Art Critics: Our Weakest Link (1974)

[I spent the spring of 1974 in the Bay Area, writing reports on the thriving West Coast photography scene for the New York Times and airmailing them back to the editor who in 1970 had made me a regular contributor to the NYT Arts & Leisure Section, Seymour Peck. A month before I flew back, I received a terse note from Peck, notifying me that he’d leave the Arts & Leisure Section shortly, to help start up the new weekday sections that the Times had decided to inaugurate.

I knew that the A&L section was Sy’s great love (he was a theater and film buff), but I assumed this meant he’d moved up a notch on the corporate ladder at the paper, so I sent him a postcard congratulating him on his promotion, and giving him the date of my planned return. He wrote back, “It’s not a promotion, Allan. Let’s talk when you get back.”

In mid-May, after I settled back in to the Alphabet City apartment in which I then lived, I called Sy, who took me to lunch at Sardi’s, on Eighth Avenue, a hangout for theater folk and Times people, just around the corner from the 43rd Street office. Over sandwiches, he explained that the powers that be at the Times felt that the A&L section had become too liberal in its views, especially the contributions from the cluster of freelancers with which Sy had augmented his staff writers. So, deciding that Sy was the problem but not the solution, they’d moved him laterally, putting him in charge of developing these new sections.

His replacement, William H. Honan from the Travel section, would become Chief Cultural Correspondent for the Times as well as editor-in-chief of the A&L section. In his New York Observer review of Max Frankel’s 1999 autobiography, The Times of My Life, and My Life with ‘The Times’, Charles Kaiser writes of the Times reporter and columnist’s years as editor of the paper’s Sunday department, ” … many of Mr. Frankel’s blunders were entirely of his own making. … at Arts & Leisure he replaced the brilliant (and beloved) Seymour Peck with a second-rate apparatchik.” That party hack was Honan.

Honan had no background in the arts; his overarching assignment was to conservativize the section. “Watch out for him, Allan,” Sy warned me as we drank our coffee. “He’s gunning for you. He’s already walking around telling people you’re a bad writer.” He sighed. “I can’t protect you any more.” He had a few months to go, but by October he’d be gone and Honan would officially replace him.

I could read the handwriting on the wall. I’ve made it a habit to collaborate only with editors who value and respect my work. The time to leave had come. For the rest of the summer and early fall, as Sy wrapped up his tenure as editor of the section, I wrote my usual assortment of book and exhibition reviews. As the date of Sy’s departure approached, I decided to go out with an assessment of the state of writing about photography as produced by art critics — including those at the Times. To fit with what were still the guidelines I divided this polemic into two parts — the first and only time I did this in my work for the paper. You’ll find the first half below. It appeared on October 6, 1974. Part two will follow shortly. — A.D.C.]

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Art Critics: Our Weakest Link

One of the most serious shortcomings of art criticism during the past century has been its utter and continuing failure to engage meaningfully with the most diversified and revolutionary image-making medium to evolve during that period. The art establishment’s initial reaction to photography blended equal parts of hysteria and disdain, which gradually mellowed into a casual but virtually total disregard. Inevitably, this led to an ignorance so widespread and profound that there is hardly an art critic today competent to discuss photography as a branch of print-making, much less as a creative graphic medium with a unique and distinctive field of ideas.

Understandably, such ignorance proves embarrassing at this juncture. Art criticism itself is heavily dependent on the photographic image, since many critics (and much of the art audience) experience painting and sculpture not in the flesh, so to speak, but through its photographic representation. Painters have drawn very heavily on photographic imagery from the very inception of the photographic medium, a long-suppressed though now much-touted fact. Photography has increasingly been woven into the fabric of 20th-century art of all sorts, beginning with Dadaist and Surrealist collages and continuing through the current work of Warhol, Rauschenberg and a host of others. And, of course, a great many contemporary artists’ creations — performances, conceptual pieces, earthworks, and the like — live on only in the form of photographs.

If this ignorance affected no one but the art critics themselves, it would be only regrettable. Critics, however, are part of an informational circuit on which the evolutionary process of art is based. As a group, the critics in any given field inform the audience what the artists are up to, serve as a sounding board for the artists, and inform the artists themselves as to what their often widely dispersed co-workers are about. In such a circuit, ignorance begets ignorance. The lack of knowledgeability of the art critics in regard to photography does not stop with them; it is transmitted to both the audience and the artists. Such a situation is not merely regrettable, but damaging to all concerned.

For example, one direct result is the recent spate of veneration heaped on Paul Strand, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston by art critics around the nation, in conjunction with the appearance of an assortment of monographs and retrospectives. These three appear to be the photographers with whose work art critics feel most comfortable. The reasons for this are not entirely clear to me (though all three do share a devotion to the original print as a precious object). Insofar as ideation is concerned, however, their contributions to their medium were concluded decades ago.

There has been no change and little growth in Strand’s image-making since the original publication of The Mexican Portfolio in 1933, and his continued romanticization of the noble peasant seems increasingly mawkish and patronizing.

Adams provided photography with an invaluable codification of craft principles (now largely outdated, according to a number of teachers), helped establish and maintain much-needed craft standards for photography as a form of print-making, and built up a body of work important in its description of America’s Western parklands; but there has been little creative risk-taking in his photography as a whole, and a scarcity of original ideas and provocative theories in his published writings. (Wynn Bullock’s inquiries into the photograph as a space-time matrix, and Minor White’s investigations of sequential imagery and the reading of photographs, have a lot more philosophical heft to them).

Edward Weston, of course, is 15 years dead, and his work is a decreasingly active influence on young photographers even in his home territory, as several recent regional exhibits on the West Coast have demonstrated. The “purism” he advocated is creatively inhibiting and so closely linked to a particular subject matter, style and camera format as to negate large segments of the photographic vocabulary and eliminate broad areas of experience from the photographer’s imagistic concerns.

Weston’s approach inherently restricts itself (as is apparent from his own body of work) to formal portraiture, landscape, still life, and the nude — the traditional subject matter of painting, it should be noted. Within those tight parameters, he created a major oeuvre, big enough that its limitations are not immediately apparent nor finally self-defeating. Yet, though his body of work is, for me, more resonant by far than those of Strand or Adams, it is my belief that he will eventually be seen as an awesome, monumental boulder in the path of the evolution of photography in the 20th century. For the theory which accompanied his work is both a summation and a source of the central misunderstanding of photographic communication: the confusion between the being, object, or event in front of the lens and the image which is made thereof.

These are not one and the same thing. The photograph is its maker’s subjective description of her/his experience, in silver particles on paper. It is not, as Weston would have it, the “essential form” of “the thing itself.” To insist otherwise is to demand a leap of faith, rather than to state a demonstrable fact. (There is an image by Todd Walker which sums this up neatly. It is a silkscreen of a photograph of a leaf, over which are superimposed these words: “A photograph of a leaf is not the leaf. It may not be a photograph.”)

As it happens, the illusionism of photography is seductive enough that we are generally willing to ignore this crucial distinction and make that leap without peeping. This does not validate the jump; it merely affirms our own credulity and the effectiveness of the photographic deception. As Paul Byers has written, “Cameras don’t take pictures.”

The dominance of the Westonian thesis (which has its corollary in “documentary” photography also) in mid-century American photography is a historical fact. That does not make it true, for the thesis fails to resolve the profoundly equivocal relationship between the photographic image and “the thing itself.” It is also a historical fact that there exist alternative approaches to photography, approaches which embrace the full range of available means within the medium, which acknowledge its subjectivity and which consciously confront its illusionism. (Examples would include work by Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Edmund Teske, Harry Callahan, Bill Brandt, Robert Frank, Jerry Uelsmann, and others too numerous to cite.)

The affirmation and valorization of the Westonian thesis — to which Strand and Adams are basically bound — is a matter of legitimate critical choice, if undertaken in recognition of that thesis’s cyclical necessity, its inherent limitations, its present moribundity, and the flourishing extant alternatives. If based only on whim — or on the equally irresponsible premise that photography plays an increasingly prominent role in current art activity and so one must, after all, say something about it to prove one is in the swim — such affirmation is not merely meaningless and supercilious. It also seriously misleads the larger art community, and denies to photography’s diverse practitioners the richness of their own heritage and the credit due many of them for pioneering expeditions into territories which — as a direct result of the wholesale critical oversight of the accounts these adventurers sent back — are still believed by artists and public alike to remain entirely unexplored.

This discussion will be continued, and a number of specific examples presented, in my next column.

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