Untitled (Collaborators, St. Tropez, France) after 1944

Constance Stuart Larrabee made this gelatin silver print, sometime in the mid-20th century. It’s a tightly cropped image; we can see a group of people standing very close together, and the details of their clothes and faces are sharp and clear. The photograph has an amazing tonal range. The light is soft, but there are deep blacks, bright whites, and all these shades of grey in between. It’s almost sculptural, the way the light models the forms. I keep coming back to the faces in the picture. Some figures have shaved heads, and they stare right at you with these piercing eyes, while others look away. It feels so immediate, like you’re right there with them, but there’s also a distance created by the formality of the composition and the way the subjects are posed. Larrabee had a strong eye for design, which makes me think of someone like August Sander. The image suggests a kind of unsentimental humanism, a very particular way of seeing the world and using photography to document it.