In 1982, Paul Giambarba photographed writer and illustrator Edward Gorey leaning against his fireplace with his arms folded, a formidable figure, not unlike one of the Edwardian characters in his books.
The portrait, one of a group that Giambarba took for CapeArts, a magazine he published from 1981 to 1983, will be exhibited at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis from April 5 through May 18.
The exhibit features black-and-white photographs of well-known figures, like David McCullough and Gorey, and though they were taken for the magazine, they are more about art than journalism. Although Giambarba says he would never compare himself to Arnold Newman, one of the leading portrait photographers of our time, who was known for his environmental portraits, there is some reference to him in Giambarba’s approach. His photographs are carefully composed images, using the body language and facial expressions of the subject, as well as the environment, to make a viable statement about the individual’s personality and work.
In the 1981 photo of artist and potter Harry Holl, we find him in the wooded area in Dennis where his Scargo Pottery has been situated since the 1950s. Holl, wearing shorts and sandals, is sitting on a tree stump alongside a sculpture of a curvaceous female nude. He looks out at us, yet seems to be focusing on something in the distance – maybe a new idea for another art form.
Edward Gorey, famous for the macabre sensibility and quirky wit in his illustrated books (“The Unstrung Harp,” “The Doubtful Guest” and “The Gaslycrumb Tinies,” to name just a few), was an eminent figure on the Cape for many years. Gorey’s deadpan humor and sense of mystery is delightfully illustrated in the opening credits for the PBS “Mystery!” series. He was a likely subject for CapeArts – and probably something of a challenge. To Giambarba, the photo conjures up words that, although not spoken, cry out: “Will this guy ever leave?” Even the cat on the mantel next to Gorey looks ready to escape.
In contrast, the photograph of McCullough is warm and welcoming. Sitting sideways at his desk, the writer, who lives on Martha’s Vineyard and is renowned for his books “1776,” “John Adams” and “Truman,” is smiling broadly. The background is a long line of shelves filled with books.
“You couldn’t miss,” Giambarba says, referring to the place he chose to set up the photo. “He worked in a very small area. And he wasn’t the big shot then that he is now.” When the photo was taken in 1981, McCullough had already written several major books, “The Johnstown Flood,” and “The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge,” but it was a decade before he would win his first Pulitzer – for “Truman.”
Much of the success of a portrait, Giambarba says, is the chemistry between the photographer and his subject. With McCullough, there was “a mutual appreciation.” He remembers running for the plane to return to the Cape while McCullough was “dropping pearls about writing. He’s brilliant.”
“If you like the subject and they like you, you get good pictures. I didn’t come to these jobs as a stranger,” he says, referring to the fact that he had some connection with the people he photographed.
Giambarba has lived on the Cape almost 50 years, in Centerville and now in Mashpee. So while he was publishing CapeArts, he was vitally involved in the arts community and came to know many of the people featured in the magazine.
The circumstance for the Dennis museum exhibition of Giambarba’s photographs is an example of serendipity. When Cape Cod Museum of Art curator Michael Giaquinto was arranging a show of the paintings of deceased Dennis artist Nancy Lee Willcox, her husband gave him a photograph of her, taken by Giambarba.
Giaquinto Googled Giambarba’s name and came up with his Web site and the photographs he had taken. They sparked the curator’s interest. “They resonated with me,” Giaquinto says. “He was recording art history.” The photos represented “a moment with an artist.” They were like “a little freezing of time.”
Prints for the exhibition are spread out on the coffee table in Giambarba’s living room, and each one reveals something vital about the subject. Furniture designer and sculptor Steve Whittlesey of West Barnstable, who uses salvaged wood and other materials to create objects that often strike a nostalgic or amusing note, is photographed lounging on one of his whimsical benches.
Photographed in his studio surrounded by his sculpture, Arnold Geissbuhler, who lived many years in Dennis before he died in 1993, muses over his work.
Furniture maker Dick Kiusalis, whose West Barnstable Tables is known for the furniture it builds out of old wood salvaged from antique buildings and boats, is framed by the rough timbers of his showroom, which is housed in an old barn.
Born in Medford in 1928, Giambarba studied art at the Massachusetts School of Art (now the Massachusetts College of Art) in Boston and with Harold Irving Smith, a former student of Robert Henri and George Luks, prominent painters of the early 20th-century Ashcan School. In portraiture a question that always arises, Giambarba says, is, “Does the painter overpower the subject, or does the subject dominate the painter? It shouldn’t be either. There should be a balance.”
The museum exhibit will be small, about a dozen photographs. “They’re not being hung as art,” Giambarba says modestly, but as documentation, as a record. They’re not tours de force, but they’re not grab shots either.”
The photographs, he says, were taken with available light. He used a Hasselblad or a Nikon.
Giambarba has worn many hats during his long career. When he was still a teenager, he was doing daily sports cartoons for the Boston Herald. He’s worked as a free-lance cartoonist, contributing to Sports Illustrated and other magazines, and has done artwork for book publishers and corporations. He owns Scrimshaw Press, which has published about a dozen titles, mostly children’s books, which he wrote and illustrated. And from 1957 to 1983, he was art director and design consultant for Polaroid Corporation.
These days, Giambarba is focused on putting together family records and photographs into books. Working with old snapshots, which he enhances with Photoshop, and text written by a family member, he designs a book, which he then has published by a print-on-demand company – “the most remarkable invention since Gutenberg,” he says.
“I love a challenge,” he says. “I’m an entrepreneur. Otherwise I wouldn’t jump from one thing to another.”
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