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Acknowledgements and
Author's Foreword to Depth
of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media
and Lens Culture
by A. D. Coleman
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For reasons still
not entirely clear to me, this book has proved the
hardest of all my collections of essays to deliver
into the world.
To begin with, it's had several incarnations. I first
announced its forthcoming appearance something like
fifteen years ago, at a time when it took a quite
different, much more expansive form. At that initial
stage of its life, it benefitted greatly from the
attention, supportiveness, and organizational assistance
of Tony Outhwaite of the JCA Literary Agency, then
my agent, and subsequently from the enthusiasm and
advice of my next agent, Jonathan Silverman of the
Scott Meredith Literary Agency.
That version of the book, which I now realize was
unwieldy and less than cohesive at best, never found
a publisher, so I shelved it for several years to
get some distance on it and its problems. Close readings
and thoughtful commentary by Richard Kirstel and his
late wife, Barbara Kirstel, helped me identify many
of its structural difficulties. As a result, I split
the book in two. Half of the original version eventually
evolved into the volume Tarnished Silver: After
the Photo Boom, Essays and Lectures 1979-1989.1
The second half -- a set of (mostly) more scholarly
essays -- formed the core of this meaner, leaner new
model. The University of New Mexico Press accepted
that book for publication in 1989; I began drafting
several new essays for it, and set to work on what
I thought would be minor revisions.
But these are substantial commentaries, demanding
much research, considerable gestation time, and extensive
rewriting. For whatever the reasons, first one and
then another of the essays commenced to give me fits.
(Some of the subsequent delay is explained -- or at
least rationalized -- in the new opening section of
the first essay in this volume, "The Destruction
Business.") And life, as is its wont, intruded
itself in some major ways to preoccupy me. I learned
again the wisdom of the I Ching: "Perseverance
furthers."
I finally managed a major chunk of the necessary revision
of these essays and the editing of this book during
a three-month residency as Museum Scholar at the J.
Paul Getty Museum in California during the fall of
1993, and as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in the Department
of Photography at Gothenberg University in Sweden
during the winter and spring of 1994. The support
and unbroken stretches of working time provided by
these institutions proved invaluable to this project,
and I thank all those involved for making those opportunities
available to me. Gradually, then and thereafter, what
I saw as the essays’ various problems began to
resolve themselves; at long last, in the late summer
of 1996, I found a way to tackle the one remaining
hurdle, the meditation on criticism that begins this
collection. With its completion, I felt finally that
the book had reached its desired form.
My thanks go to the editors, curators, and lecture
and conference sponsors who variously commissioned,
solicited and/or welcomed these essays in their original
forms, and to those who published subsequent versions
of them as I refined and polished my arguments: Jim
Hughes at Camera Arts, Kathleen Kenyon at the
Center Quarterly, Thom Harrop and Ana Jones
at Darkroom Photography/Camera & Darkroom,
Neil Postman at Et cetera: A Journal of General
Semantics, Andreas Muller-Pohle at European
Photography, Sue Beardmore at The Ffotogallery
(Wales), Joachim Schmid at Fotokritik (Germany),
Italo Zannier at Fotologia (Italy), Jerome
Liebling of Hampshire College (Amherst, MA), David
Spurgeon at Impact of Science on Society (France),
Jay Black and Ralph D. Barney at the Journal of
Mass Media Ethics, Henning Hansen at Katalog
(Denmark), Richard Kostelanetz, Barry Tanenbaum at
Lens' on Campus/Imaging On Campus, Joan Harrison
and Judy Collischan van Wagner of the Hillwood Art
Gallery of Long Island University (NY), the photography
faculty of Loyola College (Baltimore, MD), Gail Fisher-Taylor
at Photo-Communique/the Holocene Foundation
(Canada), Eli Bornstein at The Structurist
(Canada), Sari Thomas of the Conference on Culture
and Communication, Temple University (Philadelphia,
PA), and Manuel Vilarino of the University of Santiago
de Compostela (Spain). I have indicated in the endnotes
and on the Publication Credits page the presentational
and publishing history of each essay, both so that
readers can see something of the process by which
they made their way into and through the world and
also to facilitate finding them in other languages,
since a number of them have been translated.
My indebtedness extends as well to others who played
more specific roles in the making of the book in your
hands. Between 1990 and 1995 various people -- photographers
Linda Troeller and Jennifer Kotter; the late Vilem
Flusser, philosopher and media theorist; and film
critic Andrew Sarris -- provided comments on the book
as a whole, or on some of its components, that proved
enormously helpful.
The fact that it has at long last appeared I attribute
primarily to Marjorie Forman, who helped me find my
way through the labyrinths of Jungian analysis during
this final version’s chrysalis stage; to the
artist, curator and historian Colleen Thornton and
the artist and curator Kathy Vargas, whose long-term
commitments to my work and ideas, incisive critiques
of the individual essays, structural suggestions for
the volume as a whole and other provocations forced
me to reconsider and clarify these pieces even further;
and to Elizabeth Hadas and Dana Asbury of the University
of New Mexico Press, who demonstrated endless patience
with me during the final redaction process. I proffer
my deepest gratitude to these fine folks.
So I reiterate my heartfelt appreciation to all of
the above; and I assure you that none of them are
to blame for any of this book's failures, which, after
all this time and effort, can only be my own.
-- A. D. C.
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Author's Foreword
This volume puts
into book form an interlaced group of essays I think
of as more scholarly than the running commentary on
photography and art with which the majority of my readers
most commonly associate me. Concerned with issues of
theory and history, with those who fall (or are pushed)
through the cracks of critical disdain and neglect,
with different approaches to praxis and dramatic shifts
in the methods and means thereof, with definitions of
terms and the function of criticism itself, they were
written between 1978 and 1996 and variously, often drastically
revised during those years before reaching their present
and (I hope) final form.
When I set about my work as a critic of photography
and related subjects, in 1968, I thought of myself as
anything but a scholar. Having but recently closed the
door on the academic context for my own fields of formal
study -- English literature and creative writing --
with a vow never to return, I had at that point no expectation
of ever again engaging in anything remotely resembling
scholarly activity, especially as a working writer.
So much for good intentions.
I did manage to stay away from just about anything approximating
the scholarly (excepting occasional lectures and workshops
at colleges, universities and art institutes, and some
teaching of seminars, mostly in adult-education programs)
until mid-1976, when I forced myself to spend several
months writing what remains my single most cited essay,
"The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition."2
(Before that, my only notable slip into anything akin
to written scholarship was my reluctantly accepting
the chore of providing the entry on photography for
a revised 1975 edition of The New Columbia Encyclopaedia,3
a task into which editor Karen Tweedy-Holmes had to
drag me kicking and screaming.)
The essay on the directorial mode was the first to require
some footnoting, that defining apparatus of scholarly
production. Putting those citations and elaborations
in seemed like a tectonic shift at the time. But it
also reminded me of how much I'd always enjoyed reading
the notes in other people's essays, since often that's
where the real action was to be found.4
So I took great pleasure in planting in my own notes
thereto a little ticking time bomb whose explosion took
place some years thereafter.5
Later that same year I undertook the writing of the
first critical survey ever produced of another important
mode of photographic activity. The resulting book, The
Grotesque in Photography,6
though light on scholarly apparatus (the publishers'
choice, not mine), looked and read somewhat like a work
of scholarship, and has functioned as a standard reference
-- indeed, still the only substantial study of its subject
-- since it appeared in 1977. With the publication of
those two works, people began to treat me as if I were
a scholar, and I began to doubt my right to disclaim
that as an accurate definition of at least a share of
my inclinations and energies.
Shortly thereafter, in late 1978, I commenced the earliest
essay in this book, "Conspicuous by His Absence:
Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance of William Mortensen"
-- in part because the aforementioned footnote from
1976 and my brief discussion of Mortensen in The
Grotesque in Photography seemed to demand it, in
part because I'd done the spadework for it back in 1974
and didn't want to see that labor go to waste, and in
part because I suspected that if I didn't do it no one
else would. Those motives -- especially the first and
last -- underlie much of what's in this volume. My perception
of problematic gaps in the literature of photography
as a whole (as well as within my own body of work),
along with my sense of obligation to articulate my operative
premises and definitions, serve as the driving forces
behind this aspect of my activity.
As this suggests, virtually all of these essays emerged
from the process of reconsidering earlier essays and
lectures, pursuing issues I'd discovered I had left
unresolved therein. At the time I began that essay on
Mortensen I'd moved almost entirely away from the reviewing,
reportage and writing of other forms of occasional pieces
that had dominated my work for the decade 1968-78, a
phase of my professional activity synopsized by my first
collection of essays.7
This meant that space had opened up in my writing life
for longer, more meditated, less assignment-driven essays:
ruminations whose length was determined by their own
inner logic, rather than by editors' needs or the appetites
of the publishing market, and of whose production schedule
I was the primary -- sometimes the sole -- determinant.
The kind of projects, that is, usually produced by people
who are either independently wealthy or else leading
the academic life.
As it happened, by the early 1980s, though I hadn't
exactly turned into an academic (at least in my own
head), I'd taken on an extensive though not full-time
teaching commitment at New York University, and had
scaled back my writing for magazines considerably. At
that juncture I'd also decided that undertaking a formal
course of study in mass media and communications would
have developmental value for my work. I found a doctoral
program that suited me (headed by Neil Postman) at N.Y.U.,
and enrolled therein. I chose to concentrate my work
within that program on an issue that I'd first raised
-- in passing, and in a few brief sentences -- in that
synopsized history of photography for The New Columbia
Encyclopaedia; its barely articulated implications
had nagged at me ever since I'd mailed in my typescript.
The chronologically second essay contained here, "Lentil
Soup: A Meditation on Lens Culture," came out of
my research towards that end; addressing the pre-photographic
history of the lens as a technology, it's the most widely
published and translated of my essays to date.
Several of these texts -- "On Redaction,"
"The Destruction Business," "Documentary,
Photojournalism and Press Photography Now," and
the book's brief epilogue, "Items for An Agenda"--
grew out of or were first presented as public lectures
or formal papers for symposia, while several others
that began as texts for the page turned into such papers:
"The Image in Question: Further Notes on the Directorial
Mode" and the essay on Edward S. Curtis have both
been polished through public performance. Two more of
the essays -- "The Image in Question" and
"Mutant Media: Photo/Montage/Collage" -- began
their lives as commissioned catalogue introductions
for survey shows of recent work in their respective
modes, directorial imagery and hybrid forms of photographic
image-making. In all those cases, the core sections
of the first versions turned into building blocks for
these further elaborations of the central ideas, which
now often bear only a marginal resemblance to their
initial appearances.
These essays all link themselves in diverse ways to
each other. The last-named pair, for instance, connect
to the Mortensen essay, on the one hand, and to "The
Vanishing Borderline" -- a rumination on the relationship
between photography and computer art -- on the other.
Similarly, the Curtis essay profits from consideration
alongside the Mortensen piece, since both address the
inevitable excesses of ideologically biased historianship
and its consequences; yet it also functions as a case
study to which the more general ideas propounded in
"Documentary, Photojournalism and Press Photography
Now" can be applied.
By the same token, "Mutant Media," "Documentary,
Photojournalism and Press Photography Now" and
"On Redaction" strike me as interrelated in
that all concern themselves in good part with the absence
of clear definitions for such fundamental terms as photomontage,
photocollage, the several forms of informationally oriented
photography, and the body of work in this medium. They
set out to propose and substantiate such definitions
-- for my own use as a working critic, of course, but
also for anyone else who finds them convenient and helpful.
(Perhaps they can also even serve as articulated reference
points for those who would dispute them, giving them
something fixed and carefully reasoned to counter with
their own alternatives.) Yet my impulse is far from
merely lexicographic; those essays also speak to other,
larger issues, for the consideration of which I felt
some commitment to a precise vocabulary was vital.
Certainly that applies to my own praxis as well. The
book opens with the most recent of these essays, a scrutiny
of the process of criticism itself, specifying -- as
well as I'm able to -- what I think I'm about, what
standards I set for myself, what I hope to achieve with
my work. And it closes with some advice and encouragement
-- for my readers, of course, but for myself, at this
stage of my life and work, as well. I trust in the intelligence
of my readers sufficiently to feel confident that they
will discern the web of correspondences and cross-references
among these separate but related constructs.
*
If there's an underlying
message to all this, it's that it turned out, to my
surprise, that I've come to feel comfortable once again
within the academic environment and its primary modes
of activity. I relish the opportunity to teach, take
great pleasure in the less frequent occasions on which
I can switch roles and become a student, enjoy scholarship
-- love tracking down ideas and leads, spending hours
in the library (no news there, actually -- it had been
a favorite haunt since childhood), the process of citation,
the careful organization of diverse threads of reasoning,
the requirements for buttressed argument. Overall, aside
from some of its mechanics (citing sources, maintaining
bibliographies and such), it proves not much different
from my normal ways of gathering information, checking
it, working out ideas and putting them into written
form, even if that wasn't always visible in the results.
So I've either adapted to scholarship or adapted it
to me. Or, most likely, both. By now I've produced numerous
other such texts, on divers subjects; most have been
published, though not yet collected into book form (several
can be found in Tarnished Silver). I consider
its effect on my work absolutely salutory. Just as my
professional experience as a working essayist and the
resulting imperative of writing an accessible, engaging
prose informed my scholarly work, so the rigors of scholarship,
and what I'd learned from re-engaging with its disciplines
-- and, of course, from the specifics of my researches
-- informed the more fluid, provisional writing I began
to generate from mid-1988 onward, when I began reviewing
and writing a looser criticism and cultural commentary
once again.
Nowadays, they simply seem like alternate hats I wear
on different days. Indeed, to my satisfaction and amusement,
a number of the essays in this book have appeared both
in scholarly journals and (minus their footnotes, but
otherwise unchanged in style and tone) in general-audience
publications aimed at a broad readership -- sometimes
simultaneously. Curiously, nowhere in my engagement
with serious scholarship did I find a requirement for
impenetrability or unclarity of either thought or language;
and no editor of the scholarly journals here and abroad
in which I've published many of these pieces ever complained
about the comparative lack of jargon and trendy locutions,
or the absence of most of the fashionable references
from my cited sources. As Katha Pollitt noted, in regard
to the notorious recent publication of a blatant parody
of such obscurantist writing by the unwitting editors
of the journal Social Text,
the comedy of
the [Alan] Sokal incident is that it suggests that
even the postmodernists don't really understand one
another's writing and make their way through the text
by moving from one familiar name or notion to the
next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way
of lily pads. Lacan . . . performativity . . . Judith
Butler . . . scandal . . . (en)gendering (w)holeness
. . . Lunch!"8
No lily pads here,
I'm afraid; only the clearest water I'm able to supply,
in which both I and my readers will have to sink or
swim. You're on your own for lunch.
*
A few words concerning
the shape of this book. As the individual essays achieved
their final forms, the question of their arrangement
in the book became a challenge. The material neither
lends itself to chronological ordering nor falls into
thematic clusters. No central issue or diegesis emerged
as a linear organizing principle. So I shuffled the
deck repeatedly. Eventually, a loose sequence suggested
itself to me, which I fine-tuned with the input of several
of the book's later readers while it was still in typescript.
Looking at the structure that evolved in that fashion,
I see that I've constructed it neither as a collage
nor as an argument; rather, it is intended as a set
of recurring questions, connected and interweaving.
Where did photography come from? What has it meant to
us until now? What have we scanted, discarded, left
out in considering it, and why? How are we presently
perceiving it? Where might we be heading with it at
the tail end of this century?
My answers to these questions remain necessarily contingent;
so, for that matter, do the questions. It may seem odd
to have spent so much effort in sculpting queries and
responses that may not endure, or may prove wrong-headed.
Perhaps it was. My goal was not just to intersect my
own thinking on one or another subject at a given moment,
but to sum it up. If I felt that, beyond the pleasures
of the texts for myself and my readers, I needed to
justify such expenditure of energy, I'd simply say that
I wanted to see what my own inquiries and lines of reasoning
would look like if they were consciously, patiently
built to last -- even knowing that they won't, because
nothing does.
-- A. D. Coleman
Staten Island, New York
January 1998
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1
Midmarch Arts Press, 1996.
2
"The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition,"
Artforum, Vol. XV, no. 1, September 1976, pp.
55-61. Reprinted in A. D. Coleman, Light Readings:
A Photography Critic's Writings, 1968-1978 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979; University of New
Mexico Press, 1994). For my subsequent thoughts on this
subject, see "The Image in Question: Further Notes
on the Directorial Mode," elsewhere in this volume.
3
"Photography." New Columbia Encyclopedia
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1975????), pp.
2138-2139.
4
Philip Rieff's homage to the footnote in his polemic
Fellow Teachers (New York: Delta Books, 1975),
p. 2, speaks eloquently to its complex function in the
life of the mind.
5
See the Postscript to the essay "Conspicuous by
His Absence: Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance
of William Mortensen," elsewhere in this volume.
6
The Grotesque in Photography (New York: Ridge
Press/Summit Books, 1977).
7
Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings,
l968-1978
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; Galaxy Books
paperback, 1982; second edition, revised and expanded,
University of New Mexico Press, 1998).
8
Pollitt, "Pomolotov Cocktail," The Nation,
Vol. 262, no. 23 (June 10, 1996), p. 9. For more on
this matter, see endnote 24 to the essay "Documentary,
Photojournalism and Press Photography Now," elsewhere
in this volume.
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From Depth of
Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media and Lens Culture
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998)
Copyright
© 1998 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For
reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication
Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F
(718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com
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