THE MARK OF AN ARTIST

Miami Herald, The (FL)
THE MARK OF AN ARTIST
Author: GENE WEINGARTEN Herald Tropic Editor

The story has been told of the reporter for The Chicago American who went to cover the Spanish Civil War and sent back a dispatch about a town that had been butchered by Loyalists. All that remained of it, he wrote, were "half a dozen adobe huts and half a hundred hounds."

Back in Chicago his copy editors, guardians as they are of grammar and style and brevity, dutifully changed this line to: " . . . six clay houses and fifty dogs."

This story is newspaper lore. I retell it here not to disparage copy editors, who are a dandy bunch of people. (They're kind of stiff and weird, but likable just the same, sort of the way one likes a pet reptile. I am just joking! Ha! Ha! I'll bet I'll get this column returned to me tomorrow, all marked up with weensy little nit-picky copy editor corrections!)

My point here is that the copy editors, adhering strictly to rules, screwed up his story. They turned something that was art into something pedestrian.

Here's where it gets sticky, though: What was better about the adobe hut line before they got their hands on it? It's hard to explain. It sounds better. The words somehow carry a feeling of desolation. They move you.

And that's the tricky thing about art, whether it be prose or painting or photography. What distinguishes the truly artistic from the mediocre is often something so subtle and subjective it can't be described, it can only be felt. Like the line about the huts and hounds, it often breaks rules. Consider the photography of Mary Ellen Mark.

I first met Mary Ellen last year, at a conference of magazine editors. The Tropic staff barged in late for lunch, as is our custom, and the only seats available were at a table where one woman sat alone, forlornly. We introduced ourselves, and she introduced herself, and thus we learned we were lunching with one of the finest photographers in the world. She was to be the featured speaker.

Mark Ellen Mark got to talking with Philip Brooker, our art director, about the sorry state of photojournalism in America, about how magazines aren't willing to do serious stories any more, about how she regrets that she has to make most of her money doing fluffy, sappy assignments like shooting movie stars, about how she would be happy to work for far less than her ordinary fees if she could just find a magazine with a soul, and that was the point at which Philip nearly kissed her.

Check out the pictures in this magazine. They break a lot of rules, rules like "don't cut off a person's head," rules like "don't have people pose stiffly." These pictures would drive a copy editor crazy.

As with the hounds and huts, I can't really tell you why these 14 pictures are so special. I know only this: Taken together, they capture something, some basic truth, about this town.

And they move you.

And that's the mark of an artist.

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR
Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1986 The Miami Herald