The Silvery Moon Photographing the nude with Lucien Clergue. by Chris Davis “It’s like going fishing — you need a guide,” Jack Kenner says. “People are always coming up to me, wanting to know how to take better pictures, and most of the time I don’t know what to tell them.” Kenner, whose work with Memphis in May and the Memphis Zoo has netted him numerous awards and made him perhaps the most recognizable photographer in town, has hoped to educate both would-be photographers as well as potential collectors by bringing a series of world-class photographers to Memphis. “And not just photographers,” he is quick to point out, “but photographers who are also great instructors.” To help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel, Kenner brought in Micha Bar-am, whose photographic works, collected by museums worldwide, document the brief and turbulent history of the Jewish State. He has also featured Shig Ikeda, whose black-and-white photos of subject matters as mundane as a turkey roasting can conjure up images as dreamy and nightmarish as any of the surrealist painters. And now, on December 11th-12th, anyone who has ever been interested in photographing the nude in natural light (not to mention nudes who have ever wished to be photographed in natural light) will have the opportunity to work with and learn from a true master Lucien Clergue. In addition to the planned workshop, Kenner is now showing a fairly broad selection of Clergue’s work at his studio and gallery on Court, behind Overton Square. Though famous for his nudes, which are wonderfully represented in this collection as voluptuous mythological figures, as well as faceless topographic landscapes, it is the portraiture and bullfight images that make this particular show so worthwhile. Clergue was acquainted with Picasso and Jean Cocteau, and there are several portraits of his well-known friends. The shots of Picasso, while technically fine, only seem exceptional because they happen to be of a famous painter, but the pictures of Cocteau are quite remarkable. Cocteau w/Self Portrait shows the mad poet standing poised to erase a chalk drawing of himself in a gesture of artistic suicide, while Jean Cocteau dans le Testament finds the dapper old gentleman resting, one hand on his heart, the other holding a cigarette to his lips. Paper cutouts of eyes placed on top of his actual eyes create an eerie effect — that of a corpse taking a smoke break. Raul Aranada is a close-up shot of a matador staring down a bull. The bullfighter’s eyes are a smoldering combination of spite and desire, more like the eyes of a ballroom dancer in mid-tango, than those of a man about to kill or be killed. Niemo II aux banderilles showcases an acrobatic picador defying gravity, his pick held triumphantly in both hands above a snarling beast that doesn’t look like it plans to go down easy. In these frozen moments, Clergue has come closest to achieving his goal of defining “life, death and that no man’s land in between.” Here the life he seeks to show seems vast and intense, with its opposite so near and so powerful. Arlequin and Acrobate de la Grand Recreation are both pictures of waifish young boys dressed as circus performers standing amid brambles and ruined buildings. The photographs are somewhat derivative of pieces like Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques and Young Acrobat on a Ball, but they do have a life of their own. The young performers are frozen, staring big-eyed at the camera. Their rough environments hardly appropriate to performance oppress them, and one is left with the apocalyptic notion that somewhere, just outside of the frame, there is a terrible train wreck, that these miniature clowns are the only survivors of a once-grand circus. Though Clergue works with natural light, L’homme Cheval du Testament d’Orphee shot on the set of Jean Cocteau’s film Testament to Orpheus has all of the earmarks of expressionism. A jagged bit of light peeks through the ruined window of an ancient building illuminating the modern graffiti on the wall below. The picture’s subject, a terrifying creature half-man and half-horse stands in the shadows — a giant dwarfed by his environment. It is Peter Schaffer’s sexually charged drama Equus captured in a single image, and it is a fine performance at that. Along with the gallery show and the workshop, Clergue plans to show slides and deliver a lecture on Picasso. “There have been so many lies,” he says of his close friend of 20 years. “People only know the lies. They know Picasso the monster. I want to show the generous man I knew. I was 18 when I saw him for the first time, and when there was no one else who could do it, it was Picasso who convinced me that my photographs were good.” You can e-mail Chris Davis at letters@memphisflyer.com. Lucien Clergue’s Photographic Nude Workshop 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, December 11th-12th, $460 Jack Kenner Gallery, 2094 Court (722-8877)