Latent Image (1968)

[This article, the first in a series of columns written for the Village Voice between 1968 and 1973, appeared exactly 50 years ago, in the June 20, 1968 issue of that alt-weekly newspaper, which had already become the template for the emerging national and, indeed, international “alternative press.” With it I hung out my shingle as a photography critic, a rubric that I thereby inaugurated and under which flag I still sail.

As it happens, I did not intend this short piece for publication. At the time, I wrote freelance for the Voice as a third-string theater critic and occasional commentator on subjects as diverse as Marshall McLuhan’s first record album and the San Antonio, Texas expo dubbed “Hemisfair ’68.” This qualified me as what now gets called a cultural journalist, a category not yet invented at the time.

Though I had a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing, had written and published a controversial one-act play in my undergraduate days, and had done some amateur acting, I had no long-term interest in writing about theater. (Online searches disclose no readily available example of those review, but you can find them — with some difficulty — embedded in Google’s cumbersome Village Voice archive.) Moreover, I wanted some space in the paper to call my own. My personal interest in photography (as a looker at photographs, not a maker thereof) had led me to propose to my editor at the Voice, Diane Fisher, that I provide a column on photography.

The Voice already had columnists and regular writers on experimental film, theater, music, dance and art, as well as rock and roll, most of those areas covered rarely, if at all, by the mainstream papers in the city, notably the New York Times. Photography seemed a logical additional to that list of edgy creative areas.

Diane didn’t ask me what credentials, if any, I would bring to such a platform. Truth be told, no such bona fides could be had at the time, and I had no clips of previously published articles on the subject to bolster my request, no letters of recommendation from anyone in the field. But, for the previous 18 months, I had proved myself capable of delivering copy that needed little if any editing, and getting it in on time — the gold standard for any editor.

The Voice was in an expansionist phase, rapidly adding advertising pages and needing editorial content to balance it. So Diane asked me to write up a prospectus that she could show to others in the editorial chain of command for further consideration. She’d get back to me with the paper’s response.

That happened sometime in late April or early May of 1968. My then-wife Alexandra gave birth to our son Edward on May 19. The weeks before and after went by in a blur of preparation for Edward’s arrival and then the magical, exhausting first days of parenthood. Eventually I came up for air and sat down with the three or four issues of the Voice that had accumulated, unread, in the meantime.

And there, in the most recent issue, under the simple heading “Photography,” I found my prospectus. Published as written, not a word changed. With a short editor’s note at the end, indicating that this would thenceforth appear as a regular feature in the Voice. So that’s when it all began. — A.D.C.]

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Photography

 by A. D. Coleman

“Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze,” wrote Alfred Stieglitz in an 1897 manifesto. Time has proven his sardonic optimism wrong; however — and this at least would have pleased Stieglitz — the ranks of serious, dedicated photographers have also swelled slowly but surely (though hardly proportionately). Much of that is attributable to the impetus given this new medium by Stieglitz and his apostles; certainly the acceptance of photography as a legitimate art form is directly traceable to his lifelong battle on its behalf. Yet equally responsible, though often disclaimed, are the popular uses of photography — journalism, advertising, even family album snapshots. Aesthetically “impure” as these may be, they served to educate an entire society to the value and uniqueness of photography as a medium for recording events, communicating ideas, and transmitting information; thus, paradoxically, the same “photography as a fad” despised by Stieglitz bred a generation for whom the camera is a natural and instinctive creative tool.

In its current manifestation, popular interest in photography is at best a mixed blessing. The very familiarity which results brings with it not only acceptance but, perhaps inevitably, a curious form of contempt. The importance of photography in our lives is so frequently acknowledged that we have become numb from repetition, while the increasing technical sophistication of modern cameras (coupled with our escape from formal visual inhibitions) has made it easier to take good (though not great) pictures. Despite or because of all this, the significance of an original photograph — as a statement, a work of art, a Ding an sich — is usually overlooked, along with the intellectual and emotional factors involved in the process of making one.

Still prevalent among the public is the attitude that if you’ve seen a photograph once — in any form: reduced or enlarged, as a newspaper halftone or a gravure plate or an actual print from the negative — you’ve seen it all. An otherwise discerning audience, which would never dream of judging Ad Reinhardt’s paintings by their reproductions in Life magazine, will unhesitatingly presume reproductions of Marie Cosindas’s subtle color portraits (in the same publication, May 1968) to be identical to the originals.

Photography may be recognized as a valid art, and part of the public may be sensitive to the superficial differences between good and bad pictures, but, with the exception of a small band of devotees, the general level of interest — to say nothing of self-education — goes no further. Questions of technique and aesthetics are discussed only in the pages of photography magazines. Such perversely unhelpful shows as the Museum of Modern Art’s recent “Photography as Printmaking” merely perpetuate the mystique that photographic methods involve arcane necromancy beyond the comprehension of the uninitiated. Collectors with modest budgets pay no attention to original photographs, though they are surely the best buy in our over-inflated art market. Photography exhibits (by which I do not mean the annual Coliseum extravaganzas*) are notoriously ill-attended. The mortality rate for galleries specializing in photographs is staggering. Books of photographs — even the greatest, such as Weston’s My Camera on Point Lobos — are too often remaindered. Somehow, photography always seems to get the short end of the stick.

This column will be a continuing attempt, on a small scale, to change that situation by giving to photography the serious critical consideration it merits. It will be (I hope) a means for turning a sizeable potential audience on to photography as a creative medium, affirming the importance of original photographs as significant objects, and providing a dialogue between photographers and their public.

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First published in the Village Voice, June 20, 1968, p. 14. (The column rubric “Latent Image” would get introduced with the next article.)

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(* This now-obscure bit of snark referred to a series of extravaganzas titled “Photo Expo,” held during that period at the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle, an ugly Robert Moses-instigated convention center that had opened in 1956. Predecessor of the current PDN PhotoPlus Expos, founded in 1983 and presently held at the Coliseum’s successor, the Jacob K. Javits Center, “Photo Expo” served as a showcase for the photo industry, then in high gear, with Kodak as its alpha dog. Like PhotoPlus, these trade shows concentrated on equipment and materials. However, following the model set for the industry by Photokina in Cologne, Germany, Photo Expo threw a bone to those who practiced the medium professionally and/or took it seriously by including a few group exhibitions as well — organized, if memory serves, by the Photographic Society of America, with titles like “The Universe of Photography,” featuring such old-school stalwarts as Fritz Henle. — A.D.C.)

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Postscript, June 20, 2018: I’d like to think that, one way or another, I managed to achieve or further those modest goals described above, along with some others that emerged along the way. At the very least, I can say that I have given it my all, leaving everything on the field.

Here’s a sample of what I produced for that Voice column — my August 5, 1971 obituary for Diane Arbus. (Click on image to enlarge.) — A.D.C.

A. D. Coleman, Diane Arbus Obituary, Village Voice, 8-5-71

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