Photography of the Future

HENRY HOLMES SMITH, professor of photography at Indiana University, friend of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, renowned avant-garde photographer, and an explorer and experimenter in his own photography, once warned against too quickly dismissing the unconventional and unfamiliar photograph as a mere gimmick. "Ultimately," he wrote, "each of us may find, to our surprise that our intolerance often rests on ignorance and our misunderstandings, our accusations of obscurity, unintelligibility, or falseness spring from too narrow a view of a medium that offers an intensity of expression and a range of images much greater than is generally seen." Smith's warning is one each visitor to the Fogg's newest exhibit, "Photography Unlimited," should heed.

The show consists of one hundred and five photographs, mixed media collages and photographic sculptures which explore and demonstrate the enormous variety of printing processes and manipulative techniques now available to the photographer. The forty-four artists represented--eighteen of whom are women--are all American and nearly all in their twenties or early thirties.

The only characteristic which really unites all the artists, however, is an irreverence toward the accepted rules about what a photograph can or cannot be, can or cannot do. In an effort to express their private and often idiosyncratic views of modern life, these artists apply paint, beads and hair to their pictures, cut them up and stitch them together. They explore the artistic potential of old techniques--like gum bichromate, solarization, and cyanotype--and new chemical processes like polaroid and 3-M color. They borrow images from television and porno-magazines, create scenes in the darkroom which were never seen by a camera's eye and photosensitize anything they can get their hands on--including plexiglass, fur and linen. As Aaron Siskind, a documentary photographer whose work later became much more abstract, said, "...as the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted--shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean."

IT IS THIS disregard for "what the world looks like" that many visitors to "Photography Unlimited" will no doubt find disturbing and even offensive. Those who admire the documentary realism of Edward Weston, Eugene Smith and Paul Strand--artists who sought the "perfect negative"--may find Karen Truax's handcolored photographs of surrealistic landscapes or James Friedman's mixed media collage made of multiple images of a woman's face, a hammer and a broken window, irritatingly enigmatic and uncommunicative.

But the great achievement of "Photography Unlimited" is that it challenges the viewer to question and analyze his or her previous assumptions about the nature of the photographic image. Experimentation for the sake of experimentation is necessary to the continued vitality of any art form. It is through the willingness of photographers like those whose works are now hanging in the Fogg Museum to question and re-examine old standards that new standards and aesthetics will be formed.

This is not to say that all the works in "Photography Unlimited" are good. Many display a gratuitous use of technique that cannot make up for a lack of interesting subject matter, composition or concept. James Hajicek's cyanotype triptychs of boring, lifeless western scrubland are boring, lifeless photographs, and Mark Harper, who obviously worked very hard at making three-dimensional constructions of fabric, etched silver and silkscreened glass etchings, achieves results that smack too much of kitsch and too little of real conceptual innovation. Happily, only a few works in the show share these flaws.

ONE OF THE most interesting features of the Fogg exhibit is the diversity of artistic issues and problems covered by the works. Several artists--numerically the smallest group--are primarily concerned with exploring purely formal qualities of design, texture, color and light. Both Linda Conner and Paul Kohl blur and soften the contours of the scenes they photograph and emphasize contrasts of light and dark--Conner in order to turn commonplace scenes into quiet worlds of peace and timelessness, Kohl in order to create beautifully balanced compositions of glowing geometric shapes.

Women, also a minority within the entire exhibit, have produced some of the most imaginative works in the show. Many women seem to be turning back to the traditional female skills of sewing, quilting and handcrafts and combining them with photography as a way of expressing their sense of their past roles and their future artistic identity. Wendy Calman's "Flying Franklin Lightning Show" and "Ben and Me" are whimsical constructions, combining photography with puppet theater, that gently parody our national obsession with our Founding Fathers while Eileen Cowin creates both a visual pun and a commentary on women and society by juxtaposing an ad for peaches with a picture of a corseted woman.

By far the largest number of artists represented in "Photography Unlimited" use darkroom effects such as distortion, unnatural color, and sandwiched transparencies to explore the realm of dreams and private fantasy. Photography, which has so long been used to mirror the physical world, is here being used to mirror the individual psyche. Many of the images thus created-especially Robert Heinecken's "Cliche Vary/Fetishism" and Ellen Land-Weber's large picture of a small child and a pink house being swallowed by vegetation--are striking and sophisticated images that haunt the viewer and remind him that there are few completely private thoughts. More often, however, because we are usually shown only two or three works by a single artist, the images remain enigmas about whose meaning we can only guess.

"PHOTOGRAPHY Unlimited" is one of those rare exhibits in which the half-realized work, or the ambitious failure, deserve as much attention as the polished masterpiece. Perhaps many of the artistic paths being forged by the photographers chosen for the show will prove to be blind alleys--but it is more likely that visitors to the exhibit are being given a small glimpse into the future of photography by those who are creating it.