The Brooklyn Rail

Photographs today are simulations, amalgams of effects and filters, whereas in the mechanical age (1840s–1960s) people tended to believe photographs were trace records, evidence—an indexical copy of something that was once in front of the camera. In other words, photographs were a disembodied specter. When looking at Charles Traub's photographs, we come to recognize the subject’s direct and causal connection is not to the camera but to the photographer’s eye. We are made aware that we are viewing the “how and what” the photographer has chosen to present to us, not what he saw. We have no idea of how many photos Traub took and rejected, only that based on an unstated criterion, the images before us passed muster and are to be shared. 

Traub is a versatile photographer known for genre-spanning work across his fifty-year career, including street, documentary, portraiture, and fine art photography. Regardless of genre, his images tend to be visually anecdotal—circumstantial. In this sense, whether capturing a potentially historic moment or some incongruous juxtaposition or occurrence, his works can be understood as a form of documentation of the temporal, the transitory. However, his photography also encompasses a wide range of formal concerns: he is acutely aware of point of view, depth of field, focus, composition etc., which he ever so subtly exploits to psychological and narrative ends. Photography affords him an opportunity to explore, cross-reference, and reiterate historically grounded genres, while seeking a contemporary approach to them.

Long before our faith in traditional modes of representation began to deteriorate, Traub self-consciously challenged the relationship between photography’s formalism and self-referentiality and its depicted subjects. Each of his photos, though often intended to be seen in the context of other images in books or exhibitions, also stand alone. This brings us to Skid Row, the title of his most recent book, published this year by Lazy Dog Press, as well as an exhibition by the same name, recently closed at the School of Visual Arts Flatiron Project Space. Taken in the late 1970s, these photos depict street tenants of Uptown Chicago and Bowery, New York, (rather than residents of the actual Skid Row neighborhood in Central City East, Los Angeles, which has, since the 1930s, had one of the densest populations of homeless in the U.S.). Instead of capturing the street culture of these locations, Traub instead focused on the complex humanity of their inhabitants, conveying without pity or judgment their unapologetic oddness, dignity, and abjection. Traub’s subjects are anonymous people, none of the subjects photographed in the book or in the exhibition are identified by name, location, or even a date. Disturbingly, many of them could have been recently taken anywhere in the States.

If one was lucky enough to see both exhibition and monograph, it becomes immediately apparent that we are dealing with two different readings of the same material. The book consists of 52 images by Traub with an afterword titled “Considerations” by the philosopher and critic Tom Huhn, while the exhibition consisted of a selection of 12 still images along with a short slide show of additional photographs from the book, interspersed with quotes by various authors and journalists.

For the exhibit Traub installed four close-cropped, larger-than-life-sized portraits of men, differing in age, race, and ethnicity, on each of the gallery’s two opposing walls. Rather than a traditional photographic format, the digital prints are presented in a painting-like format, full bleed and mounted sans glass in thick black frames that emphasize their objectness. Even though these are not mugshots, because of their modularity, scale, and starkness they bring to my mind Andy Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men (1964). Beyond these, a mural-sized image mounted flat onto the gallery’s end-wall shows a man holding a cigarette in his stained fingers, his nails noticeably chipped. He is photographed head-on from the waist up, the street behind him is blurred, as it often is in these photos. The unfocused backgrounds suggest that “Skid Row,” is merely an evocative title, an allegory for any rundown urban center, or dejected neighborhood and its populace.

In the gallery’s foyer, Traub has hung a diptych featuring a portrait of a determined-looking Black man abutted to a full body photo of the same person. He is smiling, propped up on crutches crammed with his possessions, an amputee. Across from him, there’s a portrait of what appears to be an elfin woman wearing a man’s corduroy hat and a patterned coat, her lips lightly glossed with a trace of lipstick. This image that hung in the gallery was reproduced in the book in a different format, a portion of a double portrait in which a man stands beside the woman, leaning on the chair she is sitting on.

The book Skid Row has no overarching narrative structure, and its layout is eccentric; most pages are printed one-sided, with each image facing a blank page, but for some inexplicable reason one occasionally chances upon a two-page spread. Likewise the order of the images in the book is distinct from that of the gallery exhibition. For instance, the book begins with a photograph of what appears to be a man panhandling at a car window, followed by the aforementioned photo of the man holding a cigarette, which is in turn succeeded by a series of profiles, a two-picture sequence of a man getting drunk, and then portraits of two young Black girls on facing pages. In contrast, Traub’s blown-up exhibition prints offer a different encounter, turning these candid depictions of everyday people into a sweeping aesthetic experience, one that captures individual characters. I can only imagine that the reason for these decisions is that Traub in each case seeks to address and subtly undermine the conventions of each format.

Traub’s photographs portray weathered and aged subjects with a twinkle in their eyes or a smirk on their lips. Often, his subjects engage directly with the camera, choosing the attitude by which they want to be represented to such a degree that they pose. In these photos the presence of the photographer is noted, and we are made aware there is nothing candid about them. Experiencing the occasionally straightforward street photos in the monograph further drives this point home.

The book also leads us to the imagined narrative of Charles Traub the photographer, decades later editing the work of his younger self, stalking the streets of seedy New York and Chicago neighborhoods. In the process, here again the status of photography as an indexical sign is brought into question. So, while his photographs maintain a claim of some direct connection to their subject, they now also serve a rhetorical function, signifying various nuanced messages. While they may still echo social realism’s criticality and Traub’s own humanist contemplation of his subjects, in our era of ubiquitous selfies, Instagram, and deepfakes these images lay a claim to the complexity of photography’s ability to do more than record the incidental.