To: John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art
Re: What's Wrong with the Show
One reason I am writing is to ascertain your decision about the purchase of [my piece] "9 Perspectives" for the museum's collection. The piece seems "to this viewer" eminently worthy of its position in the show, "Mirrors & Windows," as a set of arche-photographs that "explore the ways in which photography can translate the exterior world into pictures, which is essentially not a personal but formal issue."
In addition I am adding some observations that were stimulated by the excitement of the exhibition's opening and the simultaneous confusion of simply being-in New York as a photographer-witness.
I am delighted by the inclusion of my photographic piece [Ò9 Perspectives"] in the exhibit of American Photography since 1960. For me the show manifests a single, unalterable conclusion that you, not Minor White, Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand, are the star of this survey. And what is convincingly different about this survey as compared to other "unending chain-signs" is the presentation of photography supported by a determined, intellectual value system. Even though the ideas and examples selected to exemplify the dualism of your theory have already engaged critical opposition, the conflict will enlarge the narrow discourse controlling contemporary photography.
After reading your essay in Mirrors & Windows, I went back to some of your previous publications like the Walker Evans catalog, Looking at Photographs, the introduction to Eggleston's Guide, Winogrand's zoo photos and Public Relations. I may be wrong but I detect a growing reliance on formalist principles to defend intuitive commitments behind Mr. Winogrand's photographs. The taste for these idea is rooted in the pages of the Evans catalog prophesying the advent of "New Topographics." This descriptive tradition, emphasizing the reflexive purity of the "frame," has been advanced by logic in contrast to the blow-hard rhetoric supporting the grander and more accessible art of Adams, Strand or Weston.
The voice of the new tradition encourages a disciplined reading of photographs whose vision might be degraded by an illiterate visual audience. But to conclude that "American Photography since 1960" can be discussed in a formalist paradigm is to create a dialectical fable that avoids the meaning of photography as a redundant system. In other words, photography that is conceptual seems excluded by a system of formulaic description and reflective symbolism. Or, where is work that critiques photography itself?
For example, on my way to the men's room on the ground floor of the museum, what do I see hanging on the wall and sitting on the floor -- a photographic piece by Monsignor Kosuth whose literal view of definition and photography is nowhere to be found in either "mirror" or "window." Not far from Kosuth's "chair" is a set of acrid color photographs by William Beckley that question the trend to transfer color into existing genres of black & white art photography. And in front of Mr. Beckley's chromatic faucets hangs an outrageous piece of photographic formatting by Douglas Huebler. I am not advocating insertion of these specific works into the show, even though I cannot see what is more proficient in the photography of Sol LeWitt than there is in photography by Bruce Nauman or John Baldessari. I am sure the list of WHO'S NOT in the show must be boring to you and means even less to me. It's true you have included photography that might be termed propositional like the pieces by Robert Cumming and "9 Perspectives" (unfortunately labeled "Photomosaic") can pass for methodical practice. I can even accept the extension of Winogrand's work as metaphor for the teleological load you have put on it to carry the meaning of quintessential description. But photography that advances itself by theoretical use seems clearly to be absent.
The imprint of your text is, on one hand, open and agreeable and points to promotional models conferring hierarchy and the responsibilities of a regime. The majority of photographic work in the show is neutralized by a discursive text that shifts ground between the deep space of theory and the foreground of recognizable practices. These trends are intelligible by reading the index of the catalog, the press kit, or the schedule of lectures without being present at the show -- a few ways language cancels space, conserves time and inscribes vision.
For me, one of the highlights of the exhibition is Robert Heinecken's photographic version of "On Photography." The bits of photographs stitched together with staples to form computerlike black and white patterns resembling publicity photos of Ms. Sontag cleverly expresses issues outside the context of formalism. Perhaps you are not aware that these constructions previously hung in an exhibition, ÒContemporary California PhotographyÓ at Camerawork Gallery in San Francisco. The show consisted of photographic works in which each artist was allowed a separate space for independent exploration. The work in the show confronted the matrix of photography that extends to the system of reproductions. The formal question of whether there is a "clear photograph" that can "transpose the real world" was put under "erasure" in order to make present the relationships and contradictions of photography determined by an ideology of genre, format and classification. Heinecken's dissimulating portraits point to a "coded system" of photography as an agency of reproduction.
From a distance of 40 feet, the stereo portraits of Ms. Sontag are meant to be viewed as a single unit of changing perspectives. However, on closer inspection one hemisphere of the unit is assembled from photographs of Sontag's text that postulates a mechanical reader in the act of deciphering. Whether Heinecken is aware of certain notions being developed in San Francisco, the use of text as an interchangeable part of photographic production is distinctly one of them. And I am not talking about narrative or diaristic practices a la Michals or Krims, or for that matter, Cumming or Baldessari. The "hard-line" I am referring to is the examination of photography's disseminating powers that are everywhere, all-the-time, interpreting us, with or without our knowledge or permission. Work of this kind is singularly absent from the context of your exhibition. The work of Donna-Lee Phillips, Peter D'Agostino, Hal Fischer, Meyer Hirsch, John Brumfield, and Sam Samore, to name only a few, reflect these practices and transgress the formal definitions of photography limited to a geometry of the frame.
In Ken Josephson's photograph, "Drottingham, Sweden," the anecdote of the frame is translated into a variety of displacements describing some of the functions of the photograph. The frame, however, determines the meaning and humor of the picture. The configuration of content is inside the photograph. The frame dominates the standards of conventional photography. The frame involves a series of registrations: the camera, film and photograph. "Window" photographs particularly demonstrate the dilemma of this confinement. The imprint of the frame, the trace of its presence, the infrastructure of photography, is shrouded in metaphors that are, nevertheless, returned to the registry of language. Therefore, to reverse perspectives terminating in files of photographs that obscure the signifier, counter-propositions must be restated in the name of photography to include language as a supplementary practice for the deconstruction of the frame, the object it contains, and its administration.
Your exhibition in many ways revitalizes the inert objects of photography. Your essay ends problematically. The choice of work you emphasize over others is reasonable within a context of familiarity. To reiterate . . . what's mostly missing is Photography that advances itself by theoretical use and not by the influence of imitative objects. Why not consider some of the work I am awkwardly trying to describe for presentation in the Photo gallery upstairs in the museum. I can send you slides and glossies of the "Third Show" of Contemporary California Photography if for no other reason than simply to breach the problem of "unfamiliarity."
I ask your indulgence in the reading of these "vague truths" that I have tried to set forth in this letter, For the last couple of years photography in San Francisco has undergone serious changes outside the support structures of schools, galleries or museums. And though these changes are by no means entirely confined to "Photography & Language," "Photography & Ideology," "Problematic Photography," "Structural(ism) & Photography," these categorical issues have served to reintroduce by example supplementary views to the dominant structures existing in contemporary photography.
