A life worth living

Todd Webb’s Paris photos

By Chris Thompson

Todd Webb: Vintage and Modern Photographs of Paris & France” shows at Aucocisco Gallery through October 4. Call (207) 874-2060.

TODD WEBB: Lucille, April 16, 1951 — Paris.

A haggard trenchcoat cuts a high-speed path along Rue Des Plantes in Paris, carrying a desperate looking man along inside it. His eyes are focused dead ahead on his index finger that points sharp, firm, and straight ahead as he carries on an intense dialogue with himself and the city that the force of his stride seems to throw slightly off kilter. The gnarled face of this man in Todd Webb’s 1950 photograph “Rue Des Plantes, Near Alesia, Paris,” combined with his all-black attire, make him seem the spitting image of the Algerian-born French philosopher, novelist and journalist Albert Camus.

In 1945, at the close of the Second World War, Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus. In it he argued that the only serious problem for philosophy is whether or not we should kill ourselves. “Judging whether life is or is not worth living”, he said, “amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

Camus was, ultimately, able to lead himself and his readers to an affirmative answer. Whether the hero of this photograph was able to do so is a question that has faded into the fog of the history that Webb himself sought to document down to its tiniest detail.

Todd Webb was born in Detroit and lived and worked in New York City for years before leaving for Europe in 1948 as a photographer with the European Recovery Program. Commonly known as the Marshall Plan, this involved massive United States involvement — economic, political, and cultural — in Europe’s reconstruction after the war. That year Webb began what was to be a lifetime of travel to distant corners of the earth with camera in hand; he arrived by boat in London and quickly set off for Paris, arriving there 53 years ago this month.

The photographs in the current show at Aucocisco Gallery, of which all but a few larger images are the first positive prints made from Webb’s original negatives, are on public view for the first time, making this an important exhibition both in terms of Webb’s life and work and also in terms of the broader cultural history of postwar photography. The photographs map a several year love affair with this city that was his assignment as well as his home. Like any affair it has its ambivalent moments, where curiosity meets perplexity, and where intimacy suddenly turns alien.

In his 1950 “Toothpaste Ad, Paris” a still-surviving larger-than-life painted advertisement on the side of an apartment building, showing a dapper nineteenth-century Parisian gent with his fashionable sideburns and cultured pout, looks down on an alley papered with worn posters. This one well-placed snapshot captures the juxtaposition of the age of Manet with the age of the existentialists, shuffling two instants of Parisian reality like a deck of cards.

Whether saturated with the barely-bottled explosive energy of the “Rue Des Plantes” photograph or suffused with the calm meditative balance of his several snapshots of the Seine, Webb’s work is loaded with a levity and a rapture that comes from this intimacy with the moods and textures of the places and times that he photographs. It is often claimed that “great” works transcend the time of their making. But one somehow gets the sense from his work that Todd Webb would have none of this loftiness, and would wish for his work to be grounded in the human drama of its time. Indeed his care for specificity, for nuances and details and uniquenesses, makes his work so much a part of its historical moment that it permits us to be a little more aware of what it might have been like to inhabit it.

In “Looking Down the Seine, from Pont Sully, Paris”, from 1951, a bridge across the Seine catches the fullness of the sun that has yet to break through the dark sky that hangs over the cathedral of Notre Dame looming in the background. The contrast between these two atmospheres gives the scene a striking warmth and clarity. While their fellow Christians off in the distance ride out the storm, a few tiny figures stand in the sun at the edge of the promenade in the foreground below, fishing, watching, waiting for nothing in particular.

Most of us could stand in the same place at the same time with the same camera and produce at best a tasteful postcard. Webb managed to create a four-by-five inch portrait of a life worth living.

But by now, of course, he had met Lucille, the former dancer who was to become his wife. In his journal entry from May 25, 1949, Webb noted that he had taken Lucille and some friends “to the Impressionist show at the Orangerie and I enjoyed it for about the tenth time. Lucille made a pass at me or vice versa.”

His portrait of her in their Paris apartment, entitled “Lucille, April 16, 1951 — Paris” (pictured), embodies this “vice-versa.” With that graceful nonchalant tilt of the neck that dancers alone can achieve, with a cigarette balanced between fingers that are poised for a plié, with her mouth hinting at the possibility of curling into a playful smile, with her head wreathed in flowers and her eyes looking through him as only a lover can, it seems that either she made the pass or she let him think that he did.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.