[This is the complete text of the keynote address delivered to a symposium organized in conjunction with the inaugural Chicago Photographic Print Fair, held at Columbia College, Chicago on Friday, September 14, 1990. It has a somewhat convoluted genesis and backstory.
The section below addresses the Sam Wagstaff collection of photographs, which in June 1981 ended its three-year national tour (subsidized in part by the National Endowment for the Arts) at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, where Wagstaff had served as a curator of paintings and sculpture from 1961-68. This is a slightly revised version of a lecture I delivered at the Wadsworth Atheneum in the spring of 1981, based on exhibitions from the collection presented in Hartford and New York City, and on the catalogue to those showings, A Book of Photographs.
At the time, I taught criticism, history, and theory in the undergraduate Dept. of Photography, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Subsequent to this lecture in Connecticut, our department invited Wagstaff to speak to our students and faculty in the department’s guest-lecture series — a presentation I missed, due to a scheduling conflict. Over drinks with department chair Tom Drysdale following his talk, Wagstaff urged him to fire me, on the grounds that I was “a Marxist.” Drysdale chortled as he conveyed this to me shortly thereafter.
In its present form, combining my assessments of the Wagstaff Collection and the Bunnen Collection, this article first appeared in print in the March 1991 issue of Camera & Darkroom Photography, and subsequently in the March 1994 issue of the Danish journal Katalog. This is the first of two parts. The second installment will appear shortly. — A.D.C.]
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Beyond Wagstaffism:
Building the Photography Collections of the 21st Century (a)
What was widely heralded as the “photo boom” of the 1970s will eventually be seen as a watershed in photography’s development as a public form of creative activity.
For a while, it seemed impossible to open the most unlikely publications — Time, say, or the Wall Street Journal — without learning of some new “record” for the field: a record number of galleries and museums displaying photography; a record number of published monographs by photographers; a record number of magazines and newspapers specializing in or incorporating photography criticism; record auction prices for daguerreotypes, for nineteenth-century prints, for major twentieth-century work — even for that less than rara avis, Ansel Adams’s “Moonrise,” known to exist in at least 900 variant versions.
The impact of all this frenzied activity on the collecting of photography was tremendous. New institutional collections were initiated, and existing ones expanded, at a pace that precluded system or forethought. Afflicted by the same variant of tulip fever, private collectors bought according to the latest fads, the day-to-day inventories of dealers, or their own idiosyncracies. Somehow the pertinent Biblical injunction — with all thy getting, get understanding — never came to mind.
Then came the ’80s, the decade just now ending — one that none of us seem inclined to decipher and most would prefer to simply sweep under the carpet. For the purposes of this talk, let me summarize it by saying that while the market for photographs became erratic and intermittently soft, and the “photo boom” ended, neither photography as a vital medium nor the collecting thereof terminated with it.
Chicago Photographic Print Fair logo
At decade’s close we’ve had record prices set at major auctions in New York last spring; new museums, archives, and public collections of photography are opening up around the world; Stephen White’s collection has sold for an astronomical figure to the Tokyo Fuji Museum; there is hardly a gallery or museum trafficking in contemporary art that did not exhibit photographs, even if those who made them often avoided the title of photographer; and Robert Persky’s newsletter, The Photograph Collector, recently trumpeted that according to its “TPC Comparative Auction Index” — based on the going price for a selection of blue-chip vintage prints — collectible photographs as investments had far outstripped the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the previous ten-year span.
The reason I’ve sketched this brief account of recent trends is to indicate the context in which the next phase of photography collecting and curatorship will be manifested. For I believe — and events such as this symposium bear me out — that we are witnessing the birth of a new phase of photography collecting, the emergence of a new generation of collectors.
This phase, and those who will shape it, will be by necessity more sophisticated than those who preceded them. More and more collections are being initiated with an eye towards some ultimate goal beyond the private pleasure of the collector: exhibition and/or publication, sale and/or donation to a museum, school or research institution. The well-conceived and well-tended photography collection has become as elaborate and demanding an undertaking as its equivalent in any other medium. This must lead the intelligent curator or collector to place forethought above impulse, if for no other reason than that sheer whimsicality is no longer affordable.
We don’t yet have a full-fledged tradition of collecting in photography as we do in the other visual arts — the medium is still too new, the formal collecting of it a comparatively recent phenomenon. So it’s not surprising that most photography collectors to date, even those whose holdings are quite extensive, have based their acquisitions more on their own likes and dislikes than on any system or theory of unification. Nor is it startling that this also holds true for a great many institutional collections.
But the collection based strictly on chance or individual sensibility is of limited value. Its limits are the limitations of eclecticism itself. Even if provocatively idiosyncratic, such a collection tends to lead the audience away from thought, directing it instead towards taste. Its arguments, if any, are destined to be minor. We’ll likely find little striking insight there — no attempts to uncover important “new” historical figures, or to restore the reputations of maligned and/or discarded ones, or to present us with an overview of the medium’s history which in any meaningful way goes against the grain of our received version of that history, or to place contemporary work in cogent juxtapositions which shed new light, thus helping to illuminate the current field of ideas within the medium.
To build a more coherent collection, one with a thematic structure and a potential usefulness, something more than mere taste is required. We are now talking about purposeful collecting, which necessitates definition of purpose on the collector’s part. Such a purpose — call it a line of inquiry — can also be based on the personal interests of the collector, but here those interests are used as conceptual tools, to shape the collection and give it resonance.
In order to pursue this question further, I’m going to contrast two collections of photographs assembled over the past fifteen years: the celebrated hoardings of the late Sam Wagstaff, now among the holdings of the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, and the less well-known Lucinda Bunnen Collection, donated in 1983 to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.
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In the title to a lecture of his own, Sam Wagstaff described himself as an “eccentric collector.” I respect the candor of that self-evaluation, but I’m not sure that I agree with it — at least insofar as his approach to collecting photographs is concerned.
Wagstaff was what I would call a collector of sensibility. By this I mean that his collection — though it has been widely praised as a model well worth emulating — centers around no particular theme, style, group, period, or subject. Such coherence as it has derives almost entirely from the interaction between his discerning eye and his catholic tastes. Aside from that, all that holds his assemblage of images together is photography itself, the medium in which they’re made.
I too have come to be the custodian of a considerable number of photographs, though my own hoard is somewhat more modest than Wagstaff’s, and my collection was not so much built as accumulated. Yet something I wrote several years ago about the photographs I live with and love (for the catalogue of a small exhibition at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut) strikes me as apropos to the structure of the Wagstaff collection; and, at the risk of putting my words — and motives — into Wagstaff’s mouth, I’ll take the liberty of repeating a section of it here.
“[These images] do not represent in any way a coherent overview of the medium, nor … do they probe any particular mode, genre, or period within its history. If, as a collection, they represent anything, it may be only the remarkable diversity of powerful and affective imagery which can be gathered together under the heading of photography. And if they reveal anything about me as the collector thereof, it doesn’t seem to be any particular critical bias or historical theory, but simply the eclecticism of my own responses and (perhaps) something about the way I see: what I find visually provocative, moving, and meaningful. The only two things that all these images have in common are that I’ve cared enough about them to select and live with them, and that they’re all … photographic in origin.”[1]
I’ve quoted this to you as a way of indicating that I’m in no way opposed to photographic collections based on sensibility and taste. There’s nothing wrong with such eclecticism. At the same time, it’s a mistake to consider it eccentric; it is, in fact, an approach typical of those who collect photographs as amateurs (that is, lovers) of the medium, though Sam Wagstaff certainly practiced it on a grander scale than most.
This is, I think, a healthy step forward from the days (still not too distant) when hardly anyone would buy a photograph unless it had been reproduced in Newhall’s History of Photography, or Gernsheim’s, or both. Photography’s a very diverse medium, and until a few years ago it was a woefully neglected one; there’s a cornucopia of marvelous imagery there. They call out for our attention; they need salvaging, preservation, re-examination, and re-introduction to the mainstream of the medium through exhibition and publication. All of these services to those images, and to the medium itself, are provided to one degree or another by the conscientious collector of sensibility, and are appreciated by all those who truly care about photography.
Yet, at the risk of sounding like an ingrate, I feel obliged to propose that — beyond the tender loving care provided to individual images — the Wagstaff collection, at least as represented by its exhibit and catalogue,[2] is less eccentric than eclectic: it’s nothing more than a highly personal but by no means oddball browsing along the avenues and byways of photography’s history.
The sensibility represented thereby seems decidedly classical at heart, in relation to the medium’s history as we understand it at present and in its sense of the photographic image as such. The Wagstaff collection’s emphasis, decidedly, is on 19th- and early 20th-century work. The dominant modes are those traditionally associated with the “fine” or “high” arts: portraiture, still life, the nude and the landscape. (We would have to amend or subdivide the latter category to include the urban or “social” landscape along with the natural one.)
These choices, in and of themselves, dictate to a considerable extent the visual qualities of the individual images. It indicates that they are likely to be images produced with large-format cameras — formal, carefully composed, concerned with static rather than active scenes, full of detail. These are pictures in which the eye can get lost and on which the mind can meditate. They do not provoke to action; instead, they invite contemplation.
This is consistent enough as a pattern to suggest itself as a basic tendency of the sensibility involved. Its conservativism is not out of harmony with the taste patterns of the medium’s heretofore dominant historians. There may be occasional images by people who have only recently entered the medium’s pantheon; Edward Curtis, virtually unknown two scant decades ago, is one such. There may be major figures notable by their absence — what, no Stieglitz, no Strand, no Ansel Adams? There may be the quirky (and mildly perverse) representation of a significant artist by an unfamiliar work — Gertrude Kasebier’s “The Gargoyle,” say. But there is no true revisionism here.
Sam Wagstaff, A Book of Photographs (1978), cover
do not mean to imply by this that these images I’ve been mentioning are unimportant or unworthy of attention. Far from it. But they are sufficiently museumized and annotated, and their makers’ reputations secure enough, that the mere collecting of them was not a unique contribution to the medium or to the audience’s understanding of it — especially since they were not presented in a way that indicates anything about photography’s morphology. Rather, this central segment of the collection simply celebrated the collector’s own connoisseurship.
(It is noteworthy that photography collecting as a field is still at such an early stage in its development that in the late ’70s such connoisseurship alone was deemed worthy of extensive media attention and considerable corporate/governmental patronage. Wagstaff’s cunning in getting such sponsors to cover the promotional costs of a marketing enterprise clearly contrived to net him a small fortune raised no eyebrows I’m aware of, save my own. I would doubt that, other considerations aside, the National Endowment for the Arts will in the future be able to justify the funding of traveling exhibitions valorizing private collections of sensibility — if, indeed, the NEA has any funds at all left once the current flap is resolved.)
Where I think the Wagstaff collection makes its small contributions to the medium is in its retrieval of vernacular and/or anonymous imagery and in its openness to provocative, emotionally charged and often controversial imagery by younger photographers. To his credit, Wagstaff paid attention to the output of younger practitioners and to the full range of the medium’s imagery, regardless of its origin or pedigree.
The collection offers some real rewards in both those areas. The range of extant vernacular and anonymous imagery included — much of it originally intended to function outside the arena of photographic “art” — is considerable. Such imagery exists in great amounts, greater by far than the general audience suspects. But much of it lies buried in files, archives, basements and other such places, entirely neglected or else categorized according to other than photographic concerns. This imagery is effectively lost to us — and, tragically, often physically mistreated or destroyed. Those who burrow into this midden heap to salvage images are paying dues of a sort to this most democratic medium.
And those who — by dint of perseverance and an open, responsive love of the medium — emerge with unnoticed or discarded works of substance restore to the medium and its audience some vital fragments of our visual heritage. These acts deserve our appreciation. At the same time, I should point out that the retrieval of a single image by an unknown photographer tells us little about that photographer or about the medium — just as an archaeologist needs more than a single potshard to reconstruct a bowl.
Support for the medium’s working artists — particularly the younger and/or less well-known of them — is another form of dues-paying for the conscientious collector. Until recently, important work from the medium’s first century was in such imminent peril of permanent disappearance that collectors, understandably, concentrated their efforts on its preservation. Now, however, with the market for such work firmly established and the necessary scholarship and conservation well underway, collectors are at last beginning to look seriously at the work of present-day practitioners.
That is a long-overdue and welcome attention. These men and women are, in a most literal sense, the lifeblood of the medium. It is they who keep it vital by exploring and expanding its field of ideas, transcending its technical limitations, pushing its craft standards to new heights and violating its boundaries. What the medium becomes in fifty years will depend on their efforts over the next twenty. …
(To be continued.)
[1] From the gallery brochure accompanying the exhibition “Critic’s Choice: Images from the Collection of A. D. Coleman,” University of Bridgeport Art Gallery, Bridgeport, CT, November 1976.
[2] Sam Wagstaff, A Book of Photographs (Gray Press, 1978).
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