In Conversation: Two Curators, Two Exhibitions

Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History features charcoal drawings; True Story: Photography, Journalism, and Media, photographs. The two exhibitions opening weeks apart is not a coincidence.

Ariel Pate, Assistant Curator of Photography (right)
Margaret, I’m so excited to talk with you about our exhibitions.

Margaret Andera, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art (left)
Ariel, agreed. Robert Longo’s drawings, the photojournalism represented in True Story, and art history interrelate in many interesting ways.

AP They do! There’s a lot we can unpack. Which of Longo’s works do you think best highlights the relationship of his drawing practice to photography?

MA Untitled (The Three Graces; Donetsk, Ukraine; March 14, 2022) is a good example. Longo based it on a photojournalist’s image he saw online the day after Russian forces attacked the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. It depicts three dresses elegantly posed in a storefront window riddled with bullets.

Robert Longo, Untitled (The Three Graces; Donetsk, Ukraine; arch 14, 2022), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

AP Longo’s work is a black-and-white, charcoal drawing on paper, but the original image is a color photograph, right?

MA Yes, and Longo enhanced the contrast. In his drawing, the white dresses emerge from a dramatic black background and look like Neoclassical sculptures. The title refers to a marble sculpture from 1814–17 by Italian artist Antonio Canova. This reference to an art historical work, the drawing’s monumental scale, and its depiction of a contemporary event are all characteristics of history painting, putting this and many of Longo’s drawings from the last 10 years in conversation with that tradition.

AP What a beautiful, subtle connection. It makes me think of the work of Larry Burrows, a photojournalist featured in True Story. His color photographs of the American conflict in Vietnam define “the look” of that war for many people, but he also drew on compositional strategies found in older European paintings.

MA You showed me a great photograph of his from a battlefield.

Larry Burrows, Reaching Out, South Vietnam, 1966, printed 1998. Gift of Photography Council M1998.225

AP Yeah, that’s an image known as Reaching Out, taken during Operation Prairie. What strikes me is that the mud-caked clothing and tents in the photograph start to look like drapery you might see in classical painting—or Canova’s sculpture!—and the main figures are on the same plane, much like in some of the history paintings Longo looks to. It’s both a news photograph and a composition that refers to older art forms and depictions of history.

Building on that, how do you think Longo’s work might live in the visual record of history? It seems like Three Graces has a different resonance than the original color news photo.

MA It’s an excellent question, because when many people initially encounter Longo’s drawings, they think they’re photographs. But a work like Three Graces is more than a document of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Longo talks about adding dramatic, cinematic effects to his source images to create “the perfect image.” For Longo, that perfect image is grounded in the formal element of composition, so he’ll make subtle changes to the perspective, the position of a figure, or in this case, the pattern of the cracks in the glass. Longo is acutely aware of the image storm assaulting us daily, so this careful manipulation of the source image is where he imbues his plea to viewers to slow down and consider the larger context of the events his works depict.

AP The massive size of his drawings really makes people stop and look, too!

MA But slowing down isn’t an option for photojournalists, is it, Ariel? They work in incredibly stressful situations, and Reaching Out captures a singular moment that Burrows could have easily missed.

AP He spoke elegantly about the pressures of photographing in the midst of war—the futility of trying to capture everything you’re witnessing within “one small frame” in a fraction of a second. But he was lucky—he worked for Life magazine, which was known for devoting numerous pages to photographs from a single news story. Photojournalists take different approaches to the limitations of the medium: some revel in the challenge of creating one image that sums up a whole story, and there’s an entire section of True Story devoted to that. There’s no single way to report on the news with a camera. And then you look at the work of Robert Longo
and realize the camera’s lens can be just the beginning!

MA I’m looking forward to our Members and visitors experiencing the exhibitions and considering these relationships. Thank you for the thoughtful discussion, Ariel!