Jonathan Becker: Lost Time

Somewhere between the last guest's arrival and the moment the evening tips into something no one will quite remember in the morning, Jonathan Becker took the picture. For four decades he worked that narrow band of time, the hour when the powerful and the glamorous loosen just enough to become readable, and Lost Time gathers the results into a retrospective that spans most of a career. The title leans on Proust, and the debt is earned; this is a chronicler of a social world that is always, even mid-pose, in the act of disappearing.

The lineage is worth knowing. He came up in the orbit of Brassaï, absorbed the example of Lartigue, and carried both sensibilities into the pages of Vanity Fair, where getting into the right rooms was the entire currency of the job. What lifts the pictures above ordinary society coverage is that the eye behind them is never quite dazzled. The camera stands inside the party and slightly to one side, watching the performance of importance with real affection and a faintly raised eyebrow.

Consider the range of who sits in these frames. Writers and heiresses, deposed royals and Hollywood fixtures, the occasional figure whose fame has since evaporated entirely, all photographed with the same even attention. He does not rank them by wattage. A duchess and a nightclub owner get the same clear-eyed treatment, which quietly flattens the hierarchy the pictures otherwise document and leaves the viewer to sort out who mattered and why.

The strongest frames hold two things at once, the glamour and the joke of the glamour. A grand host swallowed by a grander room. A tycoon dwarfed by the art he paid for. A famous face caught in the half-second after the public smile clicks off, when the private calculation shows through. He photographs status the way a good novelist writes it, alert to the one detail that gives the whole game away.

Technically the work is quieter than the lives it records. Available light wherever the room allows it, a composition that lets the setting do half the talking, a steady preference for the telling gesture over the flattering angle. He is not chasing the definitive portrait so much as the revealing situation, and the distance between those two ambitions is what keeps the images from curdling into publicity stills.

His way with a subject seems to have been patience disguised as ease. The people in front of him look comfortable, unposed, mid-sentence, which is the hardest register to reach and usually the sign of a photographer the room has stopped noticing. He earned that invisibility over years, and it shows in how little the frames strain for effect. The result reads less like access granted than like access dissolved.

The pleasures are not only sociological. Across the sequence the recurring faces age, the fashions date themselves, the parties blur into one long party, and an accidental history of taste assembles itself in the margins. Read quickly, it is a gallery of names. Read slowly, it is a study of how a certain kind of power liked to be seen, and of the small betrayals a camera commits against anyone who forgets it is there.

As a retrospective, the edit is generous without sprawling. The sequence trusts accumulation over argument, letting decades pile up until a worldview emerges from the sheer quantity of evenings. It is the kind of volume that gives more on the third pass than the first, because the early plates only gain their weight once the later ones have taught you how to read them.

There is a fair objection waiting here. A lifetime spent among the rich and the celebrated produces, in the end, a record of the rich and the celebrated, and a viewer hungry for a wider slice of the world will not find it in these pages. The milieu is narrow by deliberate choice. Inside that narrowness, though, the looking is patient and deep enough that the boundary stops reading as a limitation and starts reading as the subject itself.

What lingers is a problem of proximity. He got near enough to these lives to see straight through them, yet near enough that the seeing depended on staying welcome. How much can a photographer finally tell about a world that keeps the door open only as long as the telling stays fond?