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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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D. R. Martin @ Icebox Gallery
Wednesday 29 January @ 10:55:47 |
 by John Tribbett
The year was 1968 and while most 18-year-olds fantasized about living the life of British Invasion rock stars, D. R. Martin was instead climbing the marble staircase of the Duluth Public Library to lose himself in a book of black and white photographs. The book was “The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson” and it forever changed young Martin’s life.
Royal Mile, Edinburgh 1969 by D. R. Martin
Cartier-Bresson, the famous French street photographer, predicated his work on the idea of the “decisive moment.” It occurs when random moments in the world arrange themselves in such a way that form, content and meaning, for a fraction of a second, strike out in brilliant cohesiveness. The moment only matters if someone is there to capture it.
So Martin arms himself with a “clunky Cannon SLR that ker-chunks robustly” when he hits the shutter release and enters the streets of Duluth. He is chasing Cartier-Bresson. The pursuit lasts five years as he stalks the “decisive moment” through the alleys, courtyards and promenades of the North Shore, Minneapolis and Europe.
Seven thousand images later he is done. The response to his work is lackadaisical. He puts his negatives in a shoebox and packs his camera in mothballs. He forgets about the photos and pursues a different career.
Three decades later, on a snowy afternoon, Martin is cleaning his basement and comes across the box. He prints some of the negatives and is again moved by the lessons of Cartier-Bresson that he pursued so long ago. The images of a windblown Duluth capture perfectly the rough edges of the declining steel-belt city of the day.
In one shot, a mother and two children sit on a Superior Street curb among the littered remnants of a VFW parade. The boy stares with annoyed eyes at what could be the parade fading into the distance while the mother, lost in thought, looks the opposite direction with tired eyes and a sleeping child in her lap. In another snapshot, a man stares menacingly back at the camera lens as a dignified elderly woman stumbles forward into the same frame. “The man walking along the right, coming up from behind me, has seen the camera and wonders what’s going on. He doesn’t quite like the cut of my jib,” the narration reads.
In Europe he captures old couples, church fronts and fog shrouded fields. The collection of everyday moments flows with the universal ease of black and white so that Duluth and Minneapolis seem to be the sister cities of Oxford, Vienna and Florence.
Here, a young couple, arm in arm, lounge against a wall in London’s Piccadilly Circus wearing laid-back mod fashions. Another captures a young girl waiting out the rain inside an Edinburgh construction shelter. Her white stockings and porcelain face contrast with the gritty floor and lurking figures in the background.
D. R. Martin’s youthful ambitions allow us to see, with clarity, the chance moments that give meaning to the mundane and value to the passing of time. We can thank Cartier-Bresson for that.
Chasing Cartier-Bresson continues through Feb. 22. Icebox Gallery, 2401 Central Ave. NE, Mpls. Hours: Tue.–Fri. 10–6 p.m.; Sat. 12–5 p.m.; open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays. 612-788-1790.
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