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Light Readings
A Photography Critic's Writings, 1968-1978

by A. D. Coleman

Editors' Choice, Photography Year 1980 (Time-Life Books)

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From the reviews:

second edition, 1998
first edition, 1979

Second edition, revised and expanded:

"A. D. Coleman has been an influential figure in American photographic culture for many years. His reviews in the New York Times, the Village Voice and more specialist journals and his interventions in public debates on the need for media education, the policies of publicly funded institutions and other issues, together with his lengthier essays on particular figures, historical movements and genres, have contributed to the emergence of a photographic discourse per se. In fact, it could be argued that . . . his career is both co-extensive with and a sign of photography's coming of age . . . In this respect, his early work, first collected in Light Readings in 1979, and now reprinted by the enterprising University of New Mexico Press with a preface by Shelley Rice, was especially significant. It bucked the then-prevailing tendency to venerate only 'straight' photography at the expense of pictorialism and other forms of 'manipulation' in the medium. And it both promoted rigorous aesthetic standards and insisted that photographs are -- and have always been -- cultural documents inscribed with some of the assumptions of their times. Some photographic critics have the capacity to analyse single or groups of images in such a manner that you truly see how and why they function. Coleman's gift is more a matter of openness to all kinds of work, for placing it accurately, and for judging its significance. . . . The essential value of this approach is that it is cognisant of the nature of photography as a mass medium; we need means of redaction (a favourite Coleman term) to begin to understand it. His essays are one such means."

-- Mick Gidley, American Studies

" . . . Since the late Sixties, when he found his niche as the iconoclastic photography columnist with [the] Village Voice, Coleman has been the very personification of the critic as agent provocateur. His seminal role as a photography critic with a conscience was enshrined in 1979 with the publication of Light Readings, an anthology of polemical and critical writings from that period (now republished by University of New Mexico Press . . . with four new essays."

-- Creative Camera (England)

"[W]hile some may take issue with aspects of Mr. Coleman's oeuvre of humanist criticism, none would deny that as this country's first and foremost photo critic he has made a singular contribution to the field, broadening both the definition and discussion of photography.

"A collection of his writings from 1968-1978 called Light Readings has long been a must-read for anyone serious about photography, and has now been reissued in an expanded second edition. . . ."

-- Taylor Holliday, The Wall Street Journal

"In terms of sheer quantity, few can match photography writer A. D. Coleman. . . . [I]n just the last year and a half, three new collections of Coleman's previously published writings were brought out, including Light Readings, a reissue of his classic 1979 text."

-- Jeffrey Kastner, ARTnews

First edition:

"Mr. Coleman's book will help a public interested in photography to better understand the medium, and those engaged in its practice to better understand themselves."

-- Jack Manning, New York Times

"In the decade just past, photography shot from the periphery of the art world to center stage -- and here, in revealing sequence, are the comments of the one critic continuously on watch. . . . By no means unassailable but always plain-spoken and pointed, these 80-odd pieces convey what the excitement's been all about."

-- Kirkus Service

". . . Coleman has been one of the most assiduous, energetic and intelligent critics of photography during this decade of expansion, and also at times one of the most opinionated and infuriating. . . . Light Readings is the book to read if you want to find out what . . . has been happening in photography during the past decade."

-- Hilton Kramer, New York Times

" . . . the book doesn't read as a collection of immutable or inarguable opinions. It resembles more a diary tracing the development of one very passionate writer's thoughts."

-- James Cassell, Washington Post Book World

"Coleman is an excellent critic and an outstanding writer on a subject often lacking in serious dialogue."

-- Tim Waters, L. A. Times Book Review

"Coleman . . . has carried on a tough-minded conversation with the medium and with himself. This collection of his writings shows the chronological growth of his belief in the medium, a belief almost never limited by mystification or shallow obsessiveness. The reader will learn a lot from this book and return to image-watching with cleaner eyes."

-- Booklist

"Coleman is a superbly articulate art critic specializing in photography . . . In this collection of articles, the writer pungently appraises famous and obscure photographers. He lambastes the stodgy attitudes toward photography in museum and academic establishments and airs his partisan views on contemporary social conflicts which photography seems to reflect with more direct intensity than do other art media . . . in a highly readable and urbane style."

-- Publishers' Weekly

"A. D. Coleman is among the best photography critics writing today. This volume brings together over 80 of his best essays. . . . Coleman's criticism is informed by a consciousness of the role of photography in society, and this leads him to com ment insightfully on the commitment of the artist, the politics of the art world, and the need for a new and consistent vocabulary with which to discuss photography. . . . Recommended for academic and public libraries."

-- Choice

"[In] the best essay in Light Readings, 'The Directorial Mode,' Coleman builds an argument around the process by which photographs are made. Coleman deemphasizes the idiosyncracies and mannerisms of particular artists: he makes the diversity of photographic styles less daunting and more clearly understandable. 'The Directorial Mode is a major contribution to the criticism of photography precisely because it insists that photography is not painting, precisely because it insists that photography must be understood through an analysis of the procedures by which photographers make photographs. 'The Directorial Mode' is ideology in the making."

-- Jed Perl, Art in America

"Every one of them evidences a rare intelligence, a careful scholarship, a skillful pen, and an independent view. . . . this book preserves for us the extraordinary early achievement of a critical career that merits a long life."

-- Milton Meltzer, Library Journal

"Coleman battles hard for recognition of blacks (no critic -- white or other wise -- has so championed the cause of blacks as either subjects or as photographers), blasts censorship (he reported in 1973 that the new head of the ad hoc censorship committee in Clarkstown, New York, is blind), dismisses Fhoto-Realism as a venal grab on the part of the artists, trounces the pretentious and unsympathetic, and tongue-lashes dealers and artists who claim for conceptual artists the 'discovery' of modes that photographers have used for years."

-- American Photographer

" . . . as far as I'm concerned, there are few, if any, photography critics working today whose writing is as intelligent, as extensive and as durable as his."

-- Shelley Rice, Soho Weekly News

"This is the best book of thoughts on photography I've found -- not photography in the ruminative Platonic limbo where it was so often and so easily speared by Susan Sontag, but as a living (and loved) cultural tissue. A. D. Coleman puts photographs in the grip of a trenchant, lively, serious journalism, the sort brought to other arts hy Pauline Kael (movies), Walter Kerr (theater), Arlene Croce (dance) and Wilfrid Sheed (books). . . . If you want to get a sense of what photography is now about, this book will mostly tell you, and in a way that lays out the main lines of advance and scrimmage, the breastworks of defense and retaliation."

-- David Elliott, Chicago Sun-Times

"Coleman does indeed criticize images and photographers without mincing words, but as demonstrated in this collection of reviews, he possesses a breadth of sympathy embracing many visual avenues."

-- Natalie Canavor, Popular Photography

"This is a book to read if you are interested in spending a few hours listening to and debating with someone who is intelligent, informed, well-spoken, and deeply concerned about photography. . . . What Coleman could hardly say himself is what a good writer he is. The prose is remarkably smooth. You almost never have to read a sentence twice, even though Coleman delights in shapely language, in crafting original phrases."

-- Zoom

"This book is essential reading for all students of the medium."

-- Photographic Book Catalogue of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House

"[Coleman's] writing . . . is of greater use for teachers of photojournalism or a history-of-photography class because there are few phases of the medium which escape him."

-- Journalism Quarterly

"Reviews and articles by an outspoken critic and militant anti-establishmentarian."

-- Editors' Choice, Photography Year 1980 (Time-Life Books)

"Coleman's apologia -- his essays which deal directly with contemporary photography's problems as a discipline and as an art form with a new-found legitimacy -- are, by far, the finest writing in the book. 'My Camera in the Olive Grove' alone is worth the price of admission."

-- Victor Gardaya, Northwest Photography

-- Jed Perl, Art in America

"For those already familiar with Coleman's writing, the book will serve as an overdue anthology of some of the most cohesive writing on photography ever produced. For those unfamiliar with Coleman, it offers a fine introduction to the medium."

-- Del Zogg, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle

"A collection of this very opinionated and controversial critic's writing in recent years. Bound to stir a reaction whether you agree or not."

-- From "The Essential Photographic Library," in The Photographer's Almanac, by Peter Miller and Janet Nelson (Little, Brown & Co., 1983)

"Collects pieces from the preceding decade by a leading photography critic, full of insight and pungent independent judgment."

-- Steven Gilbar, in Good Books: A Book Lover's Companion (Ticknor & Fields, 1982)

"A critical assessment of contemporary photography exhibited in New York during the 1970s. Coleman's broad social perspective brings much insight to bear on his discussion."

-- George M. Craven, "The Art of Photography: A Basic Library," Friends of Photography Newsletter

"Throughout, Coleman's approach to and understanding of the medium (including its visionaries and philistines) demonstrates a rare commitment and intelligence. He is a critic who is less concerned with imposing his own revelations than clarifying the importance of his subject. . . . An entertaining read and an informed journey through contemporary American photographic history."

-- Amateur Photography (England)

"Each [essay] is worth reading and the sum total impressive."

-- Creative Camera (England)

•

From the book:

. . . Reporting on a talk [John] Szarkowski gave in late 1975, I noted that he "defined briefly the various stances a curator can take toward a medium, dismissed most of them as beneath his consideration, and announced that the highest and most rigorous form of curatorship was autocratic, elitist, and appropriately limited by the curator's own ideas and taste patterns, the narrower the better."

This is not in itself objectionable. The medium is diverse, vital, and energetic enough to sustain a wide span of critical and curatorial stances, including Szarkowski's. Were he the director of photography at any other contemporary art museum, I would not be writing this letter, and indeed might be looking forward to the recurrent challenge of severing the bonds with which his esthetic inhibits the medium's full development.

But that is not the situation at all. In this case, the curator exercising those prerogatives in that fashion is, in essence, the sole hand on the helm of the most powerful institution in the world of contemporary photography. There is a great deal of work -- much of it important, even seminal -- which he has rejected out of hand (or ignored, which amounts to the same thing). He has discriminated not only qualitatively but generically. And the decisions made on the basis of such prejudice have demonstrable, long-term, substantial effects on the medium's evolution. Those effects are detrimental (I would go so far as to call them deadening); they extend far beyond the walls of the museum itself.

Therefore let us not pretend that we are merely discussing the philosophical ramifications of "one man's opinion" in a democratic context. We are in fact dealing with an unhealthy concentration of power, wielded by a man whose approach to the responsibility thereof is a coy denial of its existence.

That denial is, in effect, an abdication of that responsibility. It epitomizes Szarkowski's inadequacy to the task at hand, but it also forces us to acknowledge that the problem goes beyond the specifis of his shortcomings. The ailment we have diagnosed is that very concentration of power itself, power which would exist to be used and abused by anyone who headed your department of photography. That power is an instrument of policy for which the museum itself must be held accountable.

The ailment, then, is the museum's. So, consequently, is the problem; and so, presumably, is the solution. In that regard, I would offer the following proposal.

The time has come for a fundamental restructuring of your department of photography.

The first step in that process should be the dividing up of the department's power and responsibility between at least two full-time curators of approximately equal rank. . . .

-- from "On the Subject of John Szarkowski: An Open Letter To the Directors and Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art"

. . . The vernacular language with which the act of photographing is commonly described is an accurate indicator of our cultural assumptions about the medium and tne motivations of its practitioners.

Certainly it is not coincidental that such terms as snap shot (whose origin is in the language of hunting), grab shot, blitz, and picture-taking are commonly used in reference to photographing. They describe acts of attack, acquisition, and possession. Photographers, both amateur and professional, often seem to harbor fantasies of thamselves as heroes, talking about their work as though they were soldiers or gunfighters. Diane Arbus spoke ecstatically about feeling as though she were crawling on her belly through a battlefield, and is quoted in the posthumous monograph on her work as saying, "God knows, when the troops start advancing on me, you do approach that stricken feeling where you perfectly well can get killed." Tod Papageorge has written, "A craftsman uses only the sharpest, most dangerous tools."

Papageorge is wrong, of course: A true craftsman uses whatever tool is most appropriate to the task at hand. And the self-aggrandizing nature of his and Arbus's statements is obvious: The hypothetical risks involved in photographing are not only self-inflicted but -- on the larger scale of things -- surely negligible. Yet this apparent need on their parts -- and on the parts of so many others -- to describe themselves as pioneers and hunters is not only touching but revealing. . . .

-- from "Taking Pictures: Photography and the Territorial Imperative"

. . . . . . What is most noteworthy about Susan Sontag's brief book of essays, On Photography, is regrettably its central deficiency as well. Its significance is that it is a book concerned with ideas about photography that has attracted a comparatively wide audience. Its failure is that that extrinsic phenomenon is its main achievement. . . .

I regret very much that Sontag sidestepped the issue she pretends to address, because it is a vital one and merits her full attention. The effort she put into this book was sufficient to create the skeletal structure on which a meaningful body of photography criticism could be built. Instead, she opted to create a circular system of thought that does not lead the reader to further thinking about the medium but suggests that the case against it is closed, and that does not encourage any encounter with the medium, either directly in the practice of it or in response to its primary objects, the images themselves.

Whatever one might call that -- style, rhetoric, polemic -- it is surely not criticism. In the final sentence of her final essay she writes, "If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well." The act of criticism begins with the application of such theoretical constructs as fill this book to that world of images, both to test their validity and in search of the infrastructure for such an ecology. But that is where Sontag stops.

-- from "Susan Sontag: Off Photography"

•

Publishing information:

Light Readings
A Photography Critic's Writings, 1968-1978
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). Second edition, revised and expanded.
Introduction by Shelley Rice.
ISBN: 0-8263-1667-0 paper, $19.95.
Out of print.