A picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought.— Samuel Palmer
Of the many things to be noted about the book and the exhibition that John Szarkowski has produced for the Museum of Modern Art under the title Photography Until Now, the first is this: the book is without doubt one of the best ever written on its subject, which is the history of photography, and the exhibition is one of the most beautiful that the museum has devoted to the medium. Neither is without significant flaws, to be sure, but given the scale of Mr. Szarkowski’s project—which encompasses the prehistory of photographic thought, going back to Leonardo, as well as a century and a half of actual photographic production—such flaws as it has are not, for the most part, unduly disfiguring.
At least this is true as far as the historical material is concerned. When it comes to the contemporary pictures, however, the exhibition goes into something of a nosedive. While certain reasons for this conspicuous drop in aesthetic quality can be adduced from the way Mr. Szarkowski treats this period in his book—he speaks, for example, of a sense of “a diminished role for photography, even a kind of disenfranchisement”—what it comes down to, I think, is the same pattern of decline that has lately been discernible elsewhere in the visual arts.
That we are now in a fallow period in the visual arts, if not indeed a period of decadence, is not something that the curatorial mind can generally be expected to acknowledge. Yet Mr. Szarkowski comes remarkably close to doing just this when, in the concluding chapter of his book, he says of contemporary photographers that “As with poets and composers, the relationship between their work and their lives has become casual and improvisatory”; and further, that the time has now passed when photographers could really believe that “they had a privileged access to truth and thus to power.” Beside such doleful pronouncements, the claim that “a score or more of photographers are now doing work of vitality and original beauty, under conditions that do not seem propitious” sounds a little hollow, and the exhibition doesn’t do much to support the claim, either.
It is, in any case, for its splendid account of what Mr. Szarkowski calls the “history of photographic pictures,” rather than for its inventory or assessment of current accomplishment, that Photography Until Now commands our admiration. Yet it is important to make a distinction here between the book and the exhibition. About the book, Mr. Szarkowski writes that he has “attempted . . . to sketch out a history of photographic pictures, organized according to patterns of technological change.” This interpretation of technological change is broad enough to encompass, as he notes, “not only . . . the chemical and optical issues often thought of as constituting photographic craft, but . . . methods of distribution of photographic imagery, economic constraints, and professional structures.”
What this means, in effect, is that Mr. Szarkowski has written a social history of photography, and—in my view—a very good one. The exhibition, on the other hand, although divided into sections that conform to the organization of this social history, is more the work of a connoisseur of photographic art than of a social historian. This accounts for the remarkably high level of quality that is sustained throughout most of the historical sections of the exhibition. Where this high level collapses into something else, we can usually feel the intervention of the social historian who cannot resist the temptation to document a development that, whatever its other claims to our attention, is devoid of aesthetic interest. It is only in the interest of social history, for instance, that items such as a population chart from a New York newspaper in the year 1900 or a layout devoted to Mussolini in a 1934 issue of the London Weekly Illustrated have found their way into the company of so many photographic masterpieces.
It is, moreover, the connoisseur rather than the social historian who is responsible for the brilliant installation of the exhibition. Mr. Szarkowski has always had a keen sense of what might be called the dramaturgy of a large photographic exhibition, which in the wrong hands—and with the wrong eyes—can so rapidly degenerate into either an exercise in tedium or a riot of showy effects. In this exhibition he is very adroit at striking a balance between familiar and unfamiliar pictures in a way that illuminates both. He is very good at rhyming pictures that belong together and, where needed, coming up with striking juxtapositions that refresh the eye, foil expectation, and offer instruction as well as pleasure. Mercifully, there is no tendency here to treat the installation as, primarily, a problem in layout design, and thus to treat pictures as mere visual counters in some larger design strategy. In most cases the exact pictorial weight of a photograph is carefully calculated and given the space and the company that are appropriate to its character and its scale.
Again, this connoisseur’s delicacy (if one may call it that) tends to break down in the contemporary section of the exhibition, but there it is often a case of trying to make bricks without the requisite straw. Pictures such as Robert Rauschenberg’s, Andy Warhol’s, and Cindy Sherman’s are so fraudulent and crass in the use they make of the photographic medium that their sheer vulgarity is bound to capsize whatever company they are made to keep. The historical part of the show is not without its own episodes of misplaced emphasis—Mr. Szarkowski seems, for example, to have acquired a sweet tooth for anonymous pictures of early industrial plants that cannot always be justified by the photographic results—but by and large, it is his connoisseur’s eye that remains in control. It was certainly the connoisseur’s eye, by the way, that elected to omit Robert Mapplethorpe from this exhibition—a decision that renders a more salutary and unanswerable judgment on the whole Mapplethorpe controversy than any other I know about.
When we turn to the book Mr. Szarkowski has written to accompany this exhibition, we find it is the social historian who is mainly in command, with the connoisseur usually playing a more ancillary role. About the role of early photography in politics and in the lives of the lower classes, for example, Mr. Szarkowski has some interesting things to say. Writing about Mathew Brady’s 1860 portrait of Abraham Lincoln, he tells us that Lincoln is thought to have considered the popularity of this picture, which was printed in huge numbers, one of the reasons for his election. “The frontier lawyer,” Mr. Szarkowski writes, “who was said to look ‘half-alligator and half-horse’ looks in Brady’s portrait rather more like Gregory Peck. It is not known how many of Brady’s portraits of Lincoln were sold in carte-de-visite form, but the one made by Alexander Hesler the following June was said to have sold more than 100,000 copies.”
He reminds us that the daguerreotype, on the other hand, “found its special function in making pictures for the smallest and most private of audiences—the families of uncelebrated men and women. Daguerreotypists made portraits of millions of people who were unknown beyond their own village, people whose forebears had never before been portrayed as individuals. . . . It is poetically just that the daguerreotype belongs to the century that saw in Western countries a radical expansion of suffrage. After Daguerre the yeoman, and then the peasant and the proletarian, would also have visible ancestors and family histories.”
In Mr. Szarkowski’s account of the nineteenth-century interest in photographing ruins, however, the social historian is joined by the connoisseur of pictorial aesthetics in defining a major genre of early photography. “Of all the surprises that might persuade one to postpone one’s journey,” he writes, “a ruin was the delight that came most naturally to Talbot’s mind.” William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) was, of course, one of the inventors of photography. Mr. Szarkowski continues:
In this taste [Talbot] was altogether representative of the educated classes of his time and place. Ruins were revered both for their meaning and their aspect: both as documents to be read for what they told of the medieval or ancient past, and as embodiments of the picturesque, a word that resists precise definition, but that expressed a taste for the used above the new, the irregular over the geometric, the rough rather than the smooth. The ruin was a central icon to the Romantic imagination, and if, by 1850, the idea had been well worked over by painting and poetry, photography brought to it a new specificity and conviction. And the calotype, which itself tended toward the rough and irregular, and did not look too insistently new, was an excellent tool for the issue at hand.
About many subjects, indeed, Mr. Szarkowski writes with a critical clarity that is admirably unclouded by nostalgia. His judgment of the way photography was used—and misused—in Life magazine properly explodes one of the abiding myths of photographic history:
In 1972 Life closed its doors; many of the other magazines that had supported photo-journalists had already done so, or would shortly. The reason usually given for their failure is the rise of television. . . . But one might say that the magazines had failed on creative grounds before television became a competitor, and that if they had succeeded on those grounds they might also have survived. It is difficult to identify a photo essay from the best days of the experiment in which consistently superior photographs and rigorous writing augment and transform each other, to achieve that new means of expression to which editors, photographers, writers, and art directors paid continual lip service.
What is also a major part of this story, which Mr. Szarkowski does not go into, is the politics of photojournalism in its heyday. The most celebrated photojournalists of the thirties and forties belonged to the left, whereas the proprietors of the mass-circulation magazines they worked for were generally on the right; and this meant that an ideological civil war was endemic to the entire enterprise. I frankly doubt that the history of photojournalism can be entirely understood in isolation from this political conflict.
There is much more to Photography Until Now than can be described here, of course. And, it is also important to take note, it is a major event in John Szarkowski’s own career. Mr. Szarkowski has been the director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art since 1962, and in Photography Until Now— both the book and the exhibition—he has given us both a summary of his thought in this field and a quite specific sense of what he believes the canon (dare one use the word?) of great photography to consist of. There is no one better equipped to essay these tasks than he, and his achievement in Photography Until Now will itself stand as a landmark in the intellectual history of photography.
That it is an achievement attended by a certain air of melancholy is itself a reflection of the situation in which photography now finds itself. With his customary candor Mr. Szarkowski takes note of the degree to which photography has lately taken refuge in the academy and in the art world in the interest of survival, and while he doesn’t offer any assessment of what losses this shift has entailed for photography—losses in quality and in expressive power as well as fundamental purpose—he shows himself to be keenly aware of them. It was certainly bad luck for photography that it attached itself to the academy at the very moment when the academy was itself suffering a calamitous crisis of confidence in its own purposes, and it was a similar misfortune for photography to become so dependent on the art world at a moment when its standards, too, were in a tailspin. But perhaps this is just another way of saying that photography is now, for better or for worse—usually worse, I’m afraid—so much a part of the crisis that the institutions of our cultural life are passing through that it has virtually ceased to have an identity or a destiny of its own. If this is indeed the case, then Photography Until Now may serve to remind us of what this field of achievement consisted of in the halcyon years of its development.
[1990]