Flaming Out of Recognition

"PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT Art, but there is art in photography," declared Man Ray about 1930. The Whitney Museum of American Art should have heeded his warning.

Ray was one of several artists to explore the "creative" potential of photography and his warning, almost fifty years old now, prophesied the most important developments in photography during those ensuing years. "Photography in America," however, the Whitney's attempt at a retrospective of the medium in this country, seems to have ignored what Ray's insights meant. This show is the Whitney's first photo show after a long period of vehemently refusing to show the medium, and one is almost tempted to hope that it will also be the last.

Symbols of this show's problems abound. It was mounted by a museum committed to the plastic arts of painting and sculpture and directed by, of all people, that museum's former curator of painting. Not too surprisingly, the show basically tries to prove that photography is nothing more than "painting with light."

This, of course, was exactly what Ray warned against. If a photograph is to hang on a wall as the equal of a painting, it has to hang as a photograph and a photograph alone, not as an attempt to use photographic tools to produce a painterly result. The face of the real world is simply too recalcitrant and ugly for a camera, stupid, fast instrument that it is, to realize a creator's dream.

This gradually became clearer over the course of the medium's history. The first "art" photographs were conscious imitations of paintings. In 1880, Henry Peach Robinson and O.G. Rejlander tried to use multiple imagery--painstakingly assembled in the darkroom--to create "historical" pictures, portraying in one vast tableau all the heroes, villains, and valiant deeds of great events. They more or less failed, but for thirty years, the so-called "Photo-secession" or pictorialist school produced soft-focus, dreamy images with such titles as "Madonna with Child" or "Blessed Art Thou Among Women."

About 1930, however, led by two men who are among the greatest photographers that America has ever produced, Edward Weston and Walker Evans, photographers turned en masse from pictorialism, began to relish the sharpness of a focussed photographic image, and became less formalistic in their work. By not understanding these men, or any that followed them, Robert Doty has essentially presented us not with the major retrospective of the 1970s which he intended, but with a history of photography that stops in 1930. Instead of advancing the history of the medium ten years, he has taken it back fifty.

The pictures he has assembled simply are not the best photographs which have been taken, and not infrequently the photographers he has exhibited have not been the most important photographers working. The most glaring example is the exclusion of both Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander from the show. In almost anyone's estimation, these two men were the most important photographers of the 1960s, whether they are to be judged by the quality of work that they have produced, or the quantity of imitators that they have spawned. Their work, especially Friedlander's, is typical of good modern photography in that it is understated, snatched out of a landscape and relishing real textures and complexities--not shots of mere abstract forms against neutral backgrounds, or of ideas that could be expressed in less than the proverbial thousand words.

PHOTOGRAPHS THAT are just "nice" or which attempt to shock or "tell us something" are inherently weak; the photographic sensibility is at its height when it picks out the realities which are known to be significant to our lives and gives them coherent visual expression. This "Flame of Recognition," to use Nancy Newhall's description of Edward Weston, is what lies behind any great photographer. The absence of Friedlander, Winogrand and their co-workers from the Whitney's show is emblematic of Doty's failure to comprehend this, but his miscomprehension of what makes for good photography also shows up in his failure to hang the best photographs by several of the "classic" photographers. Doty's treatment of Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz, both closely associated with the "pictorialist" school, is good, but the pictures by Weston and Evans which he selected distort their work. Both men represent the birth of modern photography, but by trying to cast them as "hard focus pictorialists" he takes all the edge out of their radical innovations. Weston is represented with several abstractly formal pictures from the early 1930s (e.g., cross-sections of an onion and of a Nautilus shell), but with only one landscape, and none of his final landscapes from Pt. Lobos. Evans, in turn, has several portraits of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men--vintage, but only one of the streetscene/building shots which constitute most of his work, his best work, and the work which he set out to do in 1929 when he started photographing. In later years, his work did turn towards portraiture, with his "Subway portraits" and "Streetcorner Portraits," both very important work in terms of the education of younger photographers--Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, etc.--but there again, none of these pictures are included in the show either.

Overall, the show has to seem capricious. Even though there are 259 pictures in it and it takes up an entire floor of the Museum, it has failed to cover the subject, and it has introduced many superfluous elements. Picking one group that has about fifteen pictures in the show, we can see more clearly just what sort of havoc Doty has wrought with what is generally accepted photographic history. Of the members of Magnum, the photojournalists' cooperative that nursed most of Life's best talent from 1930 to about 1960. Robert Capa, generally conceded the greatest war photographer ever to live, is missing completely: so are Elliot Erwitt and Constantine Manos, both of whom have had one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art; Danny Lyon, whose photoessays have been widely acclaimed, has only one picture in the show. But Dennis Stock and Charles Harbutt, by no mean's Magnum's greatest talents, have several pictures apiece. And so it goes through the show. Much of the color work that Doty picked belongs on a calendar rather than a museum wall, and there is a slew of just-plain-bad attempts at portraiture and "social documentation."

Every disaster has its benefits, however, and this particular show is not an exception. There is a wonderful chance at the Whitney to see photographs and photographers which are not well-known, if for the moment you ignore that almost all of them deserve to be obscure. Among the better examples are several photographs by Edward Weston from his very early pictorial period. These are quite rare--largely because later in his life he so disliked the pictures that he destroyed the negatives--but quite interesting to someone who knows mostly Weston's other work.

Furthermore, the very earliest photographs in the show, even though they are only a small fraction of the pictures hung, actually are a good selection of early American photography. The Civil War photographs of Matthew Brady, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, and the Western landscapes of Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, and Timothy O'Sullivan--all in original prints--are wonderful. Some good early American photographers have been left out, but it almost seems worthwhile to lose them in order to be able to see ten 16 x 20 inch contact prints from O'Sullivan.

Photography is a fad right now, and so the show's catalogues will probably sell well, despite their $25 price tag. But if photography is to become more than a fad and be recognized for the serious aesthetic potential which it does have, its new proponents will have to develop a far better sense of the medium's history and possibilities than Doty and the Whitney demonstrate in this show.