Gallery Scene

By: John Ranard

Two photographers from backgrounds worlds apart prove the maxim that intelligent photographs, like fine wine, age well with time.

George Daniell (1911–2002) graduated from Yale and studied drawing at the Art Students League. He picked up a small Leica camera prior to a college trip to Europe and returned with stylized street photographs that impress the viewer with their wit and gaiety. He gained a following over the years for his photographs of blue-collar working men, dockworkers and fishermen—photographs that celebrate the male figure. Accepting commissions from Life and Time magazines to photograph the literary set, he created intimate pictures of Audrey Hepburn, who he befriended in Rome during the 1955 filming of “War and Peace.” It is these shots that jump out of the portfolio of vintage prints.

Henry Clay Anderson (1911–1998) worked as a commercial photographer out of his Greenville, Miss., studio, where he advertised, “Pictures made any time, any place, any size.” His clients were the proud middle-class blacks of his community who were photographed as they wished to be seen. Men wore cool suits and fine felt hats; their wives dressed in tasteful dresses. In one memorable photograph, three graduating seniors still wearing their tuxedoes after their prom sit on a backyard swing late at night. They have that smart confident smirk we can all remember, when the world was ours.

Working with a Super Speed Graphic that gave a 4 x 5-inch negative with lots of room around the subject, Anderson cropped out “extraneous” background, cars, toys, furniture and the photographer’s shadow while enlarging his prints. These exhibition images, printed full-frame posthumously, give the photographs an amusing, surreal, yet honest look. His family portraits with children standing on furniture, their faces at camera height, are precious.

On May 7, 1955, Reverend George Lee, a member of the NAACP, was murdered for registering black citizens to vote in Belzoni, Miss., 50 miles away. Anderson was the only photographer who accepted the request to photograph the events surrounding the assassination. His simple, straightforward documentary photograph of Reverend Lee’s car, taken without pretense or ostentation, communicates today the brutality of this killing, leaving it for our minds to contemplate the horror of the scene.