Pictures at Two Exhibitions

By ROBERT HUGHES

"There were two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated." Thus, after decades of lugging his camera into the crannies of American misery and hope--ghetto Jews and child pieceworkers in the verminous cellars of New York, riggers on the high steel, the corridors of Ellis Island and the mine tunnels of Pennsylvania--Lewis Hine, once a schoolteacher but also one of America's great reformist photographers, gave his modest definition of "concerned" photography. All arts, in theory, have some social resonance. But documentary photography is uniquely a social act, for its sole purpose is to make people concrete to each other.

Yet the documentary photographers have not been taken seriously as artists.

American museums, especially, have been interested in the "more imaginative" masters of the medium, beginning with Edward Steichen, proceeding through the epic or intimist nature poets (Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams) and finishing in an exponential growth of different styles in the '70s --Duane Michals' enigmatic fumetti, Paul Caponigro's monumental landscapes, and Jerry Uelsmann's surrealist montages. Meanwhile, LIFE and Look were the showcases for the documentary photographs: the picture magazines were their museum without walls, and it is now pitifully shrunk. To present the documentary photographer to a "serious" audience, an audacious venture has just opened in Manhattan: the International Center of Photography, or I.C.P.

As if for counterpoint, Manhattan's Whitney Museum has mounted a lavish historical show entitled "Photography in America."

Ample Program. The I.C.P. is the child of ebullient, beetle-browed Photographer Cornell Capa. Housed in a rambling Georgian mansion on East 94th Street--it was once the Audubon Society's headquarters, and pigeons still roost in its unrenovated attics--it has an ample program: exhibitions, archive, study center, seminars, master classes, lectures. It is a culmination of years of effort by Capa to get museum exposure for such doyens of the document as Lewis Hine and Andre Kertesz, together with Capa's contemporaries and friends, some prematurely dead: David Seymour Dan Weiner, Werner Bischof, and Capa's brother Robert, who died in Indochina in 1954. Their work forms one of the center's inaugural shows, Classics of Documentary Photography"; another floor is given to the equally classic results of Henri Cartier-Bresson's two visits to Russia in 1954 and 1973.

The motto Van Eyck wrote above his Arnolfini wedding portrait in the 15th century, "Jan van Eyck was here, is by implication engraved on every 35-mm. viewfinder. Yet the idea is still current that documentary photographs are not subjective enough, not personal.

"The idea that any photography can t be personal is madness!" Capa growls.

"I see something; it goes through my eye, brain, heart, guts; I choose the subject.

What could be more personal than that?" As the work on the walls attests, under the stress of the moment style becomes a reflex of the eye, but no less individual for that.

Warm Tide. At the Whitney Museum, the history of American photography from Southworth and Hawes daguerreotypes in the 1840s to the present day has been compressed into 259 prints Maybe the sheer quantity of material needs prejudice to prune it, and that is what it gets from the curator of the exhibition, Robert Doty. The documentary art of le hasard objectif--"objective chance" as Cartier-Bresson called it--is firmly played down. Instead, one gets a tone of slightly woozy "heroic" romanticism that laps round the isolated and tauter masterpieces in the show--steichen's Flatiron Building, for instance --like a warm tide. Photographers with sharp teeth (Robert Frank, Diane Arbus) are represented at their most innocuous, while Doty's wish to avoid tl chestnuts of the American lens--best-known images made by photographers like Weston or Stieghtz--has resulted in the presence of much august but second-grade work by famous names Some omissions are incomprehensible: Margaret Bourke-White, for example, whose photographs of the industrial landscape of the '30s provided one of the best moments in New Deal iconography, and Berenice Abbott, who almost did for New York what her friend Eugene Atget did for Pans, and was one of the finest portrait photographers of the century besides.

Curator Doty writes that his choices were limited to "photographers who intended above all that their work should be informed by a conscious el fort toward the perfection of an inner vision or an avowed aesthetic content.

Unfortunately, almost everyone can make beautiful photos. The obsessive problem of photography is how to make true ones--and that means finding out which truths pertain to photographic experience and which do not. In this, the Whitney show--though certainly of some help--is not the clarification one hopes for.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.