`Practical Everyday Places'

I’m attracted to artists who acknowledge their forebears and gratefully take their place in a tradition, whether established and recognized, or cobbled together. Bob Dylan is like that. He can’t sing eight bars without nodding to Muddy Waters or Hank Williams. An entirely new and unprecedented work of art is an impossibility and probably a nightmare. Ezra Pound’s dictum, “Make It New,” supposedly adapted from Confucius, has proven artistically disastrous and resulted in such monstrosities as Maximus Poems, Howl and the Cantos themselves. Instead of fetishizing mere novelty, like children, I would propose: “Make It Good” or “Make It Beautiful.” In his preface to The Quiet Hours: City Photographs (2003), Mike Melman writes:

“These photographs are not my work alone. Many people over a lifetime have helped make them possible: Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Walker Evans, Rembrandt, Eugene Atget, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, Mike Lynch, Wayne Gudmundson, and Alfred Stieglitz are all artists whose work illuminated my path.”

Melman’s humility and taste are refreshing, though I knew only seven of the nine names on his list (not Lynch and Gudmundson). The same humility and taste are apparent in his 70 black-and-white photos of cities and towns in Minnesota, taken between 1983 and 2002. All were shot before dawn, often while snow is falling. I visited Minnesota only once, during the summer, but lived most of my life at the other end of the Great Lakes, in Ohio and New York, and I recognized the nocturnal quiet of his Quiet Hours, and the paradoxical feeling of standing outdoors but feeling as though I were in a room with an unusually tall ceiling. Lights are gauzy in the winter haze and the ground is stone.

Several photos remind me of Cleveland and other cities where I’ve lived. On Page 77 is “Earl Street Viaduct, East Seventh Street, St. Paul, 2001.” Melman faces east at dawn. The sun glows beyond the overpass. Two or three inches of snow, not fresh but refrozen, cover the gutters and unshoveled sidewalks. To the right is the brick-fronted Viaduct Inn (“Food Liquors”). No one walks the street. In fact, Melman (born in 1939) documents a thoroughly human environment without the presence of humans. This is Edward Hopper country, and the absence of people lends poignancy to his scenes. A photograph of three two-story frame houses, titled “West Duluth, 1990,” reminds me of the pictures Walker Evans took in Bethlehem, Pa., in 1935 – the same American sadness. In his introductory essay “Cities of Shadow and Light,” Bill Holm, the poet and native Minnesotan, recognizes this particular shade of dolor:

“Real artists…are interested not in commercial marketing and promotion but in opening the human eye to the unexpected truth and beauty of reality. Mike Melman is such an artist, and these seventy images intend to show you a world you had not imagined to be so full of beauty. He does not, however, mean to cheer you up. These pictures risk invoking two small adjectives that strike a chilly fear into the American sensibility: old and sad.”

I think Holm is being a little hard on the “American sensibility,” which is, after all, a very complicated and contradictory creation, and may not even exist, but he makes up for his trendy generalization later in the essay:

“There’s a danger of nostalgia when looking at these seventy haunting pictures, but we should, as the artist did, beware falling into it. These are not pictures of the good old days or of some lost Shangri-la of refined taste and quality buildings. These are practical everyday places, used places, streets where ordinary people lived and grain elevators, railroad yards, and factories where they carried their lunch buckets to work. What these photographs give us is insight into the pulsing real life of cities where we had not previously thought to look for beauty.”

Holm goes on to identify Melman’s “ancestors in American art and literature,” especially Whitman and Sandburg. From “Song of Myself” he quotes:

“The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot soles, talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses
on the granite floor.”

Holm makes the claim, probably correct, that “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is “likely the first and still the greatest American poem that celebrates an ecstatic urban experience.” He also links Melman to Hart Crane and Crane’s friend, the photographer Walker Evans. The first edition of The Bridge, published in 1930 by Black Sun Press, had a photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge, shot by Evans, on the cover. This is a shrewd linkage on Holm’s part, and be rightly calls Evans “Melman’s real artistic grandfather,” though he also cites Stieglitz and Hopper, and quotes the latter on the quality of the Melmanian light he found in Paris:

“The shadows were luminous – more reflected light. Even under bridges there was a certain luminosity. Maybe it’s because the clouds were lower there, just over the housetop. I’ve always been interested in light.”

So is every painter and photographer. My favorite picture in Melman’s collection is on Page 43: “Knauer’s Meat Market, Main Street, Austin, Minnesota, 1996.” For a middle-of-the-night photograph, the scene is remarkably bright. Evans and Hopper, who shared a love of commercial signs and vernacular architecture, would have loved it: “Lutefisk,” “Baltimore Oysters,” “Ribs,” “Choice Steak Sale,” “Low Milk Prices,” “Shrimp” – sheer poetry.

Other artists have come to mind as I’ve been enjoying Melman’s work, especially John French Sloan and some of the other Ashcan painters, photographer and novelist Wright Morris, and Sherwood Anderson, whose earliest works were set in Chicago: Windy McPherson's Son (1916) and Marching Men (1917). Another distinctly American artist, a composer, also came to mind and took me by surprise. Since I first looked at The Quiet Hours, I’ve been slipping and calling it Quiet City, after Aaron Copland’s beautiful 1940 composition. The haunting trumpet part, in fact, is perfect accompaniment for some of Melman’s darker, sadder street and river scenes.