TRAINING THE EYE BY NARROWING THE VISION

I came across a marvelous burst of wisdom today, penned by the photographer Dorothea Lange. These words were used as the touchstone for an impressive poem called “Aperture” by David Moolten:

The camera . . . teaches people

how to see without a camera.

What that simple sentence made me remember was how I had learned to see the beauty of certain buildings through the paintings of Edward Hopper. I came to Hopper’s paintings quite late in life, house sitting for a friend while she taught poetry at various colleges around the country. Getting acquainted with my new surroundings, I stumbled across a book of his reproductions on the coffee table in her living room.

Hopper mesmerized me immediately. And the word is not too strong. Shortly afterwards I rounded a corner of the Guggenheim and was literally rooted to the spot for several minutes by one of his paintings. But what I thought about today was that, several years after spying that coffee table book in Cobble Hill – by which time I’d moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn – I found myself gazing at the pink, brown and ocher facades of the brownstones in late afternoon sunlight and muttering, “I learned how beautiful these are from Edward Hopper.”

So it’s true of the artist’s brush as well: it can teach one to see without it. To use a more popular metaphor, the impact remains long after Elvis has left the building.

Moolten’s poem, as I suggested, was adroit and accomplished, distilling from Lange’s photograph of a Japanese-American boy in an internment camp both the honor of its subject and the dishonor of his situation. As well as the government’s rather self-defeating folly in asking an artist like Dorothea Lange to take on that particular assignment.

“Aperture” appears in the current issue of Southwest Review, which informs me that Mr. Moolten’s first book, Plums & Ashes, won the 1994 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and that his next, Especially Then, was published in 2005.

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