Charles Traub (Light, 724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street): In these photographs of (mostly) figures glimpsed on the beach at Lake Michigan in Chicago, there are two contradictory impulses at work. One is concerned with the comedy (often almost grotesque) of unlovely bodies displaying themselves with vanity and abandon. The other is occupied with the sense of form that this comic display offers to the camera eye. And it is the sense of form that usually wins out, not only in the way the photographer is able to place his figures in the format of the picture surface but also in the way he marshals every contour and detail for maximum effect.
Perhaps the two most striking features of the photography of Charles Traub are its physicality and its intimacy. Most of the pictures are taken from so close that they inhabit another's personal space. As a result, they allow us to participate in the very intimate radiations, qualities and subtle feelings of another living being. Normally, it would be very impolite, tantamount to trespassing, to be this close to people we don't know and to stare the way these pictures do—fixing our attention on body parts or configurations that are almost too momentary, too ordinary to be seen. And yet, the photos condone our behavior and even invite our participation. We may stare—it's all right—these people have accepted our intrusion and allowed us a little feel of what they might just be all about.
There is in these photographs a habit of attentiveness to and a consciousness of both male and female being. It should be said that many of these photographs take place along Chicago's lakefront, the sensual core of this great city. They participate in what the shore is for people. The soft intimacy of the vignetting closes in on things, isolating them, as if in a dream, singling them out for our undivided attention. What we normally regard as "environment" is merely peripheral, tangential to the main subject of these pictures which is the body. The physical, whether flesh or fabric, is the subject matter. This is what has been selected to be seen or, rather, felt with the eyes.
If, by temperament, Traub tends toward the physical, his sense of form is always local and specific. The resulting images are often static, sculptural and, at times, even monumental. This is especially true of the photographs that isolate single forms. Another tendency of his seeing detects a strangeness, a mysterious almost surreal aspect contained within the ordinary. Either way, the gesture, the act of the photograph, signals an embededness in a very intimate, sensuous, often sexy, sometimes strange, material reality.
These images are, finally, not a description of the world or even that part of it where Chicagoans go to sun themselves and enjoy the pleasures of the body. Rather, they are pictures asserting pictorial values and the values that Traub himself feels to be important. These images are human things. And the preference is for people loose enough, open enough, to confront the camera and allow it to take them. Traub respects them for this freedom and returns their openness by conveying their dignity and innocence.
