Selective Vision

...Attitudes have changed and Willie and Joe have become anachronisms, replaced by new archetypes (possibly even more schizoid) like the combat soldier with peace sign and headband...

...As the novelty wore off and materials improved, photographers began to combine the two approaches...

...At that time, photography had already begun to lose its innocence, but the split between the commercial and the creative camps had not yet become an abyss and therefore it is easy for us to pronounce Atget an artist...

...I wanted to show something of the agony, the suffering, the terrible confusion, the heroism which is everyday currency among those men who actually pull the triggers of rifles aimed at other men known as 'the enemy.'" So wrote David Douglas Duncan in 1951 in the preface to THIS IS WAR!, a collection of his photographs...

...He does, after all, show us one kind of truth-that it takes the imminence of death to bring out genuine comradeship between men -and while his successors may mean better than he does, their work also speaks of the excitement and drama of killing, of stimulation that is simply not available in civilian life...

...But I am not convinced that the new antiwar propaganda will accomplish any more than Goya did with his etchings, over 100 years ago...

...But most significant of all is their disinterestedness-a quality that can probably never again be achieved in photography...

...Mainly, however, what his exhibit illustrates is the use of photography for tasteful propaganda, as well as an artist's failure to deliver the goods as promised...

...Reed's picture is a fine example of tabloid spontaneity made memorable by esthetic Tightness, however fortuitous...

...But even its most efficient practitioners still seem insecure about their status, the value of their subject matter, indeed the medium itself...

...This uncertainty is apparent in their efforts to bolster their work with tricky effects that serve only to recall the excesses found in any issue of Popular Photography...

...John Szar-kowski, Director of the Museum's Department of Photography, captioned the show, and quotes opinions from two artist-photographers...

...Naturally, these "artists" look down on the journalists, refusing to recognize that their medium simply doesn't lend itself to art for art's sake, and conversely, that photojournalism only succeeds when it contains esthetic values of some sort...

...Duncan is no exception...

...and a few portraits of celebrities...

...It was then rescued by the American photographer Berenice Abbott, who introduced it to this country during the '30s...

...Though bland and wholesome, Duncan's pictures are not only unquestionably handsome, but they demonstrate the camera's insidious ability to abstract from reality and nevertheless be representational...

...The Museum of Modern Art is currently running an exhibition of 40 studies of trees, each approximately 7x9 inches, by the turn-of-the-century photographer, Eugene Atget...

...I bring up these points in full cognizance of my own inability to confront horror...

...I would be unable to look at, much less review, an exhibition that told all the well-kept secrets of combat...

...Ray's is an excellent description of Atget's intent, even if he does suggest that genius can be attained by an effort of will and a pull on the bootstraps...

...Perhaps it should be heartening to know that a younger generation of photojournalists is exposing the ghastlier side of war, bringing about a change that is noticeable even in the mass circulation magazines: Life, a few years ago, ran a blunt color shot of a tank covered, like the Raft of the Medusa, with bodies...

...Like all of Atget's subjects, his trees have been seen by the human eye rather than a miraculous lens, and one would guess that this quality has endeared him more to painters than photographers...

...Duncan's current show at the Whitney Museum (through August 27) features black-and-whites of the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts...

...Duncan's real fault is not that he is dishonest, or bellicose, but merely that he is out of date...

...Today, we continue to separate reportage from art photography, yet in fact the latter now expresses mainly artistic pretensions...

...Instead, they require close study...

...This last point can be illustrated by a shot of Sheriff Rainey taken during his arraignment in connection with the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi...

...In the pictures displayed at the Modern, Atget for the most part focused on the tree trunk and root structure, showing only part of the upper vegetation...

...His long exposures, with their rich range of textures and tones, convey a strong feeling of peaceful stasis...

...There is something touching about the precision and completeness of Atget's oeuvre...

...Snapped by Bill Reed for Life magazine in 1964, it featured Rainey seated in court with a deputy, their authoritative bodies bulging out of the picture plane...

...Despite the nostalgic attraction of their sepia color, the prints, retiring in their modesty, do not make an immediate impact...

...In 1968 he branched out quite successfully into television, taking stills of that year's political convention for NBC and providing a running commentary as they appeared on the screen...

...Photography is no longer a debatable candidate for consideration as Art, having now found its own niche as an art-at least in the minds of its audience...

...color renderings of exotic landscape, with and without figures...

...We are all familiar with the going cliches: proletarian vitality, seamed old age on park benches, maternity and the child, nature festooned with dew-drops, etc...

...True, the odd corpse appears now and again, and there is some Rembrandtesque rendering of field surgery at a safe distance...

...Atget was born in 1856...

...But the general impression is of a bunch of guys at war games: Pretty soon they'll stop, clear up the messy landscape and go on home...

...Besides being valuable records, the pictures are as profound and serene as some Japanese prints they occasionally resemble in their sophistication of design...

...All of the works are large and impeccably printed...

...Best known as a Life magazine battlefield photographer, Duncan has also produced books on art, most notably a study of the lifestyle and work of Picasso...

...Evidently he earned a living selling his documentary pictures to museums and artists, but his work remained unknown until after his death in 1927...

...Resembling as it does, our own period, the fin de siecle may have been as difficult to live in...

...At least it was media-free, however, so that what an artist projected was his work rather than a hustled public image...

...Early in its existence, photography was divided between documentation and pictorial statements about life...

...The sheriff, his cheek swollen with a plug of tobacco, is an exquisite symbol of jubilant racism, caught at the critical moment...

...Or that the spirit has reached newspaper picture editors generally, who now regularly feature photos of children aflame from napalm and of burly GIs pulling in some tiny Vietnamese for interrogation...

...The photographs are really descriptions of different species' styles of growth...

...Art photographers have developed a rigid esthetic that results in totally symbolic work, or merely personal propaganda...

...Atget was a good documentary photographer, but is misclassed as anything else," said Edward Weston...

...Engrossed in recording Paris scenes, architecture and nature, Atget appears to have been a man with no opinions, much less an ax to grind...

...He had been a sailor and unsuccessful actor before turning to photography?through which he wanted to make "a collection of everything artistic and picturesque in and about Paris...

...Duncan gives us exhaustion, picturesque growths of beard, soldiers crawling about a ravaged countryside, "boys" after their first baptism of fire, the perky black kid with playing cards tucked in his helmet, a cigarette pause-that-refreshes against a stormy sky, and so on...

...Although a photojournalist of some 30 years' standing, he remains capable of such technical boyishness as, for example, a prismatic Picasso...

...Man Ray, on the other hand, was more generous, granting Atget genius, albeit of an accidental kind: "His purpose, which was modest and utilitarian, was transformed into an artistic problem without his volition, through the agency of a wholly intuitive sensibility...

...And as the Museum's permanent collection in the adjoining Steichen Galleries attests, they are immediately recognizable, even among the works of Atget's gifted contemporaries...

...Interestingly, Duncan, despite his affection for certain aspects of war, may not really be very different from the younger, franker, antiwar photographers...

...In short, hardly anything of what war does to a man...

...As for the mentally and physically maimed, if Duncan is to be believed, then who are all those men serving life sentences in Veterans' hospitals...

...We rarely see the people being saved from Communism in Korea and Vietnam, and never the enemy...

...The detail that, for me, makes the print unforgettable is the line of grinning citizens in back, a supportive chorus linking the two men and establishing Rainey in his habitat...