Tom Garver
Director Newport Harbor Art Museum (now Orange County Museum Art), California, 1968-1972, 77-80
Curator exhibitions Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1972-1977
Curator exhibitions M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, 1974-1975
Director Madison Museum Contemporary Art, 1980-1987
Assistant professor California State University, 1970-1971, 79-80
August 1, 2020
Bill:
COVID sloth has driven me to communicate with you by e-mail rather than by post. I spent a couple of hours earlier this afternoon, seated outside on my little back porch. The light was good and the temperature pleasant.
While I’d looked at the photos with some care, this time I also read the text, highly prescient I would say, as it was written before both COVID and George Floyd, but then you are a good son of “the Berkeley way…” In a word, it’s a remarkable piece of work, and could only have been self-produced because no trade book publisher would have touched it in its present form. That’s okay, and more than okay. It’s been done the way you wanted it to be.
First off, I have to say that your life’s experiences exceed mine by at least an order of magnitude, and their presentation, in your rather jump cut style, makes one want to know more. But maybe not knowing more is the best thing here. One thing that I now do know is how differently your style has changed over the years. When I looked at the photos last evening, I was taken aback in the shift which seems to have taken place pretty much with the arrival of your first digital camera and color. You mentioned your respect for Cartier-Bresson, which is obvious, but you came to note by taking his “Decisive Moment” style and co-mingling it with a breezy WTF style. Of course it isn’t WTF in the least, and I found out that one reason is your earlier artistic endeavor as a painter. This work is so good because it is “balletic,” in that it is made to look effortless.
Of course this becomes so much more obvious with the arrival of color. My first response was that these later color images suggest an incredible sensate luxury, an all but palpable sense of richness, of touch. One of my complaints as I looked at them was thinking that you’d served them up at such a small size, but reading the text told me differently. While they are vastly different from the black and white images in both viewpoint and social sensibility, they are still largely documents of utter and all but invisible commonalities, what might be called “social detritus.” They look as though you have manipulated them, overprinted several images, but I note that you haven’t, rather you’re a master of an imagery which permits passage through transparent/translucent substances, allowing every variant between water clear transmission to complete reflection. I would love to see these at the full 30 X 40 size. (I would also love to see Haverford College, the recipient of your postcards to me, have one of these but, alas, the decent money I made buying and holding works of art for years before selling them, was battered when I gave it to “folks who really know how to manage your money,” and since then the diminished amount I had has been halved by my divorce. I’m solvent, and grateful to be so in these COVID times, but have to “live quietly,” as they say. Of course, at 86, and essentially under a “shelter at home” mandate, how else would I live?)
Bill, one of the things you mention, fortunately not belligerently or bitterly, is that your work, and with it a significant bit of your identity, has faded from public awareness. Early on, you dined out on significant public recognition. You correctly note that having been added to John Szarkowski’s pantheon was a very important asset, and having served on at least one NEA photo jury with John, I can attest to the fact that while he spoke softly, he spoke passionately and well about photographers he respected—but that was then and this is now. As we age, our star will grow ever dimmer. For me it may remain alight in the form of a few footnotes here and there, but for you there remains a significant and important body of images, which barring human extinction through some stupid act of abnegation, will remain in collections worldwide.
And I shouldn’t leave out Dan Skjǽveland. Amazing what someone who really believes, believes in what you are doing, and makes a huge difference in the energy one brings to such a project. It isn’t about money (although that helps) but it’s that belief, that willingness to step outside one’s own self interest that can make such a difference. Bill, you were very lucky that he fell into your life!
All best, and again, great job! Tom