Princely Prints

By Timothy Foote

GJON MILI: PHOTOGRAPHS & RECOLLECTIONS

New York Graphic; 249pages; $40

In a sense, Gjon Mili is the Marcel Du-champ of photography. As a trained engineer he pioneered the use of electronic flash and multiple-exposure photographs, then, in 1938, started doing stories for LIFE magazine. There he revolutionized his art and influenced two generations of journalists. "Time could truly be made to stand still," he recalls in this extraordinary book of prose and picture recollections. "Texture could be retained despite sudden, violent movement." The book includes a fair number of famous Mili pictures doing just that: his own version of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase; the 37-mm cannon shell stopped at one-millionth of a second as it leaves the nose of a fighter plane; Pitcher Carl Hubbell's arm and hand caught in the act of committing a knuckle ball; Ballerina Nora Kaye transformed into a tornado of multiple images during a pas de bourree; Pablo Picasso holding a penlight in his darkened studio, carving a picture out of thin air.

These alone would make a brilliant volume. Mili offers more. Nobody has photographed dance, theater and performing musicians better than he did. His visions of Florence and Chartres Cathedral are almost enough to make a trip to either place unnecessary. With great compression the book also tells the story of Mill's life from the time he emigrated from Rumania and went to M.I.T. as a skinny teenager, to the journey back to Bucharest 48 years later to visit his mother's grave. Free of the technical gush that sometimes afflicts photographers exposed to print, Mili offers brief notes on the art of portraiture, illustrating them with dramatically juxtaposed pictures of famous people, among them Pablo Casals, Adolf Eichmann, Jean Paul Sartre, Alfred Hitchcock and Henri Matisse. Perhaps the best is Sean O'Casey, a perfect proof that color film does not always destroy the power and the mood of a portrait.

The old Irish playwright, almost blind, appears in his shabby, shadowy room, warmed by a dark red blanket, looking like some sort of sweet yet cranky prince of the mind and spirit. On the basis of his memoirs, that is just what Gjon Mili appears to be.

--By Timothy Foote

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