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Acknowledgements
and Preface to A.
D. Coleman: Writings on Photography and Related Matters,
1968-1995, A Bibliography
edited by Nancy Solomon
Acknowledgements
My introduction to photography
as a subject worthy of serious consideration came during
a brief hiatus between my completing graduate studies
in English literature and creative writing in late 1966
and my launching myself into full-time free-lancing
in mid-1968.
During that interim phase, I worked an an assistant
editor at Da Capo Press, a division of Plenum Publishing
Corporation, a scientific-technical publishing house
founded by my parents, Earl and Frances Coleman. Da
Capo had started as a reprint project specializing in
works on music, had then branched out into the other
arts, and was beginning to generate original titles
as well. Alan J. Marks, the editor under whom I worked
there, was a knowledgeable collector of rare books and
prints, and had begun to turn his attention -- and the
press’s -- to photography. Through Alan, I came
to know and love William M. Ivins’s classic Prints
and Visual Communication, of which Da Capo produced
the first reprint edition; got to watch the production
of a facsimile edition of Fox Talbot's The Pencil
of Nature aspects of the production of the second
edition of Paul Strand’s The Mexican Portfolio,
co-produced by Da Capo and the Aperture Foundation;
familiarized myself with aperture magazine and
the ideas of Minor White and others; and met a number
of photographers working in different ways.
One day, Alan walked into the office with a Paul Caponigro
print he’d just purchased -- a wonderful rendering
of Caponigro’s “Untitled, West Hartford, Connecticut,”
a 1959 study of the vertical face of a rock quarry.
He propped it up on a shelf and told me, “Look
at that -- it’s a miracle of seeing.” I did,
and over a few days’ time came to understand what
he meant and what Caponigro had done. In some ways,
that’s where these efforts of mine found their
initial spark. So I thank Alan for that unintended gift.
The research I did for the press on its photography
projects during that year, my office dialogues on the
subject with Alan, and the faltering first conversations
I had with photographers during that time (as well as
the discussions on which I was privileged to eavesdrop
in the office), constituted a significant aspect of
my introduction to the medium. Because writing has always
served as one of my primary means for coming to terms
with my experience, the hankering to write about photography
began to manifest itself. Michael Hoffman of aperture
-- then one of the medium’s few “little”
magazines and outlets for serious criticism -- was the
first to encourage me to start putting my thoughts down
on paper. He didn’t publish any of those early
efforts, but that push started me off; I thank him for
nudging me at what proved to be an auspicious moment.
However, I do not think that either of these two gentlemen
should be held accountable in any way for what ensued.
*
From the very beginning, this
bibliographic project has depended largely on the energies
of others -- more so, surely, than any other book that
bears my name. The demands of time aside, I did not
think I could effectively synopsize my own writings;
I'd already made them as compact as possible, from my
standpoint. The perspective of outside readers on what
was essential to mention for reference and retrieval
purposes was required for this. So I have left the creation
of this tool largely to others, restricting myself to
a supervisory and advisory role.
Fortunately, I found willing and capable helpers all
along the way. Until near the end, none of them had
bibliographic training, and I provided them with no
formal model for their synopses. The basic publication
information has been conformed to a standard style;
the synopses, however, are both idiosyncratic and inconsistent,
a limitation for which I as project supervisor am solely
accountable. With my inexpert guidance, these assistants
did the best they could, which overall seems very well
indeed. In approximately chronological order, then:
Steven W. Albahari, whose dedication to getting this
project off the ground and yeoman's work on my early
writings in the first months of 1981 first gave it shape
and made it seem possible; Harris Fogel, Peter Walts
and JoAnn Frank, who moved it forward incrementally
at various stages; Edward Q. Bridges, who produced about
ten year's worth of entries covering the '80s and early
'90s, and conformed the whole project to a standard
format proposed by the CCP's Nancy Solomon; Harris Sibunruang,
who revised the initial New York Times listings
to make them more substantial and useful; and Tanya
Murray, who did the same with the original Village
Voice and Popular Photography listings, and
also brought the entire bibliography up to date through
1995.
Sometime in the mid-1980s I began to realize that this
reference material, originally created strictly to serve
my own organizational and retrieval needs, might prove
useful to others. By early 1987 I found myself in correspondence
with James L. Enyeart, then director of the Center for
Creative Photography, over the possibility of the CCP
publishing it as a research tool. As that indicates,
the process moved slowly; but the results are before
you, and I believe it has proved itself worth the wait.
The initial encouragement of Jim, and the subsequent
support of Terence Pitts, who replaced him, was invaluable
during the making of this reference work. So too was
the labor on its behalf of the Center's Amy Rule, and
especially that of the incomparable Nancy Solomon, its
true midwife, whose enthusiasm and determination never
waned and whose sense of order far exceeds my own; between
them, they taught me a great deal about the premises
on which research tools are built.
In the winter of 1996-97 the Center honored me by selecting
me as its second Ansel and Virginia Adams Distinguished
Scholar-in-Residence, specifically to work on this bibliography
and explore the CCP's William Mortensen holdings. During
those months, working under the direction of Amy Rule,
Nancy Solomon, archivist Leslie Calmes, and myself,
a small band of volunteers -- Lauren Smith, Michael
Eisner, Jeanne Fransen, Lisa Reddig, Jessica L. Mackta
and Jacinda M. Russell (most notably the last-named
two), all graduate students in the University of Arizona's
Department of Photography(?) -- made contributions
that added greatly to its completeness, consistency,
clarity, accuracy and usefulness.
Finally, a bibliography is only as useful as its retrieval
system allows it to be; Linda Gregonis, the indexer,
has made it all as accessible as possible.
Thanks are owed to all of the above, without whom this
book would not be in your hands, or mine. And a special
thanks to Terry Pitts -- for his friendship; for his
introductory note, which does as succinct a job as I
could hope for of putting this project in context; but,
most of all, for his unflagging good humor, encouragement,
well-timed prodding, and absolute faith in our collective
ability to make this idea a reality.
-- A. D. Coleman
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Foreword/Preface:
Feeding the Lake
When
I wrote my first brief essays on photography in 1967,
and began publishing them some months later in 1968,
I had absolutely no idea that I was initiating an
endeavor that would result, more than thirty years
later, in what's summarized by the book before you.
As I've noted elsewhere,1
in starting out on this project I was directly inspired
by the writings of four people: William M. Ivins,
Jr.; Marshall McLuhan; Minor White; and Ralph Hattersley.
None of them, however, were working critics; they
functioned primarily as theorists and educators. Indeed,
aside from Sadakichi Hartmann and, to a lesser extent,
Charles H. Caffin, photography had never enjoyed the
presence of a working critic committed to its regular
scrutiny over some extended period of time. Hence
its critical literature up until then -- even that
generated by its part-time critics and occasional
commentators -- must be described as sporadic and
thin. This meant that, more than a century and a quarter
after its invention, photography for the most part
lacked what Hugh Kenner, in one of this bibliography's
epigraphs, defines as a critical tradition:
"a continuum of understanding, early commenced."2
The thought of making some contribution toward the
development of such a "continuum of understanding"
appealed to me. Not only did that tradition not then
exist, however, but hardly any predecessors even exemplified
its possibilities. The closest thing I had to a role
model at the time was James Agee. Certainly I admired
his few writings about photography, his well-known
appreciations of Walker Evans and Helen Levitt (though
I found them a bit overwrought and mystical). But
his extensive critical commentary on a parallel medium,
film, written from the perspective of a thoughtful,
attentive lay member of the general audience, achieved
exactly the mix of accessibility, provocation and
insight toward which I set out to work my way.
Even today, though I’m years older than he was
when he died, I am not the stylist Agee was, nor the
poet, nor likely to become so. But I'd like to believe
that I've managed to bring a similarly literate, autodidactical
attention to bear on still photography and ask some
useful questions, serving to stimulate the medium's
audience into thinking more critically about something
they were experiencing constantly but taking for granted
-- in my case, photographs, photographers and photography.
Critical writing about photography is, in any case,
a subset of critical writing in general, which in
turn forms a category (though not often enough acknowledged
as such) of literature. And I feel toward my little
corner of that territory as Jean Rhys felt about hers:
"All of writing is a huge lake. There are great
rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
And there are trickles like Jean Rhys. All that matters
is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake
matters. You must keep feeding the lake."
In the process of tracing the history of the criticism
of photography -- first for my own purposes as a working
critic, and subsequently as a teacher of workshops,
seminars and full courses on that subject -- I gradually
came to know a good deal about Sadakichi Hartmann,
whom I think of as my forebear in the field. Not so
much in his flamboyantly caped and behatted "King
of Bohemia" mode (though I'm impressed to recollect
that Edward Weston proclaimed him one of the finest
interpretive dancers he'd ever seen), but in his enthusiastic
embrace of the role of the professional critic, and
his acceptance of photography as meriting such concentrated
thought.
Photography was only one of the visual arts to which
Hartmann attended, but he treated it with the utmost
seriousness and engaged wholeheartedly in its theorizing
and its battles. From that, and from his determination
to survive as what he called a "bread-and-butter
critic," I drew much encouragement -- although,
in regard to the latter aspect of his life, I regretfully
conclude after over thirty free-lance years that it’s
no accident he died in poverty; Calvin Trillin spoke
true when he opined, "I basically don't think
God intended for people to make a living by writing."3
Not by writing criticism, at least. Be that as it
may, both these writers, Agee and Hartmann, have contributed
considerably by their examples to the project encapsulated
by this bibliography.
In prefatory comments to my several volumes of collected
essays -- Light Readings, Critical Focus,
Tarnished Silver, Depth of Field, The
Digital Evolution and the forthcoming Available
Light -- I’ve discussed the various phases
of my working life and its professional context(s),
and have elaborated considerably on those matters
in some of the published interviews with me listed
elsewhere in this volume. Rather than reiterate all
that here, I prefer to point the reader interested
in such issues toward those more expansive accounts
of my experiences and what I learned therefrom. More
to the point, I think, are the whys and wherefores
of this bibliography as a reference work.
The present volume's origins, as a publication in
and of itself, are quite humble. By the early 1980s
I'd published enough essays that, even though I'd
clipped and saved all of them systematically in looseleaf
binders, I began to have trouble locating them for
my own purposes. Also, at that time, scholars, researchers,
students and others had begun writing to me more and
more frequently, requesting both photocopies of various
of my essays and citations -- basic bibliographic
references -- for them. Tiring of replicating these
by typing them out each time (those were the pre-digital
days, after all), I decided that a simple bibliography
-- comprising the necessary publication information
plus short synopses of the essays -- would serve those
needs adequately for everyone concerned; I'd be enabled
to track down my own essays in their binders, and
I could photocopy the entries to answer queries. With
the help of an intern, Steven W. Albahari, a rudimentary
bibliography of my writings through early 1981 was
produced.4
In fits and starts, the project moved forward thereafter.
By the late 1980s the number of my publications had
grown to such a point, and the bibliography along
with it, that it had become a potential publication
in the making, with the Center for Creative Photography
as its designated sponsor. From then on, it was just
a matter of time until it found final printed form.
But for the heroic efforts of Ed Bridges, who worked
on it as my assistant for several years, and the devoted
labors of Tanya Murray, who volunteered to complete
it, however, that day would still be far off.
The CCP's designation of me as its Ansel and Virginia
Adams Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence in late 1996
allowed me to spend time once again with the original
material (which, by then, had mostly entered the archive).
Perhaps even more importantly, it enabled me to move
from a sporadic correspondence relationship into extensive
face-to-face dialogue with the CCP's Amy Rule and
Nancy Solomon, who guided me through something not
unlike psychoanalysis applied to the sphere of scholarship
and research: a gradual laying bare and naming and
evaluating and rethinking of previously unarticulated
motives and unidentified patterns in the organization
of my life's work.5
In doing so, they brought to bear on this project
a level of professional attention, experience and
expertise (not to mention infinite patience) that
resolved most of the structural and stylistic problems
still outstanding at that point; they also supervised
the work of the graduate students who helped us fill
in many of the gaps in these entries. That concentrated
period of collaborative effort finally shaped the
raw material into something I could begin to imagine
we'd finish, though I don't think I actually believed
that until March 12, 1999, when -- during the Society
for Photographic Education's National Conference in
Tucson -- Nancy placed a bound draft copy of the page
proofs in my hands, and a stack of pre-publication
order forms for it on the CCP's table.
As this suggests, most of the work on this reference
book was done by others, whose assistance is indicated
in the Acknowledgements. The end result, I hope, is
a basic reference tool that makes accessible a large
variety of writings revolving around the hub issue
of photography and addressing, in various ways, the
medium itself and many of its ramifications. Since
these texts were published in exhibition catalogues,
"little" magazines, photographers' monographs,
encyclopaedias, obscure scholarly journals, weekly
newspapers, regional U.S. publications, periodicals
from abroad, and other vehicles not widely distributed
even in the U.S., the bulk of my output and the diversity
of my interests and approaches have not been easily
visible or accessible to anyone. Aside from myself,
no one I know of has read all my writings; and many
of even my most faithful readers have missed a number
of what I consider to be my key essays. Short of putting
copies of all the published versions of all these
essays into your hands, an impossible challenge, I
could find no way of bringing that extensive body
of work closer to you;6
this resource at least tells you where to go to locate
it for yourself, and sketches what you will find there.7
*
This bibliography's final shape
merits some discussion. Early on in the process of converting
it to its protoype as a publication, we had to decide
on an organizational structure. I had always kept the
clippings of the published versions of my essays on
which it's based in looseleaf binders, running in chronological
order (along with all editors’ published introductions
to any essays, all readers’ published responses
to any of them from those same periodicals, and all
published interviews with me).8
However, once I established an ongoing, working relationship
with any publication, and became a regular contributor
thereto, I established separate binders in which all
my appearances within that periodical's pages were contained,
arranged once again in chronological order.9
There were also separate, chronologically ordered binders
for "assorted publications" (those periodicals
to which I was only a one-time or merely occasional
contributor), for introductions and catalogue essays,
for translations, for interviews with me, and for essays
on subjects other than photography, art, and related
issues.10
Putting everything back into the hopper and reorganizing
my total output strictly chronologically would have
been a considerable but not impossible task. However,
part of our goal with this volume was to reflect the
original structure of the archival material on which
it's based, which is entering the Center's collection
at this time -- and that's not how the dozens of binders
I shipped to Tucson were organized. So we decided to
stick pretty much with the way I'd filed the material.11
Beyond reflecting accurately my own organizational method,
the advantage of our current system is that you get
to see the scope and development of what I covered (and
didn't) in every one of my long-term outlets, some indication
of how I conceptualized and used each steady forum,
major and minor, over a period of time -- which you
couldn't do otherwise. What we lose with our schema
is the sense of what I produced as it came out, piece
by piece: the actual flow of my output (or, more precisely,
the flow of its appearance in print, not exactly the
same thing). Seems like a toss-up to me; my apologies
to those who'd prefer the alternative.12
We hope that the structure we chose proves basically
workable, and that the extensive indices (the heart
of any bibliography) and cross-references allow access
to everything you might need.
The discovery of some errata in such a sizeable project
would not shock me; however, to the best of the abilities
of all those involved, this reference tool is accurate.
And, to the best of my knowledge, it is absolutely comprehensive
and complete for the period it covers. We've gone through
it, a number of times, with a fine-toothed comb, and
I've had ample opportunity to make any necessary corrections.
So final accountability for any and all mistakes rests
with me, not with my collaborators.
This bibliography stops at the end of December 1995;
I, of course, did not. We needed a closing date; though
not exactly arbitrary -- mad optimists that we are,
we had hopes of finishing it by the spring of 1997 --
it does not represent any symbolic transition point
or terminus. To the contrary, it catches me, in effect,
in mid-stride. By the time it reaches the printers I'll
have published some 200 additional essays; and though,
as a working writer, I now cover a broader range of
subjects than ever before for a wider variety of publications,
I foresee no end to my engagement with photography.
So I've I begun to consider this as an ongoing project
-- especially in its eventual electronic/online edition.
The updating needed to make this bibliography current
through the present is already underway; and, with its
structure and style now set, the process can be more
systematic. I anticipate expanding it not only with
entries decribing new publications of my own but also
with the additional kinds of entries one finds in standard
bibliographies: references to and comments on my work
in the writings of others.13
Information about the progress of that project will
be posted at my own website (www.nearbycafe.com). An
online, searchable version of this volume is posted
at this website and at www.creativephotography.org.
*
Over time, I've managed to publish,
somewhere or other, virtually everything I've written
on photography. During the years encompassed by this
bibliography there were of course outlines for various
unrealized book projects, large and small; a number
of planned essays (or wished-for assignments) never
undertaken due to lack of editorial sponsorship or limitations
of my own time, money and energy; a few untranscribed
or hitherto unpublished interviews with photographers
(for which I still have hopes, and schemes); and, of
course, the chronic scribbler's inevitable heap of raw
notes. But, though the Center now houses some yards
of my correspondence and typescripts, there's no hefty
stack of unpublished texts there awaiting discovery;
nothing more than a dozen typescripts of essays, all
of them minor, that for one reason or another never
made it into print. What I've produced, I've published,
which means that I have done whatever I could to put
it in the hands of its optimum and maximum audiences.
This also means that what you see in this book is what
you get. Researchers using the archive will find tearsheets
and clippings of the writing as it actually appeared
in print.
For about the first decade of my professional life,
I discarded the carbon copy of an essay submitted for
publication once it was printed. (Short-sightedly, I
hadn't yet begun to explore the licensing of subsidiary
rights, so those carbons just cluttered up the office.)
Circa 1980 I began to keep copies of my final drafts
on file, for possible revision and/or submission, as
written, to additional outlets. Those have now been
deposited with the CCP as well.
I've never bothered to hang on to early drafts of my
finished essays, which announcement may well discourage
any graduate student hoping to uncover something about
my working method as a writer by comparative analysis
thereof. That's the plan. I do not believe that the
world of scholarship would gain much from studying my
fits and starts, my discards and failures, and have
decided to preclude any such efforts, confident that
inquiring minds will have better (or at least other)
things to do. Consider that my own personal Paperwork
Reduction Act.
However, over the years -- and especially since mid-1988,
when I began writing regularly once again as a reviewer
-- I have published different versions of numerous essays.
Some of the pieces listed here have appeared over a
dozen times in English alone, in one form or another.
As I hold no brief against researchers comparing and
contrasting variations that I felt were worth some readers'
time, we have made every attempt to indicate such variants
in the bibliographic entries that follow; and the Center’s
archives hold all those variant typescripts.14
*
I hope that researchers in various
disciplines will find this resource both useful and
usable. Because my own interests range widely, I suspect
it may prove valuable not only to those involved with
photography but also to others in such fields as art
and art history, media studies, American studies, cultural
studies, critical theory, visual anthropology and sociology,
visual communication -- even, with my essays on the
pre-photographic history of the lens taken into account,
the philosophy and history of science. If, in addition
to serving their needs, it also brings new readers --
scholars, teachers, students -- to some pertinent older
material of mine that they wouldn't have come across
otherwise, thus giving it an ongoing life and usefulness,
I'll feel the effort it's required from all those involved
in its production has more than justified itself.
-- A. D. Coleman
Staten Island, New York
January 2000
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Notes
1
"Preface," Light Readings: A Photography
Critic's Writings, l968-1978 (New York: University
of New Mexico Press, 1998), p. xxii.
2Hugh
Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1971), p. 415.
3
In a public lecture, College of Staten Island, New York,
April 19, 1980.
4
Steven came to me as an undergraduate on a work-study
assignment from Bennington College in the winter/spring
of 1981. Among the many chores to which he set his hand
was the first draft of this bibliography. I'd thought
he might get a few hundred entries done; on his last
day with me he presented me with two copies of a bibliography
complete up to that date. Steven was then trying to
decide between a life in music and a life in photography.
He's since become the publisher of the extraordinary
periodical 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography
and other projects, as well as a dedicated photographer
in his own right. He claims he owes it all to me, but
I know better.
5
These discussions educated me in areas I'd never before
contemplated, including the complex interaction between
primary research materials in an archive and bibliographic
annotation thereof.
6
However, I'm doing my level best to make the most important
and durable of these writings available in book form.
In addition to the half-dozen collections of my essays
already published and in print, listed in this bibliography's
first section, I have at least as many more in various
stages of redaction; some are already scheduled for
publication, while others await their publishers.
7
Photocopies of any of these essays, (in their original,
published forms) can be ordered from CODA Enterprises,
POB 040078, Staten Island, New York 10304-0002 USA;
T/F (718) 447-3091, coda@nearbycafe.com. Write, call,
fax or e-mail for further details.
8
The purpose of these binders was simply to maintain
an accessible repository of everything I published,
and everything I said in print via published interviews,
along with the response to it -- editors' introductions,
readers' letters -- that it evoked within the pages
of the periodicals in which that work appeared. Those
strict parameters define and delimit this research tool.
(The occasional missing volume, issue, and page-number
information in early entries results from my own laxity
in recording that information in these binders; I welcome
users' additions to and corrections of these entries,
which will be made and credited in any subsequent editions.)
9 I've
appended a listing of my formal, long-term writing relationships
and other official positions with periodicals to this
preface.
10
While photography and its various corollary issues has
served as my central focus, over the past thirty-odd
years I've written and published essays about numerous
other subjects -- at greatest length, theater (as a
third-string drama critic for the Village Voice,
1967-68), but also music, politics, cooking, and quite
a few more. The CCP's archive also contains binders
of clippings of the published versions of those writings
through 1995, but they are not listed or synopsized
in this volume.
11
See note 5, above.
12 However,
we did begin working toward some electronic version
of this database, to be made available either as a computer
diskette, a CD-ROM, or an online database on the Internet
(or more than one of those options). We've elected to
post it as a pdf file, downloadable for free and readable
with Adobe Acrobat Exchange. This is an ongoing project,
planned for periodic updating; perhaps, in some future
version, we'll get to have our cake and eat it too in
that regard -- by building in some commands that will
let the user shift from a totally chronological order
to chronological within each publication, and retrieve
data in other ways as well.
13
I've kept no specific file, scrapbook, or list of other
people's commentary on me and my work, though copies
of and/or references to many of those exist within my
archives and are sometimes mentioned in my own writings.
As indicated previously, a few elements of that
much larger bibliography are contained in this one,
but its production will require the efforts of another
cadre of researchers, in that case starting from close
to scratch.
14
A brief note in that regard: The most substantial editorial
pruning my essays ever received, and the closest line
editing to which they were subjected, came from my editors
at the New York Observer. None of those changes
-- most of them made in consultation with me -- did
any harm to my prose; some may even have done good.
However, aside from a few minor benefits of assiduous
Observer fact-checking, I did not transcribe
those changes to my own master versions of those essays.
Hence the variants of them that I published subsequently
-- in my "Letter from" in Photo Metro
and elsewhere -- are either the original, full versions
of those essays or my own revisions thereof, before
editorial changes and cutting for reasons of space by
others.
This seems like a logical place (or at least a handy
one) to add the following information: As is the case
for almost everyone who writes for newspapers, I had
neither control over nor even advisory say concerning
any of the headlines for my articles in the New York
Observer, the Village Voice, or the New
York Times. Those were devised by others; though
rarely objectionable or glaringly inaccurate, they do
not necessarily reflect either the tone or the central
issues of those essays. The titles of most of the other
essays covered here came from me, and I consider them
integral to the essays.
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From A. D. Coleman: Writings
on Photography and Related Matters, 1968-1995, A Bibliography
(Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 2000).
Copyright
© 2000 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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