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Robert A. McCabe p h o t o g r a p h y |
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The Books:
On the Road with
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 Robert McCabe's first photographs of Greece were taken during a trip in 1954 when he was an undergraduate at Princeton University. He returned in 1955 and 1957 via freighter from the U.S. and traveled extensively in the Aegean, again shooting with a Rolleiflex and Plus-X film. In 1957 he also took a series of color photographs in the Greek islands at the request of the National Geographic Society. His work has been widely exhibited and published; his most recent show, a selection of photographs entitles "Greece: The Innocence Years" opens in November at the Galerie Sit Down in Paris. |
Robert McCabe believes in simplicity I came to Greece quite by accident, traveling in company with my older brother. France had been my dream, but my brother had a Greek friend at college who invited us to spend ten days with him. We ended up spending the entire summer in Greece. Greece in 1954 had very few visitors. Everywhere we went there was enormous hospitality and a sense of discovery. We used to only half joke that an island was spoiled if there was even one other visitor on the island. When we first came to Santorini, there were literally no other visitors, and Mykonos had perhaps ten. Today Greece is a prosperous country with highly developed tourism. In 1954 it was a poor country–there were 180,000 visitors versus 16 million now–but the people had a genuine and non-commercial interest in, and affection for, visitors. It was almost like the Homeric sense of hospitality and respect. I remember in Ios the mayor of the island actually gave up his own bed to one of my traveling companions, a doctor from New York; the mayor slept on his living room floor. Today, it is impossible on the islands to take a photograph that doesn't have tourists in it. That's not very interesting. The islands in the 1950s and 1960s had their own distinctive characters: their own architecture, their folk songs and dances, their food. Some elements came from their history: influences of the Turks, the Crusaders, the Franks, the Venetians, the English. Today, many of those differences have been homogenized. I think–I hope–that a common theme [in might photographs of Greece] might be a sense of poetry. I found it both in the people and in the landscape. Sometimes the poetry emerges from combining landscapes with figures. I took only black & white photographs in Greece until 1957, when the National Geographic Society sent me a box of Kodachrome film and asked me to photograph the Greek islands. The two are totally different disciples. With black & white you compose with forms and shapes and lighting. With color, you have not only the forms and shapes and lighting, but also the colors. In both media, I believe in simplicity. You can tell if a composition is successful by reducing its size to that of a contact print: if the image is still strong, you are on to something. Why is a picture worth a thousand words? A very philosophical question, and a challenging question! When you think that even a 35 mm negative or digital file might have 13 million pixels or grain equivalents in it, for a thousand words to compete with 13 million individual captures of a scene, you realize that the poor wordsmith is at a serious disadvantage! Fifteen million inputs is heavy artillery in capturing a scene. It takes a ton of words to compete. Photography is very, very subjective, at least the way I like to practice it. We can give a very one sided picture of something if we want. We can make Switzerland into a poor dirty country, or Pakistan into a prosperous country–by carefully selecting the subjects of our photographs. Perhaps my early photographs of Greece give a romantic and poetic vision of the country. If you look at Costa Manos's spectacular photographs from the same period, you see a different vision. He shows more than I wanted to of the poverty and hardship of life in those years. Costa's remarkable book, A Greek Portfolio, answers definitively the question of whether one picture is worth a thousand words. |
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This page is recreated with
permission from the
monologue printed on page 96 of "Odyssey: The World of Greece"
Magazine. November/December 2008 issue. [back] |
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