I started looking seriously at and writing about photographs in 1967; my first essay on the subject was published on June 20th, 1968,⁵ almost exactly three decades from the moment at which I write this. In retrospect, I see that -- fortuitously and not by plan (at least not my own) or foresight, mostly by sheer coincidence -- I stepped into the field of photography at the very end of the calm before the storm.

My point of entry was New York City, where I'd grown up and -- after a brief west coast interlude -- was once again based. Because I came to the situation young (I was twenty-four in '67) and from outside the medium (a writer, not a photographer), I'd missed some of what now seem obvious harbingers in New York of what was soon to come. Helen Gee's Limelight had already been there and gone; this coffee house, between 1954 and 1961, functioned not only as the city's first photo-specific gallery but also as a central meeting place for photographers, curators, picture editors and others involved with or interested in the medium.⁶ I'd known of its existence, in a vague way; yet while I'd popped in and out of it during my aspiring-Beat Greenwich Village adolescence I must confess I'd never once looked at the pictures on the walls. Roy DeCarava had long since closed his short-lived, pioneering little gallery,⁷ which also preceded by a decade my interest in the medium. And, more recently, the Association of Heliographers had imploded in early 1966, taking with it their germinal midtown gallery space.⁸ I'd been away from New York, doing graduate work in literature and creative writing in northern California, during that group's brief heyday, but probably wouldn't have encountered them even if I'd stayed put. Before 1967 I wasn't paying much mind to photography, and after that I was.

So what did I find when I started attending to photographs in 1967?

The public perception of photography as a creative medium just then had been largely shaped -- not only in the U.S. but internationally -- by Edward Steichen's blockbuster survey, The Family of Man (1955), still traveling world-wide at that juncture, its catalogue version already esconced as the most popular photography book of all time. Leaving aside the complex debate over that exhibition's flaws and virtues (except to point out that it was hugely controversial within the field at the time of its birth and thereafter), let us simply note that it placed its emphasis on stylistically traditional, extroverted, denotative and subject-dominated imagery, for the most part setting aside experimental tendencies, the medium's relation to abstraction and the photographer's inner life. That there were photographers of other, indeed opposite inclinations -- and that some of the very images in that show had been drastically recontextualized from their bodies of work -- remained a relatively well-kept secret.

In New York -- even at that time the acknowledged photography center of the world -- only one institution, the Museum of Modern Art, exhibited photographs continuously and maintained on public display an elementary survey of the medium's history.The Modern also had a department devoted to the medium, as did the Brooklyn Museum (the latter's department, in fact, was founded shortly before the Modern's, and had accumulated a notable collection, but did not make such active use of its holdings as did MoMA's.) John Szarkowski, a dark-horse candidate for the job, headed the well-established and world-famous MoMA department, having taken over for Steichen in 1963; he'd already mounted several key shows that began to define his curatorial aesthetic, perhaps most notably "The Photographer's Eye" of 1966, a formalist rationale for camera vision that, especially in its book form, would influence a generation or two of photographers.

The next year, 1967, Szarkowski put up the "New Documents" show that first brought serious attention to Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus; in many ways, those two exhibits set the course of photography for the next ten years.⁹ Due to the international clout of the Modern in all media, to Szarkowski's own growing power in the field, and in no small part to the enduring impact of The Family of Man , at that point -- and for at least the next decade -- the MoMA Department of Photography was the medium's 800-pound gorilla: as I put it in an essay written years later, "The directorship of that department is unquestionably the single most influential sponsorial position in contemporary creative photography."¹⁰

The Metropolitan Museum of Art had its magnificent Alfred Stieglitz collection, and assorted other important materials, including a good bit of essential 19th-century work -- much of it gathered foresightfully by William M. Ivins, who'd been the Met's first curator of prints from 1916-46 -- and other significant bits and pieces that had trickled in erratically. But that material lay there neglected, available to researchers yet all but buried. The late John McKendry, then the Met's curator of prints and drawings (and the man who, with evident delight, first introduced me to a young leather boy named Robert Mapplethorpe), had little interest in the medium, and mounted only the most haphazard and desultory exhibits thereof -- largely, it seemed to me after a few years of writing about this situation, as a result of my public goading.¹¹

In those days neither the Guggenheim Museum nor the Whitney ever mounted anything photographic, or collected photographic work of any kind -- regrettable decisions, surely, since they'll now pay millions for material with which to build their recently initiated collections, material they could have had for mere thousands of dollars as recently as 1980. Some of the city's other museums (such as the Museum of the City of New York) had photography collections, a few of them even somewhat thematic or otherwise rationalized. But they mounted photography shows only sporadically, if at all. Most of them generated their own infrequent exhibits; few photo exhibitions then traveled -- there was no established "circuit" for such shows -- and few of those that did go on the road made it to this city. The now-defunct Riverside Museum had a working relationship with Cornell Capa, and mounted some valuable surveys of "concerned photography," but the International Center of Photography was not yet a visible gleam in Capa's eye.

No commercial gallery devoted itself exclusively or even primarily to photography; hardly any art galleries included photographers in their stables, and very few showed any photography at all -- save for a handful specializing in avant-garde art, in which "conceptual" artists were beginning to show photo-documentation of their works and ideas (not to be considered as or in relation to photography, they insisted almost universally). The era of not-for-profit venues and/or "artists' spaces" had just begun, fueled in part by National Endowment for the Arts and (in this state) New York State Council On the Arts funding; photo-specific showcases of both sorts would emerge within the next few years, but none were yet extant.

The best and most sought-after regular showcase for photography outside MoMA's small gallery for rotating shows was Norbert Kleber's Underground Gallery, at 51 East 10th Street -- right in the heart of the East Village. This run-down, newly hip, ethnically diverse neighborhood had considerable art-world history (from the Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art years) and much '50s and '60s jazz action (at the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place and elsewhere) to its credit, and a goodly amount of literary history as well, most notably the poetry and theater events at St. Mark's in the Bouwerie Church and a coffee house called Les Deux MŽgots -- both of them, coincidentally, also on 10th Street -- where experimental poets like Jackson MacLow read.¹² In fact, it was New York's center for what was beginning to be called "the counter-culture." The Fillmore East and other rock venues were up and running there; off-off-Broadway theater -- Sam Shepard et al -- was virtually birthed in its basements; the East Village Other and Al Goldstein's Screw were edited and published nearby, along with various other underground papers; the Fugs, Tuli Kupferberg's and Ed Sanders's radical rock group, headquartered there (Sanders's Peace Eye Book Store was located there as well). Alternative lifestyles and experimental media were thriving in those buildings and storefronts and parks and streets. Certainly the area had the right Big Apple karma as the seedbed for a revolution in the arts, one that would include photography as a matter of course.

Kleber worked out of (and, as I recall, perhaps mistakenly, even lived in) a brownstone apartment you entered by walking through the building's front gate, under the stoop, and down a few steps -- hence his gallery's name. Norbert made his living renting high-end photo equipment to professional photographers for commercial shoots out of the apartment's back end, but he'd turned the long, low-ceilinged front room of his apartment into a clean, spare, handsome display space, complete with white walls and track lights.¹³ One could hang several dozen prints there, in a single row around the walls, and give them room to breathe. It wasn't exactly the hushed chapel of Stieglitz's "291" or "An American Place," nor did it have quite the pristine spaciousness of that archetypal venue Brian O'Doherty dubbed "the white cube,"¹⁴ a style of art environment already widely available to artists in other media, but it came close: the work received serious, respectful treatment on the walls, and there were press releases, announcement cards, perhaps even an occasional poster, and wine-and-cheese openings.¹⁵

Aside from that, there were various less amenable and desirable options, mainly the anterooms of many of the city's camera stores, commercial labs and custom-processing houses, some of which regularly mounted exhibitions: Portogallo, Modernage, Willoughby's, The Darkroom. Then came the public libraries with glass-covered wall-mounted display cases and/or vitrines; a few college and university or community-center "galleries" (commonly the entrance area, or some long, hard-to-locate hallway); bank and other institutional lobbies; and the occasional restaurant or coffee-house that put photos on the walls behind the tables (usually unviewable in ambient light during normal business hours) or, more rarely, following the Limelight model, set aside a better-designed and more functional viewing space for them.

And outside New York? Up in Boston there was the Carl Siembab Gallery, and out in San Francisco Helen Johnston's Focus Gallery -- neither one significantly profitable, both labors of love, then known to me only by report. The George Eastman House (not yet the International Museum of Photography) mounted exhibits, maintained a major collection, and published a small journal, at that point the only English-language periodical devoted to the medium's history and conservation; but the GEH was remote, located in Rochester, in upstate New York, and had little direct impact on the New York City scene. Beaumont Newhall had retreated there after his departure from the MoMA department -- a transition forced by the museum's appointment of Edward Steichen over him as the head of that department in 1947, an event that had proven schismatic in the small, tight world of creative photography, and whose consequent atmosphere of betrayal and allegiance still festered in the local and national scenes.¹⁶

Fact was, however, that -- Steichen's machinations aside -- Newhall, as evidenced by his subsequent activities, had little interest in post-World War II photography (aside from tracking the later work of Group f.64's members), and was probably ill-suited to head either a department or a museum obligated to address the full spectrum of post-war photographic picture-making; the final edition of his History, published in 1982, treats the '60's and '70s summarily and unenthusiastically. Whatever attention to younger and/or more experimental practitioners Eastman House manifested during his tenure, and whatever influence on the then-current field of ideas it exercised, came less from his inclinations than from the survey exhibitions and (even more important, because they circulated much more widely) the accompanying catalogues that Nathan Lyons organized for that institution: Toward A Social Landscape, The Persistence of Vision, Vision and Expression, Photography in the Twentieth Century. These, along with the germinal anthology Lyons edited during that same period, Photographers on Photography, constituted a goodly chunk of the in-print literature of photography at that juncture, and provided more than an inkling that the medium's current practitioners represented a far greater diversity of approaches to praxis than was commonly understood.

Speaking of that literature: The plethora of serious books on photography that overwhelms all of us in the field today stands in starkest contrast to what one could find in bookstores or order from publishers circa 1967. Newhall's perennially in-print History -- the "revised and enlarged" 1964 edition -- was firmly entrenched as the standard narrative of the medium's origins, evolution and acculturation, though Helmut and Alison Gernsheim's more Eurocentric version of that history was findable (between editions, at that particular moment; the first came out in 1955, the second in 1969). Peter Pollack's idiosyncratic tome,The Picture History of Photography of 1958, was out of print too (its second edition would also appear in '69). Available from Dover Press, a New York reprint house, were Robert Taft's 1942 Photography and the American Scene and Heinrich Schwarz's superb critical biography of David Octavius Hill -- the first such for the field. That was about it for the history of photography in English.

New monographs trickled out erratically, most of them thematic and/or subject-dominated. Grossman, now long gone, was a major player in photography publishing back then, oriented mainly toward photojournalism, documentary and "concerned photography." Though the Aperture Foundation had managed to publish a few fine, small monographs -- on Stieglitz and Weston -- that operation hadn't yet entered book publishing in a major way. Publicity for such books in all cases was minimal, just your basic press release; I actually can't recall attending a launching party or book-signing event for a photo project until the early 1970s.

As the public face of the photo scene, just about all of this fell through the cracks of art criticism, and even art journalism, at the time. Photography's critical tradition, as I noted in my opening paragraphs, had barely begun. No such professional as a photography critic existed; it was a function that I invented, pretty much out of whole cloth, when I premiered my Village Voice column, "Latent Image," in mid-1968. The journal aperture, then well-established and under the editorship of Minor White, was one of the medium's few "little" magazines, a dependable vehicle (though at best a small-circulation, putatively quarterly one that actually came out much less frequently) for serious, intelligent writing on photography, some of which entered the territory of the critical. Contemporary Photographer, a short-lived alternative to it, also contained some notable commentary. Occasionally, Infinity, the journal of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, included thoughtful prose. From time to time, the Saturday Review of Literature ran a knowledgeable essay. But here in Photo Central, New York City, the closest thing to regular critical discourse was Jacob Deschin's column in the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times.

Jack always made a point of saying, in conversation and in public situations, "I'm a reporter, not a critic." For decades, under his editorship, the "Camera" page of the Times offered a consistent reportorial mix of trade and product news, photo tips, exhibition and book announcements, notes on the photo scene (awards, etc.) -- and, occasionally, brief comments on an exhibition or book. Jack's own published books, without exception, were how-to texts aimed at the amateur market. This was the output not of a working critic, but of a working reporter and competent professional photographer with some strongly held opinions about certain photographic styles and picture-makers. Jack knew the difference, and made no bones about it.

There's no question that Jack's short comments and opinions on this or that book or show had some impact on the photographers mentioned, and -- especially with the clout of the Times behind them -- carried some weight in the field; serious, extended critical commentary on photography in mass-audience publications was just about unheard of, and, until I started my work at the Voice, Jack's column was the only game in town. Those little snippets do provide some useful trace of events that otherwise might have gone entirely unnoticed. But they didn't constitute a contribution to the critical literature then, and they don't now; that's probably why no one (including Jack himself) ever gathered them together in book form. Jack would never have billed himself as the paper's photography critic, whereas that was the only possible job description for Gene Thornton (my colleague in the Times slot, more on which anon) and myself. Jack's perception of himself is neatly summed up in the title of the little journal he started up after he left the Times: The Photo Reporter.¹⁷

This is not to demean Jack himself, his work, or his memory. He did what he did very well. I like to think I do also. Our activities and concerns differed greatly. Back when he was alive, if I wanted to know what some upper-echelon power shift at Kodak meant, Jack would be the first person I'd call. But I wouldn't have dreamt for a moment of putting Jack on a panel with John Russell, Hilton Kramer and Peter Schjeldahl -- the main art critics for the Times during the '60s -- to discuss current critical theory in photography, photography's impact on contemporary art, Marshall McLuhan's ideas about photography and mass media, or any other such subject.¹⁸ He didn't belong in that company, and wouldn't have felt at ease there.

Aside from Jack's column, the only other regular writing on photography of that period appeared in the camera magazines -- then as now industry-driven and industry-financed, devoted principally to an amateur/hobbyist readership, but providing some editorial space for interviews and profiles, portfolios of halfway-decent reproductions of images, articles on one or another aspect of photo history, and considered if not learned commentary on various aspects of photography. It came without footnotes, bibliographies, thorough fact-checking and other scholarly apparatus, and its production depended more on its authors' whims and tastes (and their publishers') than on any attempt at a systematic overview of the literature and identification of the gaps therein. Still, it has a not inconsiderable value today as elementary chronicling and raw research, and is often the only extant trace of its subjects from that period; we should be grateful for its very existence, and the effort that went into its making, without discounting our frustration at its lacunae and shortcomings.

People like David Vestal, Margery Mann and Ralph Hattersley (all three of them accomplished photographers and respected teachers), Harvey Zucker (a historian and collector of antique photographica who'd recuperated the daguerreotype process, made dags himself, and wrote about early tools and techniques and what we now call "alternative processes"),¹⁹ and numerous others generated lively, informed reportage, frequently useful tutorial texts, accessible and unpedantic history, and what we might call proto-theory and proto-criticism for a wide if specialized audience, one with a hands-on involvement in photography. Even if unaware of the fact, all of us writing about photography today stand on their shoulders and profit from their example.

One limitation of that writing's usefulness was that it appeared where it did, in publications such as Popular Photography and Modern Photography, read exclusively by amateur and professional photographers; I never met anyone (aside from myself) who didn't make photographs but bought those magazines. Another, a corollary of the first, was that these writers -- to whom I'd add Jack Deschin, who certainly felt himself one of their company and also published regularly in those periodicals -- had become so habituated to addressing that readership, with its limited range of interests and reference points, that they rarely engaged with the larger field of ideas in contemporary art, or wrote in a language and style aimed at the medium's already sizeable general audience.²⁰

Which is where I came in.

My introduction to photography as a subject worthy of serious consideration took place during a brief hiatus between my completing graduate studies 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 Da Capo and 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 aspects of the production of the second edition of Paul Strand's The Mexican Portfolio, co-published by Da Capo and the Aperture Foundation, and the creation of a facsimile edition of Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature, with a new introduction by Beaumont Newhall; familiarized myself with aperture magazine and the ideas of Minor White and others; and met a number of photographers working in different ways -- including Benedict J. Fernandez, whose first monograph was then in the press's pipeline.

One day in 1967, Alan walked into the office with a Paul Caponigro print he'd just purchased -- a wonderful rendering of "Untitled, West Hartford, Connecticut," a 1959 study of the vertical face of a rock quarry. He plunked it down on a shelf in front of me, with a simple admonition: "Look at that. It's a miracle of seeing."²¹

I learned some crucial lessons about my own habits of looking and the nature of photographic seeing from that picture of Caponigro's. Long attention to that image, and that print, introduced me to the transformative potential of camera vision -- its ability to help me look at things "not only for what they are, but for what else they might be," as Minor White said. It taught me, too, just how literalized and habitual my own perceptual tendencies had become, how important it was to be aware of my seeing, to achieve some critical distance from it. Over a few week's time I came to understand what Alan meant and what Caponigro had achieved. In some ways, that's where these efforts of mine found their initial spark.

That encounter led to other engagements -- both during office hours and on my own -- with the photographic print as an object and the photographic image as an interpretative artifact. The research I did for the press on its photographic 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. The urge to learn more made itself felt, but was immediately frustrated, at least along the traditional channels of my educational experience: In 1967 there was no history of photography course being taught anywhere in the metropolitan New York area -- not even a course in art history that addressed photography at length. Courses in art criticism remain rare today; a course in photography criticism was unheard of at that time.²² Short of interning at MoMA or the GEH, autodidacticism was the only choice.

So I began ferreting out photography shows, books and periodicals -- making use of Deschin's column, the listings and reviews in Pop Photo and Modern Photography; familiarizing myself with the collections at MoMA, the Met, and the New York Public Library (where you could still call up from the stacks a complete set of Camera Work in the main reading room); and haunting the city's many used-book stores to build a reference library for myself. (The stretch bounded by Broadway and Fourth Avenue between 13th and 8th Street was very heaven, though on the wane, and still full of treasures; now only Strand Books remains.) As the above account suggests, tracking this stuff down was a challenge; at the same time, the scene was still compact enough that, once one found one's way in, it proved manageable, and -- unlike the situation today -- in no way daunting.

Because writing has always served as one of my primary means for coming to terms with my experience, the hankering to write about photography soon began to manifest itself. Michael Hoffman of aperture , who headed that journal's New York office, was the first to encourage me to start putting my thoughts down on paper. The two earliest pieces of writing on photography I ever produced, in 1967, were a review of a new book-length collaboration between Arthur Rothstein and William Saroyan and another of Wright Morris's just-published God's Country and My People.²³

Who was I writing for? Myself, to start with; as Thoreau once put it, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?" In all the media with which I'd engaged up till then -- branches of contemporary literature and music, primarily -- as either a creator or an involved, informed audience member, the active presence of a thriving critical dialogue was a given, the imperative of establishing a critical tradition (in Kenner's sense of the term) understood by all concerned. So it was perplexing to engage with a medium in which the absence of such a dialogue seemed troubling to so few.

Not that this void went entirely unnoticed. Minor White, for one, issued periodic calls for critics of photography in the pages of aperture, and I took him seriously. The thought of making some small contribution toward the development of such a "continuum of understanding" appealed to me. Not only did that critical 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 lay member of the general audience, achieved exactly the mix of accessibility, provocation and insight toward which I set out to work my way.

Coincidentally, in 1967 I'd begun freelancing for the weekly Village Voice, primarily as a third-string theater critic -- not a slot I'd trained for or sought out, simply a job that needed doing for which I had some appropriate background. Though I didn't know it, the Voice had run a few pieces on photography from time to time, mostly by George Wright (including a piece on Moholy-Nagy in the very first issue of October 26, 1955). Nothing on the subject was appearing in those pages at the time, however.

With great trepidation, as well as what in retrospect seems like enormous temerity, in the early spring of 1968 I broached the idea of initiating a regular column on photography to my Voice editor, Diane Fisher. It seemed a reasonable proposal. This upstart paper, still comparatively new and controversial, billed itself as a "writer's newspaper"; novelist Norman Mailer had been one of its founders. It prided itself on serving as a hotbed of first-person cultural reportage (what was then being called "personal journalism" or "the new journalism") and critical writing -- some of it accessible, some of it esoteric, all of it stylistically distinctive -- about many marginal, cutting-edge art forms: jazz, rock, various other alternative musics, experimental film and video, avant-garde dance, off-off-Broadway theater, happenings and "performance art," new painting and sculpture and mixed-media hybrids. Many of these had audiences about as minute as the crowd of two dozen or so I'd discovered in regular attendance at photo openings and the occasional photo lecture. Why not add photography to that roster?

Having none, I never offered Diane any credentials to support my bid for this role, aside from my obvious interest in the project; and she never asked me for any.²⁴ She did request a written proposal, to run past the paper's upper editorial echelons for discussion, suggestions, and possible approval. I drafted it around the time my son Edward was born, in May of '68. She promised to get back to me shortly with a yes or no. A few weeks later I opened the new issue of the Voice to find my proposal published as I'd written it, with no advance notice to me or time to prepare myself for this new venture. Sink or swim. I decided to swim.