On Art
BLOCH, BRADLEY W.
On Art AWIDE-ANGLE VIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRADLEY W. BLOCH In 1802 Humphry Davy, an English chemist, published an article that described attempts to record an image permanently on...
...I wasn't proposing that these were art," he said years later of the photos...
...The photographer, of course, is asking the question of the craft she practices...
...Some early practitioners, though, rebelled against the idea of the camera as essentially a recording device...
...Szarkowski, by placing the picture at the end of the show, makes itatriumphanttonic chord, arhetorical question that we want to answer with a resounding yes...
...But with the invention of the halftone process, pictures could be converted into a system of minute dots burned into copper or zinc plates and reproduced on printing presses as easily as text...
...Photography was an art, they said, and it should look like art—which to them meant an allegorical painting...
...The 1880s delivered yet another technological boost to photography...
...Before long mass-circulation publications like Vanity Fair, Vogue and of course Life were eagerly exploiting this development...
...Thus Henry Peach Robinson's Sleep (1867), depicting two girls resting on an oversized bed, is a virtual catalogue of painting conventions, with abundant velvet and a moonlit sea framed by a leaded window...
...European photography was by this time exploring less refined territory...
...Bythe 1880s, the wet-plate method gave way to the use of gelatin emulsions that allowed plates to be prepared in advance and the camera itself to shrink in size...
...One of a series of photos that pose her family and friends in various domestic settings, the picture shows two young women on a lazy weekend sitting around a table covered with construction paper, scissors, glue, and a dog-eared copy of the Sunday New York Times...
...Viewing the MOMA exhibition, one gets the impression that photojournalism and advertising/fashion photography petered out sometime after World War II...
...Once he approaches contemporary times, fewer and fewer examples are drawn from outside the realm of art...
...Happily, they receive fuller treatment in the catalogue for the exhibition...
...Clearly photography has moved beyond its original mandate as a flawless mirror of nature...
...Manufacturing companies, once limited to carefully arranged shots of finished products, started to record the various stages of production...
...Pictures like Safety Device on a Milling Machine and Protective Clothing for Workers in the Furnace Room, both made at the Krupp steel works in Germany, do more than give us a glimpse of labor conditions at the turn of the century...
...the show degenerates into a predictable survey of museum pieces...
...The first few galleries reveal the limited interests of mid-19th century photography: satisfying the large public demand for portraits, chronicling various archeological or architectural wonders, capturing outdoor scenes in a way that made good on photography's claim to be "the pencil of nature...
...Perfection, or at least the crude approximation that would signal the birth of photography, did not occur until 1839, but even before then the debate was set: How much of photography is art, and how much is science...
...Whether the subject was Egyptian pyramids or slumbering girls, however, that creative process was a cumbersome one in the beginning because the negative was made on a chemically treated glass plate that had to be used within 10 minutes of its preparation...
...the photographer is free to create on both sides of the lens...
...The history of photography from the mid- '50s to date is largely formed by various attemps to break free from those confines...
...Photography Until Now, curated by Szarkowski and on exhibit at MOMA until May 29, reflects his wide-open approach...
...By changing course at the end, however, Szarkowski missed an opportunity to score a significant curatorial coup...
...She was undoubtedly trying to be friendly and enthusiastic...
...Paul Martin, an Englishman who wrote of the "indescribable thrill" of taking pictures unnoticed, took two such furtive photos of a woman raking seaweed along a shore in 1893...
...This is a somewhat chancy strategy in an art museum setting...
...The pictures are arranged chronologically...
...Szarkowski writes with commanding authority and dry wit...
...His survey of photography's first 100 years exposed us to a wide range of its uses, from sweeping landscapes to prison mug shots...
...Our appreciation of traditional "high art" photography is renewed, and we gain a deeper understanding of the many different avenues explored by photography's early pioneers...
...Yet in their own stilted fashion they contributed an essential insight: Photography may be a mechanical process, but it is not confined to what is "real...
...For the first time we notice photography showing inklings of the detached, alienated sensibility that has become so prevalent in our own day...
...Still, in the frozen moment Klein captures we regard her differently: She appears by turns kitschy and demonic...
...Closer inspection reveals that the newspaper is turned to a pair of articles about the American Craft Museum, one of which bears the headline, "...But is it Art...
...Since editors favored clear dramatic images, the style dominated much of American photography...
...As it is, Photography Until Now is a competent and worthwhile show...
...Mounted on the occasion of the craft's sesquicentennial, the show takes in everything from the work of classic photographers like Eugène Atget and Edward Weston to x-ray images and slow-motion studies of animal locomotion...
...masterpieces can get lost under an avalanche of eclecticism...
...The show similarly scants photographic experiments by the Constructivists and Dadaiste...
...Considerable time is spent on photography's initial decades, when its history reads like a chemistry textbook and its applications were largely "useful...
...The result was photomontage, a wonderfully messy and raucous genre, where an urban landscape might b e rendered as a kaleidoscope of edifices, and political enemies as predatory animals in suits and ties...
...It is disappointing that Photography Until Now devotes relatively little attention to the photomontage...
...William Wegman creates adorable yet bizarrely contrived studies of his Weimaraners...
...After seeing the photo change an innocent gesture into a grotesque act, you will think twice before smiling for the camera again...
...It will certainly become a standard reference alongside the history of photography published in 1949 by his predecessor at the MOMA, Beaumont Newhall...
...Those who continued to look upon photography primarily as a documentary or scientific tool also took advantage of the mobility offered by the dry plate...
...For while they had provided a large audience, they tended to keep American photography within the narrative tradition dictated by editorial demands...
...with a hand-held camera—for many years called a "detective camera"—they could be surreptitious, too...
...Photographers could now be more spontaneous...
...But I think they're relevant to art the way a dictionary is relevant to literature...
...In his view, the artistic vision involved in making photographic pictures is conditioned by the technological context—by refinements in chemistry and optics, as well as such factors as economics, professionalization, and the methods of distributing the finished product...
...many leading monteurs, like John Heartfield, saw the propaganda poster as an art form...
...Indeed, the exhibition's only glaring weakness comes near the end, when Szarkowski retreats to a narrow and rather bloodless version of the contemporary scene...
...That technological advance had a dramatic effect on artistic style...
...Until then, photographs could only be reproduced chemically in a darkroom from the original negative...
...Nevertheless Szarkowski pulls it off...
...Szarkowski's catalogue, in fact, is a considerable achievement...
...It is easy to criticize the pretentiously romantic offerings...
...Klein wasaphotojournalist, and even an aggressive picture like Moscow carries the reportorial aura of that profession...
...Back in 1969, Szarkowski put on a controversial show of bank robbery photos taken by automatic security cameras, entitled One-Eye Dicks...
...Most of the examples from these movements are relegated to a single wall, sandwiched uncomfortably between Steichen and Irving Perm...
...One wishes he had brought the same perspective to his present production...
...At the end of the exhibit, we come to a large 1987 color photograph by Tina Barney...
...In more recent years, photographers without a journalistic background have expressed themselves in less conventional language, but the alienation remains: David Hockney fractures a face into a cubist collage...
...John Szarkowski, director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), has long held that these two components cannot be truly separated...
...their very existence reveals a telling confidence in industrial progress...
...he is one of those rare scholars who can poke fun at atopic they regard with reverence...
...If inretrospectmuchoftheir work seems more propaganda than art, the technique nevertheless stands as an important attempt to transcend the painterly tradition in photography, flying in the face of the sanctified images that dominated American pictures...
...One reason the great picture magazines fell into gradual decline during the '60s may be that many photographers saw them as having already outlived theirusefulness...
...The curator is right to emphasize the blossoming of photography as an art...
...In William Klein's Moscow (1959), for instance, a woman relaxing in a park gives us a freshfaced smile...
...There is an obvious explanation for her activity: She probably used seaweed for cooking and had gone out to collect some after noticing that her stocks were low...
...They attracted some of the most talented artists available: Edward Steichen was the chief photographer at Condé Nast, and W. Eugene Smith worked at Life...
...When the process was perfected, he wrote, it would prove to be "as useful as it is elegant...
...The compositions were often put to blatantly partisan uses...
...But Martin's photographs strip her actions of that intent...
...On Art AWIDE-ANGLE VIEW OF PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRADLEY W. BLOCH In 1802 Humphry Davy, an English chemist, published an article that described attempts to record an image permanently on light-sensitive paper...
...Weston's famous nudes, for example, retain the studied, glamorous quality found in the slick magazines, and Stieglitz' shots of Georgia O'Keeffe look so elegant as to be carved in marble...
...Unfortunately, in making this point he has robbed Photography Until Now of consistency and balance...
...Particularly in Germany and the Soviet Union, the photographic image became an element to be arranged at the artist's whim...
...Moreover, by letting us view her without her consent they give her an anonymity that makes her Everywoman, while our voyeurism reduces her to an object...
...What has emerged is a deeper version of the displaced feeling caught by the early hand-held cameras...
Vol. 73 • March 1990 • No. 5
