THE PHOTOGRAPHER, HIS WIFE, HER LOVER: Who’s zoomin’ who? |
The staid BBC goes tawdry and tabloid with Paul Yule’s “noir” documentary, The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover, which is getting eight screenings at the MFA, December 15 through 30. This is Yule’s second telling of the life and times of eccentric American photographer Winston O. Link, who died in 2001, and much of the new movie is a messy, ugly postscript to his comfy 1990 portrait, Trains That Passed in the Night. The earlier movie celebrated the art world’s discovery of Link at age 70, when MOMA and sundry art dealers went scrambling for the nostalgic, large-format photos of Appalachian country folk and steam engines puffing down railroad tracks that he did back in the 1950s. The new movie quotes from the old: 1990 shots of the stoop-backed, white-haired gent walking down to a dock, on the arm of his devoted wife. What Yule didn’t know then: Conchita Mendoza, 25 years younger than her husband, had taken a lover, Edward Hayes. And she had legal control of his estate. As soon as he printed one his old-time masterpieces, his honey was, it seems, out the door selling it, and keeping the money.
Yule returned to England and moved on to other projects. But what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Link brought him back to the USA. On BBC assignment. He was to do the first jailhouse interview with Mendoza, who at the end of a scandalous trial in Westchester, New York, had been packed off to prison for stealing, and hoarding, invaluable artwork done by her now-infirm husband. The Links had had a major falling out, and Mr. Link had gone to the authorities insisting that his wife be arrested. His claim: he’d looked out his window and caught the greedy lady shoving 1500 of his vintage photos into her car trunk.
Did she or didn’t she? The trial verdict was obvious after Link, the only witness to the crime, broke down crying on the stand about the beautiful 1950s of his photos. Someone who was at the courthouse recalled how the whole jury “wanted him as their grandfather.”
In The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover, Yule seems divided between spinning a sordid, sexy tale (replete with ripoff Philip Glass music) and trying to get the true story the second time around. In prison garb, Mendoza is afforded lots of screen time to plead her innocence, but she’s coarse and unpleasant. She’s hard to believe, especially when she makes ghastly claims about Link’s sexual proclivities: he, in his mid 70s, luring home grody strangers from the Port Authority Terminal to come on to his wife. As for the grandfatherly Link, we learn from Salem Tamer, his best friend for 50 years, that he was a racist elitist and unbearably temperamental and paranoid. Did he fake out the jury? “You meet him and think, ‘Oh what a sweet guy,’ ” Tamer laughs about the pal he punched out several times for odious behavior. “Work with him a month and then say that!”
