Reinventing Photography (1974)

[Continued from previous post: … And so it went. The new boss, William Honan, spelled out the new rules in the one meeting I had with him that fall, sitting the office occupied until recently by Seymour Peck, the just-departed editor of the Arts & Leisure Section of the New York Times.

There was good news. Photography criticism would move from the back of the book — positioned there amongst stamp-collecting, bridge, chess, gardening, and radio/television schedules — to the front of the book, alongside art criticism.

But the ground rules had changed, and not for the better, by my lights. Toeing the line and toning it down would just be the first stage. From the standpoint of crafting my prose, the package included writing less as an essayist and more as a journalist — important material at the start of the article, progressively less important stuff as you moved toward the end, so they could cut from the bottom, with no guaranteed minimum space.

In place of the free rein Peck had granted to both Gene Thornton and myself as we alternated our biweekly contributions, I’d have to propose and clear each assignment in advance with Honan, with no certainty that a man who knew nothing about photography and cared less would agree with my priorities. And, because articles weren’t certain to run at all, as a freelance I’d write on spec, with no commitment from them on whether or how much of a submitted article would appear, or how much I’d get paid for it, instead of receiving a dependable bi-weekly fee for a regularly scheduled column of a predetermined length.

I could still call myself a Times critic, but it would mean a radically, visibly diminished role after almost five years of hard work. The readership I’d built would notice the difference immediately. I could see the handwriting on the wall. Then as now, I don’t do office politics well, don’t know how to suck up to superiors, and don’t want to work anywhere I’m not wanted, especially for anyone looking for an excuse to get rid of me.

So I rode out the transition period between Sy’s closing down his tenure and Honan’s takeover, deciding to go out with a bang. My next-to-last column, “Art Critics: Our Weakest Link,” was already in the pipeline, the last piece of mine that Peck got to approve. I’d already drafted its follow-up, “Reinventing Photography,” promised in print at the end of the first part of that polemic. I submitted it, confirmed that Honan had approved its publication, and walked out of his office and the Times building for the last time.

On November 3, 1974 this column did in fact appear toward the front of the section, on the page of the Arts & Leisure devoted to art criticism — the only one of my NYT columns to occupy that space. — A.D.C.]

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Reinventing Photography

The late Alexander King used to recount the poignant story of a man he had met — somewhere in northern Europe, as I recall — during his travels as a youth. This man invited King to his home to see with his own eyes the machine he had been working on for 20 years. The machine, which he felt to be on the verge of perfection, was to be a great boon to mankind. King observed the man as he placed a piece of paper into the prototype and pressed a number of buttons. But it was not until he had watched the device attack and mangle the paper for several minutes that he realized the man was reinventing the typewriter.

Some time ago, a curator whose main concern is the Polaroid image showed me with similar enthusiasm a recent Polaroid photograph by Brigit Polk. Polk has been experimenting with and exhibiting one-of-a-kind color Polaroids for about five years, and it has been interesting to watch her progress from a state of technical naïveté, during which her imagery incorporated a great deal of accident, to a more sophisticated craftsmanship and a more formal, controlled way of seeing.

The image I was shown by this curator (who handled it like a treasure and waxed more than enthusiastic over it) involved a mannequin in a shop window and a variety of reflections. Insofar as Polk’s work up to that time was concerned, the image had significance as one of the first signs of her awareness and conscious use of light itself and the spatial illusions it generates. However, there is an extensive tradition of mannequins-and-their-reflections-in-shop-windows-imagery in photography (works by Atget, Kertész, and Friedlander come immediately to mind), and in juxtaposition to these Polk’s image could not help but seem both ideationally hackneyed and imagistically mediocre. My curator acquaintance appeared considerably distressed when I opined that all this image represented, in effect, was Polk’s reinvention of the typewriter.

Typewriters get reinvented out of ignorance. The art world is currently reinventing photography, also out of ignorance. In this instance, the ignorance stems from two sources: the critics and the artists themselves. The ignorance of the critics results from their failure to come to terms with the breadth of photographic history, as well as their inability to grapple with post-war American photography. They continue to venerate Edward Weston’s devotion to the “perfect print” as a precious object and his belief in the photograph as the embodiment of the spirit of “the thing itself.” As I have noted previously, Westonian purism is a decreasingly influential stance; its overemphasis by under-informed criticism has proved to be profoundly misleading to artists everywhere. This ignorance on the part of critics has generated, and become coupled with, ascarifying corollary on the part of artists: the belief that if they approach photography in ignorance they cannot be held accountable to its traditions and precedents.

Polk is only one of a number of artists who make photographs but carefully avoid any commitment to the medium they employ. In this they are aided and abetted by critics like John Perrault, who announced that “some photographs are not photography, they are Art,” a semantic maneuver whose audacity is soon outstripped by its ludicrousness. Taking such statements seriously results inevitably in the sort of art-world contortions reported in these pages recently by Roy Bongartz in his article on conceptual art (Aug. 11).

“The Gibson Gallery,” Bongartz wrote, “shows photographs by Roger Cutforth, for example, that are not to be looked at as photographs, but as graphic representations of ideas or ‘sculptures,’ a term that has been extended to include conceptual art. There is a snapshot of a hand holding a snapshot, for instance, and it is to be bought and judged not as photography but as a transcendental form.”

Bypassing the obviously foolish implication that photography by photographers excludes “transcendental form” and “the graphic representation of ideas,” does the fact that Cutforth is labeled artist rather than photographer mean that he is not responsible for the unoriginality of his “transcendental form”? For most of the past decade, Kenneth Josephson has been creating — and exhibiting and publishing — an extended series of photographs involving hands holding snapshots and picture postcards. Are these not “transcendental forms” also? Is Cutforth’s image not to be gauged alongside this series? And is Cutforth’s dealer not to be chastised for an apparent incompetence which has kept this artist and the gallery customers unaware of the existence of a large body of work that is obviously similar to Cutforth’s and that not only precedes it in time and goes far beyond it in scope but is also no doubt considerably cheaper?

In the same article, Bongartz reports that a new school of “narrative art” includes works which “consist of little stories or scenarios either typed on paper, tape-recorded by voice or shown in photographs.” In discussing such works, are art critics to be excused from an obligation to consider them alongside such fictional photographic sequences from the past decade as those by Eikoh Hosoe, Ralph Gibson, Les Krims, Duane Michals, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Richard Kirstel — “narrative art” which has been published and exhibited widely, in most cases internationally? If so, on what rational basis?

Unless photographers are to be excluded de facto from the ranks of artists, no such rational basis exists. It is hard to believe that anyone in his or her right mind would argue that the craft expertise of photographers invalidates their imagery as “art” whereas the technical ineptitude of artists certifies the esthetic legitimacy of their photographic experiments. Such an argument is patently ridiculous.

Yet it is being made, tacitly, by the art world at present. Many contemporary artists appear to believe that photography is a virgin territory without a history (beyond Westonism, at least), free from relevant precedents and prior accomplishments: a brand new field of ideas which have not even been touched on by the medium’s own practitioners, in which any small step breaks new ground. Since photography is presently permeating the art world, one can understand/the easy acceptance of this delusion; it is, in Hemingway’s words, “pretty to think so.” It is also fallacious, a mirage whose only sustenance is wishful thinking and sufficient distance to make its insubstantiality difficult to verify.

(Part 1 I 2)

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[Postscript: This article appeared shortly before what would get called Postmodernism engulfed the art world, including the criticism of art. As a consequence thereof, unfortunate in my opinion, critics of art began to attribute the reinvention of photography to the pomo cohort of “artists using photography” — Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, et al. As a corollary, they treated all photography produced by photographers before the emergence of the “Pictures Generation” as quaint, barely relevant historical artifacts. They also viewed image-makers identified as photographers rather than artists as unworthy of serious consideration.

Sadly, the situation of criticism of photography as performed by critics of art, as described in this pair of articles, remains unchanged fifty years later. To the best of my knowledge, no designated art critic writing in English since then until today has demonstrated more than a passing acquaintance with the history of photography, the medium’s field of ideas, its literature, or its major movements.]

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