IN THE 1960s, German artist Gerhard Richter created a stir when he started to make paintings that looked like blurred photographs. In 1991, he reflected on the difference between painting and photogrpahy: “Photography has almost no reality; it is almost 100 per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence.”
Visit Imma's current exhibition of approximately 165 selected photographs from the David Kronn Collection, Out of the Dark Room, and pretty quickly you may conclude that individual photographic prints do have something like the reality that Richter attributes to painting.
It’s something that Kronn is acutely sensitive to. A photography buff since his early teens, he was also a bit of a technical geek and taught himself as much as he could about optics and photographic technology. So show him a photograph and he doesn’t just see what it’s a picture of, he asks himself how the image was made, what kind and format of camera was used, and what kind of film, chemicals and paper were employed to produce it. For him, in other words, every photographic print has its own distinct physical presence, in exactly the sense that Richter attributes presence to painting.
Kronn is a Dubliner. He was born and brought up in the city, studied medicine at Trinity College and then, aged 25, won a place in the paediatric residency training programme at New York University Medical Centre. That led on to a fellowship in medical genetics at NYU and, eventually, to his current positions: chief of medical genetics at Westchester Medical Centre and associate professor at NY Medical College.
From an early age, though, photography has been a passion. He had a camera before he was 10 and, in Dublin for the opening of the exhibition at Imma, he has a digital SLR slung over his shoulder, and admits to being pretty inseparable from it.
In his late teens, he even took on “a few semi-professional” photographic assignments before committing himself to his medical studies. Those studies, however, were prolonged and intensive, as was the work that followed, and photography was put on the back burner.
He realised that New York was a great place to see photography, though, and then, “at one fateful moment” in 1996, a friend took him to the annual exhibition of the international association of art photography dealers, then the most important art photography show in the world. Kronn was, as he put it, “like a kid in a candy store”. Then he attended a photography auction, where he bought a portrait of writer Terry Southern by William Claxton. “From that point, I can say I was hooked.”
In fact, without spending a fortune, Kronn has amassed a formidable collection of more than 400 photographs, and growing. Early on, he bought whatever caught his eye and was affordable, but over time his awareness of what interests him grew, as did his knowledge of photography and the evolving shape of his collection as a Collection. Thematically, childhood, landscape and time emerge strongly, as indeed does Ireland.
Being Irish, he tended to gravitate towards work with an Irish connection, and his collection is notably rich in photographs made in Ireland by photographers we don’t particularly associate with Ireland – as well as those we do, such as renowned Magnum photographer Martine Franck. The show includes examples of Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti’s breakthrough portfolio of Irish photographs from the late 1970s. The less predictable Irish links are with Paul Caponigro, Jock Sturges, Roger Mayne and, perhaps most strikingly, Harry Callahan.
Callahan is a particular favourite of Kronn, and there are several of his beautiful, abstracted black-and-white landscapes in the show. Kronn has also concentrated his efforts on Irving Penn, a huge influence on contemporary portrait and fashion photography. There's a whole room given over to him with outstanding examples from some of his most important series, including Small Tradesand Enga Warriors.
A number of stop-motion and long exposure images vouch for Kronn's interest in photography and time. Caponigro's Running White Deer, County Wicklow,from 1967, is fantastically fluid composition, the group of deer making a blur of movement. It combines time and landscape brilliantly.
Other memorable landscapes include Bart Michiels’s impassive views of the sites of second World War battlefields and Robert Glenn Ketchum’s environmentally engaged, intricately detailed studies of northern waters, images that identify him as a modern Ansel Adams, also represented by a superb study of alders.
There are amazing photographs of children by Malick Sidibe, the sitters spoiling the formality of the studio setting by disobediently moving their heads. “They were his rejects, essentially,” Kronn notes, until someone noticed how striking and expressive they were. Equally, Irina Davis’s portraits of toddlers in a Russian orphanage are moving and disturbing. Ken Kitano makes remarkable composite images of classrooms of children, distilling them into single images.
THE BEST WAY to approach this exhibition is not to look for one overarching theme but as a broad compendium with some thematic concentrations. There are more than enough iconic images to stop you in your tracks. This is particularly interesting in that Kronn’s long-term plan is to give the bulk of his collection to Imma. The process has started already and it is highly significant because Ireland does not yet have a substantial public collection of international photography. It seems that Kronn’s enthusiasm will work to Imma’s, and to our, great advantage.
Out of the Dark RoomWorks from The David Kronn Collection. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. Until October 9th
