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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
March 22, 2015

Previously unpublished
Art Criticism.

© 2015 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.


Two Men Wearing Neckties (2015)
  Two Men Wearing Neckties (2015)
© 2015 by Bud Grossmann

A CRITICAL COMMENT
ON A PHOTOGRAPH BY
RICHARD BURBRIDGE


In general, I refrain from commenting publicly on art that displeases me, but I would appreciate your looking at page 57 of the March 23rd issue of my favorite weekly magazine. Perhaps you can tell me what redeeming qualities you find in the black-and-white, presumably digital, portrait of Peter Gelb. I myself found few.

Lit from above, shot from below, Mr. Gelb has great globs of reflected light in his eyeglass lenses; he appears shifty-eyed behind the glare. Possibly the photographer intended that effect, but I would hope not. Mr. Gelb is missing a little slice off the crown of his bald head and would have looked better, I am sure, if the photographer or the photo editor had let the slice remain. The shutter snapped while Mr. Gelb’s lips were slightly parted, showing a pair of rounded upper incisors and three overlapping lower teeth. This might have been the one occasion in a hundred when I would have approved of a picture-taker’s saying, “Please look into the camera and chuckle ‘Cheese!’”

I wonder what photos the magazine editor didn’t choose; I wonder how someone decided this picture deserved to fill an entire page.

When I did a Google Image search on Peter Gelb, I found dozens of photos I liked better than this one, none that I liked less.

And then Google gave me gold. It showed me Peter Gelb’s father, the late Arthur Gelb, represented in a Marion Ettlinger photograph so warm and glorious that I for a moment forgot the assault that a man with a camera had committed upon the son. ♦


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This page was updated Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 1:07AM CST.

© 2015 by Bud Grossmann