Snapshots of Stone

THE FOGG BILLS Walter Rosenblum as a "documentary photographer," and on the surface, this appears to be correct. "Documentary Photography" is a pretty well- characterized genre and the photographs in Rosenblum's retrospective run the gamut of the themes that documentarians have traditionally found to be significant--poor peasants in Haiti, Spain and Mexico, slums in New York City, war, exuberant life in European parks.

But the subjects of the pictures obscure Rosenblum's accomplishment as a photographer. These photographs are not particularly concerned with a coherent description of their subjects or with any sort of journalistic rendering of events. Instead of the sociological or surrealistic approach which is traditional among photographed people and human places with a reverence for them as pure visual objects. His scenes are scenes and subjects seen as inanimate as a nature photographer's.

Rosenblum has used neither gesture nor context to give meaning to his photographs: stripped of surface drama, their strength has to come from a sort of photographic "impression," a symbolic "equivalence" inherent in the forms of the picture. Rosenblum has tried to "document" the beauty of life, more than he has its particulars.

At their best, these photographs have a wondrously subtle tension to them. On one hand, they seem absolutely dumb in conception. Their composition is so casual-seeming that it is as if their frames enclose not a work of art, but a transparent "peephole" to the physical event that Rosenblum recorded. They are almost like the leaves of a family snapshot album, so direct is the affair they seem to engender between the viewer and the viewed.

But these pictures also have an eternal quality that belies their seeming randomness Rosenblum has found a sort of sculptural elegance in his subjects that seems to hold the pictures to the gallery wall and prevent any quick dismissal of them. It is as if that "transparent" peephole is also completely opaque-full of a mysters that could not be ciphered. He has turned his snapshots into stone. His portrait of a "Haitian Woman," for example, is so casual that it could be a passport photograph and yet so full of a unity of expression that it is ultimately as impenetrable as it is gripping.

Yet with all their formal elegance and highly-keyed tones, these pictures seem ultimately somewhat artificial. They are quite marvelously photographed, but they are also anachronistic. The great photographers of nature Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams--have been able to make photographs full of the tonal richness and graphic simplicity which typifies Rosenblum's work, but Rosenblum's pictures of the "humanscape" seem to lack the sort of passionate involvement with their particular subject that the "nature scapes" of Weston, Strand and Adams had with theirs. Perhaps it is as simple a matter as the fact that human faces are "supposed" to come out gray rather than black or white if a photograph is properly exposed. Such graphic portraits are not accurate. Or perhaps the human psyche allows a sort of romantic treatment of nature at the same time as it requires a more cutting and detailed treatment of humanity itself.

A third possibility, though, is that Rosenblum's work is different from the tradition and prejudices of photography. We may possibly have to look at it with unbiased eyes in order to find out whether in fact he has accomplished the "synthesis of the 'documentary' and the 'aesthetic"' for which Paul Strand lauds him in his introduction to the show. This sort of respect for Rosenblum's work is what prompted Fogg photography curator Davis Pratt to hold the show. Yet regardless of whether Rosenblum's work will eventually seem to be innovation or aberration in the tradition of photography, the pictures are worth seeing.