Mirrors and Windows

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the past ten years photography has swept, as it were, from the magazine to the museum. There is no debate left on whether photography is an art; it is universally accepted as such, although the arguments for this or that aesthetic of photography are as brisk and rancorous as ever. Avidly collected, taught on an industrial scale, buoyed up by reams of historical exegesis and critical debate, photography in America has moved into the public eye, rather as painting did in the 1960s, and no American institution has done more to create this state of affairs than the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, through its photography director, John Szarkowski. MOMA's main summer show is entitled "Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960." It is a sampling of 200 works by 100 American photographers, curated and introduced by Szarkowski in his usual eloquent, aphoristic and pugnacious style. It is, inevitably, a grab bag, but one with coherent strands in it, and likely to hold considerable influence for the future.

The most striking thing illustrated by the show is how far behind photography--meaning the photographs Szarkowski designates as "serious"--has left its old role as witness to public events. Not one picture in the exhibition, except for an exquisitely formal-looking image of a fire in Minneapolis by Irwin B. Klein, looks in any way like a news photo. This must seem strange at first, since the past 20 years have been the most photographed in history. Everything that happened, one might suppose, happened before a camera; there has never been anything like the sheer bulk of visual documentation left as the residue of a popular-photography culture. People and events seem ghostly unless they have been verified by a camera. Wars, elections, riots, disasters, communal ecstasies, the speeches of politicians and their deaths--all are eaten up by the omnivorous lens, as photography (through journalism) defines the terms of our fictitious intimacy with the world.

This intimacy means a ravenous consumption, rather than contemplation, of images. Szarkowski, an aesthete to the fingertips, will have none of it. His catalogue essay describes the decay of the relationship between serious photography and the dying picture magazines in the '60s, along with what he terms the growing realization among photographers that the camera's testimony about news was "opaque and superficial." He roundly states that "good photographers had long since known--whether or not they admitted it to their editors--that most issues of importance cannot be photographed." So one of the messages of the show is clear: in the judgment of MOMA--the first American museum to treat photography systematically as an art and perhaps the most powerful taste-forming museum in the country--the documentary or "concerned" tradition, which ran from Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine through figures like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith, has petered out.

If "issues of importance" are no longer available to the camera, if all photography can make of big events is a scribble of light that promises more information than it delivers, what can photography do? What are its proper subjects? The argument of Szarkowski's show is that photography has undergone changes similar to those that overtook painting and sculpture. "The general movement of American photography," Szarcowski writes, "has been from public to private concerns." Photography has become more and more aware of its own history and limits as a medium: a debate about these is built into the art, so that photography, instead of being an unproblematic record of appearances, is also selfcriticism.

During the '20s, space itself--articulated air--became the subject of constructivist sculpture and painting, whereas before it had been the frame for a subject. In the '60s and '70s, the language of photography rather than the pattern of events tended to become the essential subject for many photographers. The retreat from public posture also combined with personal fantasy, reverie and wit. The result has been a rather low-pressure art that refuses to strum on the heartstrings. For convenience, Szarkowski divides the images in this show into "mirrors"--pictures that mean to describe the photographer's own sensibility--and "windows"--realist photos of fact, including the facts of photography seen as a system. In short, the romantic vs. the realist: but it is not a very strict dichotomy, as Szarkowski himself stresses. The typical photo in this show, mirror or window, is cool, low in narrative content, linguistically sophisticated, beautifully made and, by the conventions of photojournalism, not very arresting. Its pleasures have to do with formal wit, mild irony and surrealist incongruity. One sees a thing nailed down with a decisive tap, as when Lee Friedlander, a deceptively casual imagemaker, positions his eyeline on an ordinary suburban street to get a flowering shrub directly behind a lamppost, so that the street light seems to be emitting great sprays of blossom in broad daylight. In one way, Elliott Erwitt's New Jersey, 1953, is a most plainly observed view by a roadside: sky, bushes, bus stop. But the cannon muzzle poking over the top of the bushes removes it to another tract of the imagination. For a moment the areas "out there" and "in here" fuse in an image of brilliantly calculated mystery, all the more effective for its offhandedness.

The show abounds in deliberately "poetic" photographs, over which surrealism--which, one is I reminded, Susan Sontag claims to be the natural mode of photographic vision--presides. Some are deliberately manipulated montages, like Jerry N. Uelsmann's dream pictures. Others are plain sights deliberately set up, like Ralph Gibson's The Enchanted Hand, 1969--a delicately ectoplastic fantasy, very much in the spirit of Joseph Cornell. Some photographs are manifestly the product of chance, an incongruous moment caught in flight. The most startling of these is Mark Cohen's Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, June 1975, which shows a girl's head almost occluded by a sinister, balloon-like object (bubble gum, probably) with a hand rising behind her head like a crown of flesh. Thanks largely to the contrast between the light on her hair, which prickles electrically, the vague street background and the greasy, diffused surface of the bubble, it is an image of unrepeatable weirdness.

Of course, not all the photos in the show partake of surrealism. We still have a few descendants of the Ansel Adams-Minor White tradition, the makers of perfect, eloquent prints recording some aspect of nature with a lyrical gravity of inspection. Perhaps the best of them is Paul Caponigro, whose photographs of the prehistoric standing stones at Avebury in England (one of them looking surprisingly like Rodin's rough-hewn monument to Balzac) are of astounding fidelity to the substance they depict; every grain in the print corresponds, in some way, to the age and density of the rock.

Szarkowski's show is not the last word on the state of American photography; in deed, some of his choices, no less than his uncompromisingly aesthetic position, will be a subject of harsh debate. But it deserves to be seen and seen again, for its emphasis on the apolitical, the uneventful, the odd, the dumb and the chancy is now a kind of official view with which photography itself must reckon.

--Robert Hughes

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