The Photographs of Homer Page

Photography anniversary shows are easy museo-hits, any Ansel Adams show is even easier. Annie Leibovitz comes with a name (but not much else) and some museums get so lazy that they just turn over whole photography shows to commercial magazines. So when a big-institution curator, such as the Nelson-Atkins' Keith F. Davis, is willing to devote a significant exhibition and a major publication to a mostly unknown or forgotten artist, he's demonstrating real commitment. (And so is his museum.) Take Davis' The Photographs of Homer Page, on view now at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, and via a Yale Press-published monograph. Until now, Page has been a forgotten figure. Davis' presentation makes a strong case for continued re-examination.

As Davis points out in the catalogue's main essay, Page was once a star, a MoMA-blessed peer of Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Lisette Model, Irving Penn, Aaron Siskind and so on. Page's mentor was Dorothea Lange, on whose property Page and his wife once lived. But while Page's peers went on to become photo-institutions, Page stuttered and disappeared. Davis posits that Page suffered from a mix of a broken marriage from which he had a hard time recovering, a propensity for drink, a crisis of confidence and a fear of ambition.

The show (which I haven't seen) and book (which I have) focuses on just two years, 1949-50, when Page worked on a Guggenheim fellowship. After the grant, Page's career disintegrated. He didn't receive a follow-up Guggenheim so that he could finish the book he planned, a book that Davis posits would have rivaled Robert Frank's The Americans for import. He soon distanced himself from the fine-art photography world, taking commercial and journalistic assignments and working for the Magnum agency. It took 60 years -- and Davis -- for Page to 'come back.'

So the drama of career-meandering aside, how is Page's work? It's challenging in ways that recall the best work of Page's peers, only darker. It's documentary photography with cheek. It's scenes portrayed with acerbic wit. Some of the pictures slowly reveal themselves to be slyly disturbing. While Frank's The Americans sheds light on the corners of a nation, Page's 1949-50 pictures are about what goes on in the corners of individual psyches. Having been introduced to Page, I can't imagine Diane Arbus (or any subsequent artist who probed psychic pain) having happened without him.

In the Page above (New York, June 18, 1949), are the children playing on a sidewalk, or are they gang-beating a female mannequin and finding it hilarious? In the second picture (New York, May 11, 1949), the advertising text says that "One woman tells another... men see for them(selves)," even as the slouching sad-sack in the picture clearly, sadly, doesn't.

It seems like Page wanted each photograph to have about 20 percent wince. A New York picture from June 22, 1949 shows two African-American construction workers taking a quick break and checking out urbanity around them. On first pass it's a picture of a city being built, with two beefcakey figure studies thrown in. Then you notice that the two men are segregated from the rest of humanity -- all of which is white and white-collar -- behind a construction barrier.

In spots Davis apparently helps Page along. On plate 50 in the catalogue is Page's New York, September 9, 1949, a picture of a group of pre-teen boys eagerly watching a sporting event, apparently a baseball game. They're happily wide-eyed, working on popsicles, thrilled to be at the game. On the next page, Plate 51 is New York, October 29, 1949. It shows a group of middle-aged men at a sporting event. Many are clutching what look to be racing forms or betting sheets, so it's probably a horse race. Dejection reigns. The joys of youth have given way to the intense disappointments of middle age.

If there's a theme that runs through Page's work from 1949-50, when Page was only 31 years-old, that's it: Middle-aged frustration. Sometimes Page has a sense of humor about it, as in New York, September 7, 1949, immediately above. But more often Page is forlorn. Several pictures feature men staring vacantly at cheesecake-mag covers at newsstands. Others feature a 40- or 50-something man asleep on the subway or in front of a doorway, even in the middle of a cobblestone street as a truck seems to be moving toward him.

It's easy to read these as self-portraits of Page's own psyche. Maybe too easy. But as affecting as these pictures are for us to look at, imagine how they must have been for Page to seek out.

Related: Time's photo-ace, Richard Lacayo, alerted me to the show.