From Amazonian Indians to Australian cowboys, Peter Lavery's images capture humanity at its most exotic. But is there a whiff of cultural arrogance here? No, says Robin Muir, simply a beautiful record of a fast-disappearing world
The remarkable documentary work of Peter Lavery gives new and resonant meaning to the great American curator John Szarkowski's observation about the triumphs of those who "are mercenaries during the week, doing their best work at weekends". For many years now, Lavery has been at the top of his profession, a celebrated advertising photographer, always in demand. His new book of mostly ethnographic portraits, Of Humankind, taken during breaks from assignments, is arguably his best work and at least the equal to his collection Circus People seen on these pages several years ago.
His photographs are not perhaps what one might expect of anthropological documents. He has not labelled them cold-bloodedly like a museum taxonomi tst might. They aren't exercises in the formal documentation of tribes. He hasn't given us details to differentiate one from another: no painstaking inventory of spears, jewellery, or tribal dress. Nor has he listed their idiosyncrasies and traits. Rather, he says: "I am in agreement with those artists who hold that the human heart is seen through the face." As he writes in his afterword: "I was not going to be sidetracked by the trappings, but was out to capture the simple and essential human character that lay under the strange, colourful exterior."
Lavery has a keen sense of his photographic heritage and has been an early enthusiast for the rediscovered process of platinum printing. A favourite photograph is the Victorian purist Frederick Evans' Sea of Steps, a gleaming platinum print which hangs in his London house. "The whites," he says, "are ethereal, the blacks go on for ever." And not out of Lavery's range is the sensibility of all those pioneering Victorian traveller-photographers who brought back haunting documents of those they chanced upon in far-off lands. Lavery's iridescent pictures of Huli warriors and Yawalapiti tribesmen remind us of Henri Cartier-Bresson's remark about photographers dealing in things which are continually vanishing and which no contrivance on earth can bring back.
Lavery's friend the late picture editor and writer Bruce Bernard,
a modest and brilliant man who avoided ostentatious
displays of admiration for a series of well-paced, silent noddings, wrote
this of him: "It would take a really great photographer, an Andre Kertesz,
to surpass what Lavery has done." Praise, believe me, comes no higher.
The Xingu and the Yawalapati are lucky to have him as their silent recorder,
their likenesses shimmering for posterity in an alchemical mix of silver
and whatever other precious metals it may take.
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