Seized Moment

Even though television has pre-empted much of the visual reportage that was once photojournalism's particular domain, the great photographer still has an unassailable place. He records the exact moment--seized out of the passing flux of the event--that fixes an image or an emotion for all time. Television's eye is quick, but flickering. The photojournalist is a permanent witness.

At 55, David Douglas Duncan is one of the greatest photojournalists alive, the Hemingway of a profession that, in its strenuousness and immediacy, cannot have Prousts. "Have camera, will travel" is its motto and its boast. In the last 30-odd years, much of that time working for LIFE, Duncan has been nearly everywhere and done nearly everything--from catching monster squid in the ocean off Peru to recording the home life of Picasso. He has been shot at by Japanese ack-ack gunners, Korean snipers and Vietnamese rocketeers. All this is documented in a retrospective show now at the Nelson-Atkins Galleries in Kansas City, Mo., which happens to be his home town.

Yankee Boomer. Few living photographers have exposed themselves or their film to such a range of coups, revolts, massacres and civil wars. The man is an anthology of risk (the Yankee boomer from the Midwest, living out his own adventure yarn), and the egotism is as extreme as the bravery. Only Duncan, one feels, could have written a preface to one of his own books, Picasso's Picassos, calling it "the most exciting and valuable book in modern art today."

However lush the writings, the photographs are almost invariably lean and telling. Duncan's instinct is for a photographic plain speech that puts all the emphasis where it belongs, on the subject, and almost none on the technique. At its best, this gives his pictures a marvellously laconic poetry, as in the shot of an Afghan tribesman washing his cups by the side of a lake in the Hindu Kush. Or a deserted cottage in Connemara, hemmed and compressed to the edge of survival between two gray bands of sky and tumbled rocks.

Duncan's experimental photos, taken with a prismatic distorting lens that fragments the image and reconstitutes it on the ground glass, are--on the evidence of the work in this show--rather less successful. They are consciously "art" and often end--like the 1963 photograph of Picasso's face melting in facets through one of his canvases--as a surface parody of Cubism.

Men at War. Duncan's best work, however, is his war photography; he operates superbly under stress. "Anyone," he declares, "can take good war pictures provided he's in the right place at the right time." Perhaps. But only a small number of other photographers, such as Britain's Don McCullin or the U.S.'s W. Eugene Smith and Carl Mydans, have equaled Duncan in the dreadful succinctness of their images.

His coverage of Marines in combat in Korea was hailed at the time by Edward Steichen as "the greatest photographic document ever produced showing men at war." But it may well be surpassed by Duncan's later work in Viet Nam. This series of photographs, taken from 1967 onward, represents the end of a trajectory of enthusiasm that began with the gung-ho spirit of his World War II coverage and ended in the blooded dust of Con Thien and Khe Sanh. It is filled with a gaunt and hopeless veracity; out of the strained faces of the Marines, the huddled dead, the looming black silhouettes of choppers and wrecked transport, the dirty light and the funereal columns of smoke and dust, Duncan has produced something near to a photographic equivalent of Goya's The Disasters of War.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.