Phil Trager’s fine art photography transcends traditional concepts of motion and stillness by Mark Lapin Published: June 6, 2006

Phil Trager is a total original as a fine art photographer, having built his celebrated career by focusing on two subjects that appear contradictory — the motionless, man-made world of architecture versus the fluid forms and faces of dancers.  In his latest book, FACES, (devoted to close-up portraits of dancers), Trager explains that he photographs buildings and dancers with the same goal: ‘The person may not look as he appears in the photograph; similarly, a photograph that I make of architecture may not literally depict the building.  A successful photograph, like a successful poem, should be transcendent, not merely literal or illustrative.’

Trager’s life story is also a tale about finding a unique way to overcome contradictions and achieve success.   For many years, Trager was torn between his dream of being an artist and the reality of working as a lawyer in a Connecticut office.  He ‘followed his bliss’ as the new–age cliché goes, but he did it the old fashioned way with hard work, decades of perseverance, and the support of a loving partner, his wife Ina, who believed in his gift and inspired his work.  She also pulled him back from the path of a crazed taxi-driver when he was photographing Grand Central Station in New York, and helped him lug cases of equipment and buckets of chemicals around the grounds of Renaissance villas in Northern Italy.

Trager’s forty years of fine art photography will be recognized this year by a traveling exhibition and the publication of a retrospective book containing 150 plates, 66 illustrations and over 300 pages.  An elite group of critics and scholars in art, dance and architecture have contributed essays to the volume, which will be published by the German firm Steidl, one of the world’s most prestigious publishers of fine art photography books. 

Trager began to photograph seriously back in 1966.  He was still working as a lawyer and would put in 45 or 50 hours per week (some of it spent daydreaming about the subjects he wanted to shoot).  When he was done with the day’s lawyering, he would rush out of the office to devote another four or five hours to photography.  Adding to the long hours was the fact that Trager has always done his own printing, often listening to Bach while performing his darkroom alchemy.  That double-life continued all the way up to 1992.  By that time, Trager had published six books of photography.  All earned high awards and critical acclaim.  His patience with the law had also been exhausted.  ‘So just stop!’ his wife Ina advised him.  He hasn’t looked back since.

In the early years of his career, Trager gained support and encouragement from Lee Witkin, who had left his ‘day job’ to open a photography gallery in New York where some of the country’s best (if not necessarily most popular) fine art and documentary shooters exhibited their work.  Trager really broke through for the first time with the 1977 publication of his Photographs of Architecture, Wesleyan University Press. Depicting (or perhaps not depicting) historic buildings in his native Connecticut, the book was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, Book of the Year for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and finalist for the Grand Prix at the International Festival of Photography in Arles. 

Trager says that he has been ‘very book-oriented’ throughout his career and usually spends three-to-seven years on a project.  He followed his study of Connecticut with a book on the architecture of New York (Philip Trager: New York, 1980).  Since the Big Apple has been portrayed in so many media by so many talented people over so many years, finding an original perspective must be a monumental challenge.  Trager was apparently more than equal to it. 

‘The personality with which Trager shows each building derives from his emotional response to it…distinctly personal vision,’ wrote critic Lynne Elton in Art in America.  The reviewer for Camera 35 commented, ‘After viewing Phil Trager: New York, it seems difficult to behold the city without a newly discovered sense of awe and appreciation.’  The response of the New York Times was to give the book another Editor’s Choice award.  Trager would go on to create equally celebrated and original volumes on the villas of Palladio (an architect of the Italian Renaissance) and the city of Paris.

Trager’s first book of dance photography, Dancers, came out in 1992.  Working with performers from several top companies, he shot the dancers outdoors, at times in the nude, in the midst of their choreographed movements.  The reviewers were once again enthralled by the originality of his approach and several compared this project to his earlier books.  ‘If architecture is frozen music, dance must be fluid architecture,’ wrote Owen Edwards, one of the most influential voices on modern photography.  ‘So it’s fitting that Philip Trager should have taken the eye that has made him a great architectural photographer and trained it upon the evanescent structures of modern dance,  The results are haunting and strangely moving.’