their center, a white shop front with a solitary man running past. The picture was signed by Charles Harbutt, though his was not a name I had been previously aware of. It was the sort of picture that only an eye that truly sees can find and capture. Such subtle pictorial insights—fleeting, structured, enigmatic—are the privileged serendipity of the visually gifted.
The sale was attended by Sam Wagstaff, now legendary as an inspired and highly influential collector and as the partner and mentor of Robert Mapplethorpe. I was very gratified that he bought the Harbutt picture, as well as paying the top price of the sale, £260, for Penn’s portrait of Colette.
Charles Harbutt, who now teaches photography at Parsons The New School, has enjoyed a long and diverse career in his chosen medium. He graduated in journalism and became a freelance photographer in 1959. He joined Magnum in 1963 and eventually became its president, leaving to found a new cooperative agency, Archive Pictures, in 1981. Though widely published and exhibited—the picture described was included in his 1974 book, Travelog—he has never sought a high public profile. Harbutt has remained quietly committed to his faith in the medium’s expressive potential, favoring the found, rather than the constructed, moment, and carrying the torch for all the best traditions of photography as a tool of engagement with the world.
|
