‘On the Road with a Rollei in the 50s,’ by Robert McCabe
Robert McCabe’s first trip to Greece was «life-changing,» he recounts in his introduction to «On the Road with a Rollei in the 50s,» a collection of his photographs. He had set out in 1954, intending to make a short version of the Grand Tour. The trip was truncated – it took him another 40 years to get to Egypt – but it prompted return visits and a lifelong connection with Greece. The photographs record the sea voyage from New York to France, Italy and Greece, as well as later trips to Greece and scenes from the Antarctic. McCabe grew up, he says, «with a camera in his hands.» He used to hang out in the darkroom of the picture newspaper that his father worked for in New York City and his earliest photographs were gritty news shots. Later, while studying photography in western Massachusetts, he branched out to explore a wider range of themes, of which this book offers a broad sample. Among the early photographs taken in North America, a shot of Anne Kirby in St Jovite, Quebec, stands out. Seated at the wheel of a car, she is framed both by the window and more narrowly by deep shadow contrasting with bright sun. McCabe captures her quizzical, determined expression as she looks back over her shoulder. The pictures he took in Paris and Italy on the way to Greece have almost documentary value, recording familar cityscapes and timeless monuments set off by long-vanished street scenes that speak eloquently of the 1950s. In 1959 McCabe went to Antarctica, and a few pictures convey aspects of that vast, white expanse and its inhabitants, most memorably the rear view of a penguin, looking for all the world like a stooped man in an old overcoat. The majority of the photos are devoted to Greece. Inevitably, some portray places and customs that have since been made over-familiar from postcards and travel brochures. Yet there is a captivating freshness about McCabe’s images of Greece. What links his black-and-white photographs, apart from the photographer’s obvious technical skill with light, composition and texture, is a sympathy with his subjects that never sinks into sentimentality. That spark between photographer and subject shines out from the cover photo of three young girls encountered on an Epirus road in 1961. Writing in the introduction about the most successful photographs, McCabe states: «The most successful photographs represent a form of poetry and go well beyond the depiction of a person, an object, or a place, or even a satisfying visual composition. Just as a short poem can create a vivid emotional experience, so too can an image. Such photographs can evoke in our souls much more than the direct visual content of the photograph.» Many of the pictures here make just that emotional connection. This handsome bilingual Greek-English edition, translated into Greek by Athina Cacouri and published by Patakis, also has a Greek title, «Sto dromo yia tin Ellada» (On the Road to Greece). The book, which has a preface by James L. Mairs, publisher of Quantock Lane Press and editor-at-large for W.W. Norton and Company, sprang from an exhibition of McCabe’s photographs at the Rizareios Center in Monodendri, Ioannina.
