I suppose everyone involved in photography who lived through the 1980s has his or her own version of that problematic decade. This book, then, represents mine. It brings together in one place a substantial sampling of the shorter essays and lectures that I produced during the years 1979-1989, a time of remarkable change in the medium and its relation to our culture. The book’s title derives from a passing comment of Richard Kirstel’s: “The premise of photography is that silver tarnishes.”

On one level, Tarnished Silver is intended as an extension of and companion piece to my first volume of selected essays, Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968-1978.¹ By design, the work I’ve chosen to preserve here continues and extends the critical project whose first phase is outlined in Light Readings. There are certainly similarities between the two. The contents of each span eleven years, and were produced for a variety of publications and readerships. Both books range widely and no doubt eccentrically over an ever-broadening field, speak in several different voices, and bring together essays with a number of diverse purposes. In these senses, Tarnished Silver complements Light Readings; taken together, the two provide, to my satisfaction, an effective survey of some central aspects of my work over the twenty-one years they encompass.

Yet I think it is important to point out that, with one exception, all the material collected here postdates the Light Readings period.² Also, unlike its predecessor and that work’s immediate successor,³ this book is not arranged chronologically; contains little that is journalistic and/or diaristic; includes only a few occasional pieces; and consists largely of polemics and ruminative essays. Its relationship to Light Readings notwithstanding, the present volume stands on its own.

Considered as a cross-section drawn from the second phase of my work as a critic, it feels much different to me. For one thing, my voice -- or voices -- appear to have changed. So has at least one major aspect of my self-defined job description: by 1979, when the years covered by this volume begin, I’d long since given up trying to survey the full range of activity in the field, and, with no general-audience forum regularly at my disposal, felt no urgency (even when I felt the urge) to voice an opinion on whatever was new and cutting-edge. That was a let-down, in a way, but also liberating; with nothing breathing down my neck, I was free to follow my nose. This book is a retroactive map of where it led me.⁴ On some issues, it may appear that I stepped out for a beer; and perhaps I did. But I also rethought my overall project, worked some key ideas through, and created a set of reasoned arguments that, as reference points, I was finding increasingly necessary.

Since the nature of my work has been shaped to a considerable extent by the circumstances under which I’ve labored professionally, some description of context seems called for. Let me begin by reminding my faithful readers and informing new ones that I am a working professional critic. This means, among other things, that I’m a writer for hire -- or, as Sadakichi Hartmann once described himself, a “bread and butter writer.” Writing is my livelihood -- a good part of it, anyway; that makes me the commercial producer of a marketable commodity. This doesn’t mean that my opinion is at the disposal of my customers; I’ve never “cut my politics to fit this year’s fashion,” in Lillian Hellman’s phrase, and have chosen to remain a free lance in order to retain my autonomy as a voice. But it does mean that what I produce (and, perhaps more to the point, what I do not produce) is to some extent determined by the nature of the current market for critical writing about photography.

In the decade-plus covered by this volume I published most regularly in two periodicals: Camera 35, whose circulation was somewhere around 100,000 when it closed its doors in 1982; and, from shortly after Camera 35's demise until its demise in the fall of 1986, Lens’ On Campus, a non-newsstand bi-monthly that was distributed in bulk, free of charge, to 100,000 college-level photography teachers and students throughout the U.S. This at least put my work directly into the hands of what I consider to be one of my primary and essential constituencies. But my own search for other vehicles, through which my writing could be made available to the general public, continued during that stretch of time -- and was rewarded at its end.

In the meantime, I adopted some practical strategies for extending my readership. One of these involved publishing different versions of the same core essay in diverse publications whose readerships did not significantly overlap. That has been the case with many of the essays included here.⁵

What did all of this mean, pragmatically speaking? More dealings with more editors over a given essay then ever before in my experience. The more careful shaping, and re-shaping, of pieces whose substance could sustain such attention. Recognition of the patent impossibility of building an extended line of reasoning within the pages of a journal that had commissioned only a single⁶ essay. The consequent necessity of redefining my terms each time out, guessing at the level of sophistication of each new readership, receiving little feedback. The fragmentation of my energies and efforts. The frustration of seeing work reach only a small segment of its potential audience. The distress of discovering that it had actually disappeared without a trace. (Relevant here is the fact that so many of the publications in which these essays originally appeared are now defunct: A Critique of America, Art Express, Camera 35, Camera Lucida, Lens’ On Campus, Photoshow, the SoHo Weekly News. I take some pride in having done my part to counterbalance this trend by serving from 1979 -81 as founding editor of VIEWS: A New England Journal of Photography, which as of this writing is still alive and kicking.)

Two essays elsewhere in this book -- “Damn the Neuroses! Full Speed Ahead! or, Thoughts on the Free-Lance Life” and “Choice of Audience/Choice of Voice” -- speak to this set of issues; further elaboration here would be redundant. Suffice it to say that, as a working writer, I found it a period of struggle and consolidation. But, as has generally been the case, the choice of subject and approach remained largely up to me; what I chose to work on and found outlets for during that time, as reflected in this book and a forthcoming one,⁷ was self-determined, rarely assigned.

Obstacles, in any case, exist as opportunities for growth. In my personal life, I spent that decade making a home and raising my son as a single father. Professionally, I immersed myself more fully in teaching, on both the undergraduate and graduate levels; developed the more scholarly aspect of my temperament, in writing and in formal study of mass media and communications theory;⁸ explored what I wanted to explore, honed my skills, and bided my time. It felt like what jazz musicians call woodshedding; I thought a lot about Sonny Rollins on the Manhattan Bridge. In 1988, a door opened at the New York Observer, and -- with my son grown and leaving home -- I decided to step back through it into regular reviewing once again, bringing the ideas and capacities I’d been developing to bear on an ongoing discussion of photography in the ’90s.

For the purpose of sketching my concerns during that period, I have divided this book into five sections. The “Prelude,” “Choice of Audience/Choice of Voice,” synthesizes some of what I thought I’d learned by 1979 about the situation of the critic in our time. “Barometric Pressures” addresses the state of photography criticism and photography education, power shifts in the contemporary photography establishment, the influence of corporate and governmental sponsorship, the emerging international photography scene, and other noteworthy aspects of photographic activity. “Paradigm Shift” brings together three interlocking essays on the “snapshot aesthetic”: discussions of two of its practitioners and one of its institutional champions.

The search for pan-stylistic linkages was already an undercurrent in my work by the late 1970s. Increasingly, I’ve felt the urge to trace connective relationships between images, theories, and ways of working, to seek evidence of pattern, the spoor of morphology. The ideal outlet for that yearning, in my opinion, is the well-illustrated critical survey in book form. Numerous such projects of mine have been formulated, but only one of them -- The Grotesque in Photography⁹ -- has been fully realized. While some of the rooms in this “museum without walls” exist only in my head, others have been sketched out on paper. My essay on “The Directorial Mode” in Light Readings is one instance. Four more of these -- on the autobiographical mode, the still life, the erotic, and hybrid forms -- have been included here, in the section of the book titled “Revisionism and Gap-Filling.” They represent my attempts to build larger, more coherent wholes out of the heaps of contemporary work. This section also contains brief meditations on such issues as the historiography of photography, and color photography and the criticism thereof.

Finally, the concluding section brings together four essays on issues of sex and censorship in photography, one of my areas of continuing concern. In retrospect, these seem sadly prophetic of the way things went toward the end of the ’80s.

>It’s my hope that the book’s structure will reward the reader who chooses to travel through it from beginning to end; at the same time, since each essay was created to stand as a self -contained statement, the pleasures of browsing should not be precluded. The editing of this volume has provided the opportunity to bring these component essays, separately created, together as a coherent unit for the first time. As a result, I begin to have some sense of what they represent in aggregate. It is in this regard, I suspect, that my critics will be most useful to me in their interpretations of this book, as they were with its predecessor.

Given its omissions, and its idiosyncratic obsessions, I’d be surprised if this book captures the flavor of anyone else’s 1980s except mine. I make no apologies for that. I found it a difficult decade, to say the least. Nonetheless, as is my wont, I kept busy, and tried to use my time well. I hope these distillations of those efforts reward your attention.