Susan Sontag. Photographic Evangels
Like other steadily aggrandizing enterprises, photography had inspired its leading practitioners with a need to explain, again and again, what they are doing and why it is valuable. The era in which photography was widely attacked (as parricidal with respect to painting, predatory to people) was a brief one. Painting of course did not expire in 1839, as one French painter hastily predicted; the finicky soon ceased to dismiss photography as menial copying; and by 1854 a great painter, Delacroix, graciously declared how much he regretted that such an admirable invention came so late. Nothing is more acceptable today than the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as an everyday activity and as a branch of high art. Yet something about photography still keeps the first rate professionals defensive and hortatory: virtually every important photographer right up to the present has written manifestoes and credos expounding photography’s moral and aesthetic mission. And photographers give the most contradictory accounts of what kind of knowledge they possess and what kind of art they practice.
The disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken, the inevitable even when inadvertent authority of the camera’s result, suggest a very tenuous relation of knowing. No one would dispute that photography gave a tremendous boost to the cognitive claims of sight, because - through close-up and remote sensing - it is so greatly enlarged the realm of the visible. But about the ways in which any subject within the range of unaided vision is further known through a photograph or the extent to which, in oder to get a good photograph, people need to know anything about what they are photographing there are no agreement. Picture-taking had been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a lucid and precise act of knowing, of conscious intelligence or as a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter. Thus Nadar, speaking of his respectful, expressive pictures of Baudelaire, Doré, Michelet, Hugo, Berlioz, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Delacroix, and other famous friends, said “the portrait I do best is of the person I know best,” while Avedon has observed that most of hid good portraits are of people he met for the first time when photographing them.
In this century, the older generation of photographers described photography as a heroic effort of attention, an ascetic discipline, a mystic receptivity to the world which requires that the photographer pass through a cloud of unknowing. According to Minor White, “the state of mind of the photographer while creating is a blank ... when looking for pictures. ... The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and feel it better.” Cartier-Bresson has linked himself to a Zen archer, who must become the target so as to be able to hit it; “thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards,” he says, “never while actually taking a photograph.” Thought is regarded as clouding the transparency of the photographer’s consciousness, and as infringing on the autonomy of what is being photographed. Determined to prove that photographs could - and when they are good, always do - transcend literalness, many serious photographers have made a photography a noetic paradox. Photography is advanced as a form of knowing without knowing: a way of outwitting the world, instead of making a frontal attack on it.
But even when ambitious professionals disparage thinking - suspicion of the intellect being a recurrent theme in photographic apologetics - they usually want to assert how rigorous this permissive visualising needs to be. “A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept,” Ansel Adams insists. “The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography - be which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good - is fatal to serious results.” To take a good photograph, runs the common claim, one must already see it. That is, the image must exist in the photographer’s mind at or before the moment when the negative is exposed. Justifying photography has for the most part precluded admitting that the scattershot method, especially as used be someone experienced, may yield a thoroughly satisfactory result. But despite their reluctance to say so, most photographers have always had - with good reason - an almost superstitious confidence in the lucky accident.
Lately, the secret is becoming avowable. As the defense of photography enters its present, retrospective phase, there is an increasing diffidence in claims about the alert, knowing state of minds that accomplished picture-taking presumes. The anti-intellectual declarations of photographers, commonplaces of modernist thinking in the arts, have prepared the way for the gradual tilt of serious photography toward a skeptical investigation of its own powers, a commonplace of modernist thinking in the arts. Photography as knowledge is succeeded be photography as - photography. In sharp reaction against any ideal of authoritative representation, the most influential of the younger American photographers reject any ambition to pre-visualize the image and conceive their work as showing how different things look when photographed.
Where the claims of knowledge falter, the claims of creativity take up the slack. As if to refute the fact that many superb pictures are by photographers devoid of any serious or interesting intentions, the insistence that picture-taking is first of all the focusing of a temperament, only secondarily of a machine, has always been one of the main themes of the defense of photography. This is the theme stated so eloquently in the finest essay ever written in praise of photography, Paul Rosenfeld’s chapter in Stieglitz in Port of New York. By using “his machinery” - as Rosenfeld puts it - “unmechanically,” Stieglitz shows that the camera not only “gave him an opportunity to express himself” but supplied images with a wider and “more delicate” gamut “than the hand can draw.” Similarly, Weston insists over and over that photography is a supreme opportunity for self-expression, far superior to that offered by painting. For photography to compete with painting means invoking originality as an important standard for apprising a photographer’s work, originality being equated with the stamp of a unique, forceful sensibility. What is exciting “are photographers that say something in a new manner,” Harry Callahan writes, “not for the sake of being different, but because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.” For Ansel Adams “a great photograph” gas to be “a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”
That there is a difference between photography conceived as “true expression” and photography conceived (as it more commonly is) as faithful recording is evident; though most accounts of photography’s mission attempt to paper over the difference, it is implicit in the starkly polarized terms that photographers employ to dramatize what they do. As modern forms of the quest for self-expression commonly do, photography recapitulates both of the traditional ways of radically opposing self and world. Photography is seen as an acute manifestation of the individualized “I,” the homeless private self astray in an overwhelming world - mastering reality by a fast visual anthologizing of it. Or photography is seen as a means of finding a place in the world (still experienced as overwhelming, alien) by being able to relate to it with detachment - bypassing the interfering, insolent claim of the self. But between the defence of photography as a superior means of self-expressing and the praise of photography as a superior way of putting the self at reality’s service there is not as much difference as might appear. Both presuppose that photography provides a unique system of disclosures: that it shows us a reality as we had not seen it before.
The revelatory character of photography generally goes by the polemical name of realism. From Fox Talbot’s view that the camera produces “natural images” to Berenice Abbott’s denunciation of “pictorial” photography to Cartier-Bresson’s warning that “the thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived,” most of the contradictory declarations of photographers converge on pious avowals of respect for things-as-they-are. For a medium so often considered to be merely realistic, one would think photographers would not have to go on as they do, exhorting each other to stick to realism. But the exhortations continue - another instance of the need photographers have for making something mysterious and urgent of the process by which they appropriate the world.
To insist, as Abbott does, that realism is the very essence of photography does not, as it might seem, establish the superiority of one particular procedure or standard; does not necessarily mean that photo-documents (Abbott’s world) are better than pictorial photographs. Photography’s commitment to realism can accommodate any style, any approach to subject matter. Sometimes it will be defined more narrowly, as the making of images which resemble, and inform us about, the world. Interpreted more broadly, echoing the distrust of mere likeness which has inspired painting for more than a century, photographic realism can be - is more and more - defined not as what is “really” there but as what I “really” perceive. While as modern forms of art claim some privileged relation to reality, the claim seems particularly justified in the cast of photography. Yet photography has not, finally, been any more immune than painting has to the most characteristic modern doubts about any straight-forward relation to reality - the inability to take for granted the world of observed. Even Abbott cannot help assuming a change in the very nature of reality: that it needs the selective, more accurate eye of the camera, there being simply much more of it than ever before. “Today, we are confronted with reality on the wastes scale mankind has known,” she declares, and this puts “a greater responsibility on the photographer.”
All that photography’s program of realism actually implies is the belief that reality is hidden. And, being hidden, is something to be unveiled. Whatever the camera records is a disclosure - whether it is imperceptible, fleeting parts of movement, an order that natural vision is incapable of perceiving or a “heightened reality” (Moholy-Nagy’s phrase), or simply the elliptical way of seeing. What Stieglitz describes as his “patient waiting for the moment of equilibrium” make the same assumption about the essential hiddenness of the real as Robert Frank’s waiting for the moment of revealing disequilibrium, to catch reality off-guard, in what he calls the “in-between moments.”
Just to show something, anything, in the photographic view is to show that it is hidden. But it is not necessary for photographers to point up the mystery with exotic or exceptionally striking subjects. When Dorothea Lange urges her colleagues to concentrate in “the familiar,” it is with the understanding that the familiar, rendered by a sensitive use of the camera, will thereby become mysterious. Photography’s commitment to realism does not limit photography to certain subjects, as more real than others, but rather illustrates the formalist understanding of what goes on in every work of art: reality is, Viktor Shklovsky’s word, de-familiarized. What is being urged is an aggressive relation to all subjects. Armed with their machines, photographers are to make an assault on reality - which is perceived as recalcitrant, as only deceptively available, as unreal. “The pictures have a reality for me that the people don’t,” Avedon has declared. It is through the photographs that I know them.” To claim that the photography must be realistic is not not incompatible with opening up an even wider gap between image and reality, in which the mysteriously acquired knowledge (and the enhancement of reality) supplied by photographs presumes a prior alienation from or devaluation of reality.
As photographers describe it, picture-taking is both a limitless technique for appropriating the objective world and an unavoidably solipsistic expression of the singular self. Photographs depicts realities that already exists, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual temperament, discovering itself through the camera’s cropping of reality. For Mogoly-Nagy the genius of photography lies in its ability to render “an objective portrait: the individual to be photographed so that the photographic result shall not be encumbered with subjective intention.” For Lange every portrait of another person is a self-portrait of the photographer, as for Minor White - promoting “self-discovery through a camera” - landscape photographs are really “inner landscapes”. The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
Maholy-Nagy’s demand for the photographer’s self-effacement follows from his appreciation of how edifying photography is: it retains and upgrades out powers of observation, it brings about “a psychological transformation of our eyesight.” (In an essay published in 1936, he says that photography creates or enlarges eight distinct varieties of seeing: abstract, exact, rapid, slow, intensified, penetrative, simultaneous, and distorted.) But self-enhancement is also the demand behind quite different, anti-scientific approaches to photography, such as that expressed in Robert Frank’s credo: “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” In both views the photographer is proposed as a kind of ideal observer - for Mogoly-Nagy, seeing with the detachment of a researcher; for Frank, seeing “simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street.”
One attraction of any view of the photographer as ideal observer - whether impersonal (Maholy-Nagy) or friendly (Frank) - is that it is implicitly denies that picture-taking is in any way an aggressive act. That it can be so described makes most professionals extremely defensive. Cartier-Bresson and Avedon are among the very few to have talked honestly (if ruefully) about the exploitative aspect of the photographer’s activities. Usually photographers feel obliged to protect photography’s innocence, claiming that the predatory attitude is incompatible with good picture, and hoping that a more affirmative vocabulary will put over their point. One of the more memorable examples of such verbiage is Ansel Adam’s description of the camera as an “instrument of love and revelation”; Adams also urges that we stop saying that we “take” a picture and always say we “make” one. Stieglitz’s name for the cloud studies he did in the late 1920s - “Equivalents,” that is, statements of his inner feeling - is another, soberer instance of the persistent effort of photographers to feature the benevolent character of picture-taking and discount its predatory implications. What talented photographers do cannot of course be characterized either as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. Photography is a paradigm of an inherently equivocal connection between self and world - its version of the ideology of realism sometimes dictating an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates the self. One side or the other of the connection is always being rediscovered and championed.
An important result of the coexistence of these two ideas - assault on reality and submission to reality - is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography’s means. Whatever the claims for photography as a form of personal expression on a par with painting, it remains true that its originality is inextricably linked to the powers of the machine: no one can deny the informativeness and formal beauty of many photographs made possible by the steady growth of this powers, like Harold Edgerton’s high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target, of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke, or Lennart Nilsson’s endoscopic photographs of the interior of a human body.
But as cameras get ever more sophisticated, more automated, more acute, some photographers are temped to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are really not armed, and prefer to submit themselves to the limits imposed by the pre-morden camera technology - a cruder, less high-powered machine being though to give more interesting or expressive results, to leave more room for the creative accident. Not using fancy equipment has been a point of honor for many photographers - including Weston, Brandt, Cartier-Bresson, Frank - some sticking with a battered camera of simple design and slow lens that they acquired early in their careers, some continuing to make their contact with nothing more elaborate than a few trays, a bottle of developer, and a bottle of hypo solution.
The camera is indeed the instrument of “fast seeing,” as one confident modernist, Alvin Langdon Coburn, declared in 1918, echoing the Futurist apotheosis of machines and speed. Photography’s present mood of doubt can be gauged by Cartier-Bresson’s recent statement that it may be too fast. The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates with the wish to return to a more artisanal, purer past - when images still had a handmade quality, an aura. This nostalgia for some pristine state of the photographic enterprise underlies the current enthusiasm for daguerreotypes, stereograph cards, photographic cartes de visite, family snapshots, the work of forgotten nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century provincial and commercial photographers.
But the reluctance to use the newest high-powered equipment is not the only or indeed the most interesting way in which photographers express their attraction to photography’s past. The primitivist hankering that inform current photographic taste are actually being aided by the ceaseless innovativeness of camera technology. For many of these advances not only enlarge the camera’s powers but also recapitulate - in a more ingenious, less cumbersome form - earlier, discarded possibilities of the medium. Thus, the development of photography hinges on the replacement of the daguerreotype process, direct positives in metal plates, be the positive-negative process, whereby from an original (negative) an unlimited number of prints (positives) can be made. (Although invented simultaneously in the late 1830s, it was Daguerre’s government supported invention, announced in 1839 with great publicity, rather than Fox Talbot’s positive-negative process, that was the first photographic process in general use.) But now the camera could be said to be turning back upon itself. The Polaroid camera revives the principle of the daguerreotype camera: each print is a unique object. The hologram (a three-dimensional image created with laser light) could be considered as a variant on the heliogram - the first, cameraless photographs made in the 1920s by Nicéphore Niepce. And the increasingly popular use of the camera to produce slides - images which cannot be displayed permanently or stored in wallets and albums, but can only be projected on walls or on paper (as aids for drawing) - goes back even further into the camera’s prehistory, for it amounts to using the photographic cameras to do work of the camera obscura.
“History is pushing us to the brink of a realistic age,” according to Abbott, who summons photographers to make the jump themselves. But while photographers are perpetually urging each other to be bolder, a doubt persists about the value of realism which keeps them oscillating between simplicity and irony, between insisting on control and cultivating the unexpected, between the eagerness to take advantage of the complex evolution of the medium and the wish to reinvent photography from scratch. Photographers seem to need periodically to resist their own knowingness and to remystify what they do.
Questions about knowledge are not, historically, are not photographer’s first lint of defense. The earliest controversies center on the question whether photography’s fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine did not prevent it from being a fint art - as distinct from a merely practical art, an arm of science, and a trade. (That photographs give useful and often startling kinds of information was obvious from the beginning. Photographers only started worrying about what they knew, and what kind of knowledge in a deeper sense a photograph supplies, after photography was a accepted as an art.) For about a century the defence of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was a vanguard revolt against ordinary standards of seeing, no less worthy an art than painting.
Now photographers are choosier about the claims they make. Since photography has become so entirely respectable as a branch of the fine arts, they no longer seek the shelter that the notion of art has intermittently given the photographic enterprise. For all the important American photographers who have proudly identified their work with the aims of art (like Stieglitz, White, Siskind, Callahan, Lange, Laughlin), these are many more who disavow the question itself. Whether or not the camera’s “results come under the category of Art is irrelevant,” Strand wrote in the 1920s; and Moholy-Nagy declared it “quite unimportant whether photography produces ‘art’ or not.” Photographers who came to maturity in the 1940s or later are bolder, openly snubbing art, equating art with artiness. They generally claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing, exploring themselves - anything but making works of art. At first it was photography’s commitment to realism that places it in a permanently ambivalent relation to art; now it is its modernist heritage. The fact that important photographers are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their work is not involved with art, shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is to the traditional aims of art. And modernist taste has welcomed this unpretentious activity that can be consumed, almost in spite of itself, as high art.
Even in the nineteenth century, when photography was thought to be so evidently in need of defense as a fine art, the line of defense was fare from stable. Julia Margaret Cameron’s claim that the photography qualifies as an art because, like painting, it seeks the beautiful was succeeded by Hanry Preach Robinson’s Wildean claim that photography is an art because it can lie. In early twentieth century Alvin Langdon Coburn’s praise of photography as “the most modern of the arts,” because it is a fast, impersonal way of seeing, competes with Weston’s praise of photography as a new means of individual visual creation. In the recent decades the notion of art has been exhausted as an instrument of polemic; indeed, a good part of the immense prestige that photography has acquired as an art form comes from its declared ambivalence toward being an art. When photographers now deny that they are making works of art, it is because they think they are doing something better that. Their disclaimers tell us more about the harried status of any notion of art than about whether photography is or isn’t one.
Despite the efforts of contemporary photographers to exorcise the specter of art, sometimes lingers. For instance, when professionals object to having their photographs printed to the edge of the page in books or magazines, they are invoking the model inherited from another art: as paintings are put in frames, photographs should be framed in white space. Another instance: many photographers continue to prefer black-and-white images, which are felt to be more tactful, more decorous than color - or less voyeuristic and less sentimental or crudely lifelike. But the real basis for this preference is, once again, an implicit comparison with painting. In the introduction to his book of photographs The Decisive Moment (1952), Cartier-Bressom justified his unwillingness to use color by citing technical limitations: the slow speed of color film, which reduced the depth of focus. But with the rapid progress in color-film technology during the last two decades, making possible all the tonal subtlety and high resolution one might desire, Cartier-Bresson has had to shift his ground, and now proposes that photographers renounce color as a matter of principle. In Cartier-Bresson’s version of that persistent myth according to which - following the camera’s invention - a division of territory took place between photography and painting, color belongs to painting. He enjoins photographers to resist temptation and keep up their side of the bargain.
Those still involved in defining photography as an art are always trying to hold some line. But it is impossible to hold the line: any attempt to restrict photography to certain subjects or certain techniques, however fruitful these have proved to be, is bound to be challenged and to collapse. For it is in the very nature of photography that it be a promiscuous form of seeing, and, in talented hands, an infallible medium of creation. (As John Szarkowski observes, “a skilful photographer can photograph anything well.”) Hence, its longstanding quarrel with art, which (until recently) meant the results of a discriminating or purified way of seeing, and a medium of creation governed by standards that make genuine achievement a rarity. Understandably, photographers have been reluctant to give up the attempt to define more narrowly what good photography is. The history of photography is punctuated be a series of dualistic controversies - such as the straight print versus the doctored print, pictorial photography versus documentary photography - each of which is a different form of the debate about photography’s relation to art: how close it can get while still retaining its claim to unlimited visual acquisition. Recently, it has become common to maintain that all these controversies are now outmoded, which suggests that the debate has been settled. But it is unlikely that the defense of photography as art will ever completely subside. As long as photography is not only a voracious way of seeing but one which needs to claim that it is a special, distinctive way, photographers will continue to take shelter (if only covertly) in the defiled but still prestigious precincts of art.
Photographers who suppose they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified in painting by taking pictures remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from art, or Art, by the act of painting (that is, by treating the canvas as a field of action rather than as an object). And much of the prestige that photography has recently acquired as an art is based in the convergence of its claim with those of more recent paintings and sculpture. The seemingly insatiable appetite for photography in the 1970s expresses more that the pleasure of discovering and exploring a relatively neglected art form; it derives much of its fervor from the desire to reaffirm the dismissal of abstract art which was one of the messages of the pop taste of the 1960s. Paying more and more attention to photographs is a great relief to sensibilities tired of, or eager to avoid, the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical modernist painting presupposed highly developed skill of looking, and a familiarity with other art and with certain notions about the history of art. Photography, like pop art, reassures viewers that art isn’t hard; it seems to be more about subjects than about art.
Photography is the most successful vehicle of modernist taste in its pop version, with its zeal for debunking the high culture of the past (focusing on shards, junk, odd stuff; excluding nothing); its conscientious courting of vulgarity; its affection for kitsch; its skill in reconciling avant-garde ambitions with the rewards of commercialism; its pseudo-radical patronizing of art as reactionary, elitist, snobbish, insincere, artificial, out of touch with the broad truths of everyday life; its transformation of art into cultural document. At the same time, photography has gradually acquired all the anxieties and self-consciousness of classic modernist art. Many professionals are now worried that this populist strategy is being carried too far, and that the public will forget that photography is, after all, a noble and exalted activity - in short, an art. For the modernist promotion of naїve art always contains a joker: that one continue to honor its hidden claims to sophistication.
It cannot be coincidence that just about the time that photographers stopped discussing whether photography is an art, it was acclaimed as one by the general public and photography entered, in force, into the museum. The museum’s naturalization of photography as art is the conclusive victory of the century-long campaign waged by modernist taste on behalf of an open-ended definition of art, photography offering a much more suitable terrain than painting for this effort. For the line between amateur and professional, primitive and sophisticated is not just harder to draw with photography than it is with painting - it has little meaning. Naїve or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken be anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as representative of photograph’s characteristic powers as a Stieglitz or an Evans.
That all the different kinds of photography form one continuous and interdependent tradition is the once startling, now obvious-seeming assumption which underlies contemporary photographic taste and authorizes the indefinite expansion of that taste. To make this assumption only became plausible when photography was taken up by curators and historians and regularly exhibited in museums and art galleries. Photography’s career in the museum does not reward any particular style; rather, it presents photography as a collection of simultaneous intentions and styles which, however different, are not perceived as in any way contradictory. But while the operation has been a huge success with the public, the response of photography professionals is mixed. Even as they welcome photography’s new legitimacy, many of them feel threatened when the most ambitious images are discussed is direct continuity with all sorts of images, from photojournalism to family snapshots - charging that this reduces photography to something trivial, vulgar, a mere craft.
The real problem with bringing functional photographs, photographs taken for a practical purpose, on commercial assignment, or as souvenirs, into the mainstream of photographic achievement is not that it demeans photography, considered as a fine art, but that the procedure contradicts the nature of most photographs. In most uses of the camera, the photograph’s naїve or descriptive function is paramount. But when viewed in their new context, the museum or gallery, photographs cease to be “about” their subjects in the same direct or primary way; they become studies in the possibilities of photography. Photography’s adoption by the museums makes photography itself seem problematic, in the way experienced only by a small number of self-conscious photographers whose work consists precisely in questioning the camera’s ability to grasp reality. The eclectic museum collections reinforce the arbitrariness, the subjectivity of all photographs, including the most straightforwardly descriptive ones.
Putting in shows on photographs has become as featured a museum activity as mounting shows of individual painters. But a photographer is not like a painter, the role of a photographer being recessive in much in much of serious picture-taking and virtually irrelevant in all the ordinary uses. So far as we care about the subject photographed, we expect the photographer to be an extremely discrete presence. Thus the very success of photojournalism lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographers work from another’s, except insofar as he or she monopolized a particular subject. These photographs have their power as images (or copies) of the world, not of an individual artist’s consciousness. And in the vast majority of photographs which get taken - for scientific and industrial purposes, by the press, by the military and the police, by families - and trace of the personal vision of whoever is behind the camera interferes with the primary demand on the photograph: that is record, diagnose, inform.
It make sense that a painting is signed but a photograph is not (or it seems bad taste if it is). The very nature of photography implies an equivocal relation to the photographer as auteur; and the bigger and more varied the work done by a talented photographer, the more it seems to acquire a kind of corporate rather than individual authorship. Many of the published photographs by photography’s greatest names seem like work that could have been done by another gifted professional of their period. It requires a formal conceit (like Todd Walker’s solarized photographs or Duane Michals’s narrative-sequence photographs) or a thematic obsession (like Eakins with the male nude or Laughin with the Old South) to make work easily recognizable. For photographers who don’t so limit themselves, their body of word does not have the same integrity as does comparably varied work in other art forms. Even in those careers with the sharpest breaks of period and style - think of Picasso, of Stravinsky - one can perceive the unity of concerns that transcends these breaks and can (retrospectively) see the inner relation of one period to another. Knowing the whole body of work, one can see how the same composer could have written Le Sacre du printemps, the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, and the late neo-Schoenbergian works; one recognizes Stravinsky’s hand in all these compositions. But there is no internal evidence for identifying as the work of a single photographer (indeed, one of the most interesting and original of photographers) those studies of human and animal motion, the documents brought back from photo-expeditions in Central America, the government-sponsored camera surveys of Alasks and Yosemite, and the “Clouds” and “Trees” series. Even after knowing they were all taken by Muybridge, one still can’t relate these series of pictures to each other (though each series has a coherent, recognizable style), any more than one could infer the way Atget photographed trees from the way he photographed Paris shop windows, or connect Roman Vishniac’s pre-war portraits of Polish Jews with the scientific microphotographs he has been taking since 1945. In photography the subject creating unbridgeable gaps between one period and another of a large bode of work, confounding signature.
Indeed, the very presence of a coherent photographic style - think of the white backgrounds and flat lighting of Avedon’s portraits, of the distinctive grisaille of Atget’s Paris street studies - seem to imply unified material. And subject matter seems to have the largest part in shaping a viewer’s preferences. Even when photographers are isolated from the practical context in which they may originally have been taken, and looked at as works of art, to prefer one photograph to another seldom means only that the photograph is judged to be superior formally; it almost always means - as in more casual kinds of looking - that the viewer prefers that kind of mood, or respects that intention, or is intrigued by (or feels nostalgic about) that subject. The formalist approaches to photography cannot account for the power of what has been photographed, and the way distance in time and cultural distance from the photograph increase our interest.
Still, it seems logical that contemporary photographic taste has taken a largely formalist direction. Although the natural or naїve status of subject matter in photography is more secure than in any other representational art, the very plurality of situations on which photographs are looked at complicates and eventually weakens the primacy of subject matter. The conflict of interest between objectivity and subjectivity, between demonstration and supposition, is unresolvable. While the authority of a photograph will always depend on the relation to a subject (that it is a photograph of something), all claims on behalf of photography as art must emphasize the subjectivity of seeing. There is an equivocation at the heart off all aesthetic evaluations of photographs; and this explain the chronic defensiveness and extreme mutability of photographic taste.
For a brief time - say, from Stieglitz through the reign of Weston - it appeared that a solid point of view had been erected with which to evaluate photographs: impeccable lighting, skills of composition, clarity of subject, precision of focus, perfection of print quality. But this position, generally thought of as Westonian - essentially technical criteria for what makes a photograph good - is now bankrupt. (Weston’s deprecating appraisal of the great Atget’s as “not a fine technician” shows its limitations.) What position has replaced Weston’s? A much more inclusive one, with criteria which shift the center of judgment from the individual photograph, considering as a finished object, to a photograph considered as an example of “photographic seeing.” What is meant by photographic seeing would hardly exclude Weston’s work but it would also include a large number of anonymous, unposed, crudely lit, asymmetrically composed photographs formerly dismissed for their lack of composition. The new position aims to liberate photography, as art, from the oppressive standards of technical perfection; to liberate photography from beauty, too. It opens up the possibility of a global taste, in which no subject (or absence of subject), no technique (or absence of technique) disqualifies a photograph.
While in principle all subjects are worthy pretexts for exercising the photographic way of seeing, the convention has arisen that photographic seeing is clearest in offbeat or trivial subject matter. Subjects are chosen because they are boring or banal. Because we are indifferent to them, they best show up the ability of the camera to “see”. When Irving Penn, known for his handsome photographs of celebrities and for fashion magazines and ad agencies, was given a show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975, it was for a series of close-ups of cigarette butts. “One might guess,” commented the director of the museum’s Department of Photography, John Szarkowski, “that [Penn] has only rare enjoyed more than a cursory interest in the nominal subjects of his pictures.” Writing about another photographer, Szarkowski commented what can “be coaxed from subject matter” that is “profoundly banal.” Photography’s adoption by the museum is now firmly associated with those important modernist conceit: the “nominal subject” and the “profoundly banal.” But this approach not only diminishes the importance of subject matter; it also loosens the photograph from its connection with a single photographer. The photographic way of seeing is far from exhaustively illustrated by the many one-photographer shows and retrospectives that museums now put on. To be legitimate as an art, photography must cultivate the notion of the photographer as auteur and of all photographers taken by the same photographer as constituting a body of work. These notions are easier to apply to some photographers than to others. They seem more applicable to, say, Man Ray, whose style and purposes straddle photographic and painterly norms, than to Steichen, whose work includes abstractions, portraits, ads for consumer goods, fashion photographs, and aerial reconnaissance photographs (taken during his military career in both world wars). But a meaning that a photograph acquires when seen as part of an individual body of work are not particularly to the point when the criterion is photographic seeing. Rather, such an approach must necesarily favor the new meanings that any one picture acquires when juxtaposed - in ideal anthologies, either on museum walls or in books - with the work of other photographers.
Such anthologies are meant to educate taste about photography in general; to teach a form of seeing which makes all subjects equivalent. When Szarkowski describes gas stations, empty living rooms, and other bleak subjects as “patterns of random facts in the service of [the photographer’s] imagination,” what he really means is that these subjects are ideal for the camera. The ostensibly formalist, neutral criteria of photographic seeing are in fact powerfully judgemental about subjects and about styles. The revaluation of naїve or casual nineteenth-century photographs, particularly those which were taken as humble records, is partially due to their sharp-focus style - a pedagogic corrective to the “pictorial” soft focus which, from Cameron to Stieglitz, was associated with photography’s claim to be an art. Yet the standards of photographic seeing so not imply an unalterable commitment to sharp focus. Whenever serious photography is felt to have been purged of outmoded relations to art and to prettiness, it could just well accommodate a taste for pictorial photography, for abstraction, for noble subjects rather cigarette butts and gas stations and turned backs.
The language in which photographs are generally evaluated is extremely meager. Sometimes it is parasitical on the vocabulary of painting: composition, light and so forth. More often it consists in the vaguest sorts of judgments, as when photographs are praised for being subtle, or interesting, or powerful, or complex, or simple, or - a favorite - deceptively simple.
The reason the language is poor is not fortuitous: say the absence of a rich tradition of photographic criticism. It is something inherent in photography itself, whenever it is viewed as an art. Photography proposes a process of imagination and appeal to taste quite different from that of painting (at least as traditionally conceived). Indeed, the difference between a good photograph and a bad photograph is not at all like the difference between a good and a bad painting. The norms of aesthetic evaluation worked out for painting depend on criteria of authenticity (and fakeness), and of craftsmanship - criteria that are more permissive or simply non-existent for photography. And while the tasks of connoisseurship in painting invariably presume the organic relation of a painting to an individual body of work with its own integrity, and to schools and iconographical traditions, in photography a large individual body of work does not necessarily have an inner stylistic coherence, and an individual photographer’s relation to schools of photography is a much more superficial affair.
One criterion of evaluation which painting and photography do share is innovativeness; both paintings and photographs are often valued because they impose new formal schemes or changes in the visual language. Another criterion which they can share is the quality of presence, which Walter Benjamin considered the defining characteristic of the work of art. Benjamin considered he defining characteristic of the work of art. Benjamin thought that a photograph, being a mechanically reproduced object, could not have genuine presence. It could be argued, however, that the very situation which is now determinative of taste in photography, its exhibition in museums and galleries, has revealed that photographs do possess a kind of authenticity. Furthermore, although no photograph is an original in the sense that a painting always is, there is a large qualitative difference between what could be called originals - prints made from the original negative at the time (that is, at the same moment in the technological evolution of photography) that the picture was taken - and subsequent generations of the same photograph. (What most people know of the famous photographs - in books, newspapers, magazines, and so forth - are photographs of photographs; the originals, which one is likely to see only in a museum or a gallery, offer visual pleasures which are not reproducible.) The result of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin says, is to “put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself.” But to the extent that, say, a Giotto can still be said to possess an aura in the situation of museum display, where it too has been wrenched from its original context and, like the photograph, “meets the beholder halfway’ (in the strictest sense of Benjamin’s notion of the aura, it does not), to that extent an Atget photograph printed in the now unobtainable paper he used can also be said to possess an aura.
The real difference between the aura that a photograph can have and that of a painting lies in the different relation to time. The depredations of time tend to work against paintings. But part of the built-in interest of photographs, and a major source of their aesthetic value, is precisely the transformations that time works upon then, the way they escape the intentions of their makers, given enough time, many photographs do acquire an aura. (The fact that color photographs don’t age in the way black-and -white photographs do ma partly explain the marginal status which color has had until very recently in serious photographic taste. The cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the photograph from patina.) For while paintings or poems do not get better, more attractive simply because they are older, all photographs are interesting as well as touching if they are old enough. It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones, Photography’s adoption by the museum only accelerates that process which time will bring about anyway: making all work valuable.
The role of the museum in forming contemporary photographic taste cannot be overestimated. Museums do not so much arbitrate what photographs are good or bad as offer new conditions for looking a all photographs. This procedure, which appears to be creating standards of evaluation, in fact abolishes them. The museum cannot be said to have created a secure canon for the photographic work of the past, as it has for painting. Even as it seems to be sponsoring a particular photographic taste, the museum is undermining the very idea of normative taste, its role is to show that there are no fixed standards of evaluation, that there is no canonical tradition of work. Under the museum’s attentions, the very idea of a canonical tradition is exposed as redundant.
What keeps photography’s Great Tradition always in flux, constantly being reshuffled, is not that photography is a new art and therefore somewhat insecure - this is part os what photographic taste is about. There is a more rapid sequence of rediscovery in photography than in any other art. Illustrating that law of taste given its definitive formulation by T.S.Eliot whereby each important new work necessarily alters our perception of the heritage of the past, new photographs change how we look at past photographs. (For example Arbus’s work has made it easier to appreciate the greatness of the work of Hine, another photographer devoted to portraying the opaque dignity of victims.) But the swings in contemporary photographic taste do not only reflect such coherent and sequential processes of reevaluation, whereby like enhances like. What they more commonly express is the complementarity and equal value of antithetical styles and themes.
For several decades American photography has been dominated by a reaction against “Westonism” - that is, against contemplative photography, photography considered as an independent visual exploration of the world with no evident social urgency. The technical perfection of Weston’s photographs, the calculated beauties of White and Siskind, the poetic constructions of Frederik Sommer, the self-assured ironies of Cartier-Bresson - all these have been challenged by photography that is, at least programmatically, more naїve, more direct; that is hesitant, even awkward, but taste in photography is not that linear. Without any weakening of the current commitments to informal photography and to photography as social document, a perceptible revival of Weston is now taking place - as, with the passage of enough time, Weston’s work no longer looks timeless; as, by the much broader definition of naїveté with which photographic taste operates, Weston’s work also looks naїve.
Finally, there is no reason to exclude any photographer from the canon. Right now there are mini-revivals of such long-despised pictorialists from another era as Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson, and Robert Demachy. As photography takes the whole world as its subject, there os room for every kind of taste. Literary taste does exclude: the success of the modernist movement in poetry elevated Donne but diminished Dryden. With literature, one can be eclectic up to a point, but one can’t like everything, with photography, eclecticism has no limits. The plain photographs from the 1870s of abandoned children admitted to a Lindon institution called Doctor Barnardo’s Home (taken as “records”) are as moving as David Octavius Hill’s complex portraits of Scottish notables of the 1840s (taken as “art”). The clean look of Weston’s classic modern style is not refuted by, say, Benno Friedman’s ingenious recent revival of pictorial blurriness.
This is not to deny that each viewer likes the work of some photographers more than others: for example, most experienced viewers today prefer Atget to Weston. What it does mean is that, by the nature of photography, one is not really obliged to choose; and that preferences of that sort are, for the most part, merely reactive. Taste in photography tends to be, is perhaps necessarily, global, eclectic, permissive, which means that in the end it must deny the difference between good taste and bad taste. This is what makes all the attempts of photography polemicists to erect a canon seem ingenuous or ignorant. For there is something fake about all photographic controversies - and the attentions of the museum have played a crucial role in making this clear. The museum levels up all schools of photography. Indeed, it makes little sense even to speak of schools. On the history of painting, movements have a genuine life and function: painters are often much better understood in terms of the school or movement to which they belonged. But movements in the history of photography are fleeting, adventitious, sometimes merely perfunctory, and no first-rate photographer is better understood as a member of a group. (Think of Stieglitz and Photo-Secession, Weston and f64, Renger-Patzsch and the New Objectivity, Walker Evans and the Farm Security Administration project, Cartier-Bresson and Magnum.) To group photographers in schools or movements seems to be a kind of misunderstanding, based (once again) on the irrepressible but invariably misleading analogy between photography and painting.
The leading role now played by museums in forming and clarifying the nature of photographic taste seems to mark a new stage from which photography cannot turn back. Accompanying its tendentious respect for the profoundly banal is the museum’s diffusion of a historicist view, one that inexorably promotes the entire history of photography. Small wonder that photography critics and photographers seem anxious. Underlying many of the recent defenses of photography is the feat that photography is already a senile art, littered be spurious or dead movements; that the only task left is curatorship and historiography. (While prices skyrocket for photographs old and new.) It is not surprising that this demoralization should be felt at the moment of photography’s greatest acceptance, for the true extent of photography’s triumph as art, and over art, has not really been understood.
Photography entered the scene as an upstart activity, which seemed to encroach on and diminish an accredited art: painting. For Baudelaire, photography was painting’s “mortal enemy”; but eventually a truce was worked out, according to which photography was held to be painting’s liberator. Weston employed the most common formula for easing the defensiveness of painters when he wrote in 1930: “Photography has, or will eventually, negate much panting - for which the painter should be deeply grateful.” Freed be photography from the drudgery of faithful representation, painting could pursue a higher task: abstraction. Indeed, the most persistent idea in histories of photography and in photography criticism is this mythic pact concluded between painting and photography, which authorized both to pursue their separate but equally valid tasks, while creatively influencing each other. In fact, the legend falsifies much of the history of both painting and photography. The camera’s way of fixing the appearance of the external world suggested new patterns of pictorial composition and new subjects to painters: creating a preference for the fragment, raising interest in glimpses of humble life, and in studies of fleeting motion and the effects of light. Painting did not so much turn to abstraction as adopt the camera’s eye, becoming (to borrow Mario Praz’s words) telescopic, microscopic, and photoscopic in structure. But painters have never stopped attempting to imitate the realistic effects of photography. And, far from confining itself to realistic representation and leaving abstraction to painters, photography has kept up with and absorbed all the anti-naturalistic conquests of painting.
More generally, this legend doesn’t take into account the voraciousness of the photographic enterprise. In the transactions between painting and photography, photography has always had the upper hand. There is nothing surprising in the fact that painters from Delacroix and Turner to Picasso and Bacon have used photographs as visual aids, but no one expects photographers to get help from painting. Photographs may be incorporated or transcribed into the painting (or collage, or combine), but the photography encapsulates art itself. The experience of looking at painting may help us to look better at photographs. But photography has weakened out experience of painting. (In more than one sense, Baudelaire was right.) Nobody ever found a lithograph or an engraving of a painting - the popular older methods of mechanical reproduction - more satisfying or more exciting than the painting. But photographs, which turn interesting details into autonomous compositions, which transforms true colors into brilliant colors, provide new, irresistible satisfactions. The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. Photographs make normative an experience of art that is mediated, second-hand, intense in a different way. (To deplore that photographs of paintings have become substitutes for the paintings for many people is not to support any mystique of “the original” that addresses the viewer without mediation. Seeing is a complex act, and no great painting communicates its value and quality without some from of preparation and instruction. Moreover, the people who have a harder time seeing the original work of art after seeing the photographic copy are generally those who would have seen very little in the original.)
As most works of art (including photographs) are now known from photographic copies, photography - and the art activities derived from photographic taste - has decisively transformed the traditional fine arts and the traditional norms of taste, including the very idea of the work of art. Less and less does the work of art depend on being a unique object, an original made by an individual artist. Much of painting today aspires to the qualities of reproducible objects. Finally, photographs have become so much the leading visual experience that we now have works of art which are produced in order to be photographed. In much of conceptual art, in Christo’s packaging of the landscape, in the earthworks of Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, the artist’s work is known principally by the photographic report of it in galleries and museums; sometimes the size is such that it can only be known in a photograph (or from an airplane). The photograph is not, even ostensibly, meant to lead us back to an original experience.
It was in the basis of this presumed truce between photography and painting and painting that photography was - grudgingly at first, then enthusiastically as a fine art. But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art - it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure - photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac’s Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget’s Paris. Photography is not an art like, say painting or poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art,t he activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, from the beginning the photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography - and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns - is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.
Painting and photography are not two potentially competitive systems for producing and reproducing images, which simply had to arrive at a proper division of territory to be reconciled. Photography is an enterprise of another order. Photography, though not an art form in itself, has the peculiar capacity to turn all its subjects into works of art. Superseding the issue of whether photography is or not an art is the fact that photography heralds (and creates) new ambitions for the arts. It is the prototype of the characteristic direction taken in our time by both the modernist high arts and the commercial arts: the transformation of arts into meta-arts or media. (Such development as film, TV, video, the tape-based music of Cage, Stockhausen, and Steve Reich are logical extensions of the model established be photography.) The traditional fine arts are elitist: their characteristic form is a single work, produced by an individual; they imply a hierarchy of subject matter in which some subjects are considered important, profound, noble, and others unimportant, trivial, base. The media are democratic: they weaken the role of the specialized producer or auteur (by using procedures based on chance, or mechanical techniques which anyone can learn; and by being corporate or collaborative efforts); they regard the whole world as material. The traditional fine arts rely on the distinction between authentic and fake, between original and copy, between good taste and bad taste; the media blur, if they do not abolish outright, these distinctions. The fine arts assume that certain experiences or subjects have a meaning. The media are essentially contentless (this is the truth behind Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated remark about the message being the medium itself); their characteristic tone is ironic, or dead-pan, or parodistic. It is inevitable that more and more art will be designed to end as photographs. A modernist would have to rewrite Pater’s dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music. Now all art aspires to the condition of photography.
The disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken, the inevitable even when inadvertent authority of the camera’s result, suggest a very tenuous relation of knowing. No one would dispute that photography gave a tremendous boost to the cognitive claims of sight, because - through close-up and remote sensing - it is so greatly enlarged the realm of the visible. But about the ways in which any subject within the range of unaided vision is further known through a photograph or the extent to which, in oder to get a good photograph, people need to know anything about what they are photographing there are no agreement. Picture-taking had been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a lucid and precise act of knowing, of conscious intelligence or as a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter. Thus Nadar, speaking of his respectful, expressive pictures of Baudelaire, Doré, Michelet, Hugo, Berlioz, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Delacroix, and other famous friends, said “the portrait I do best is of the person I know best,” while Avedon has observed that most of hid good portraits are of people he met for the first time when photographing them.
In this century, the older generation of photographers described photography as a heroic effort of attention, an ascetic discipline, a mystic receptivity to the world which requires that the photographer pass through a cloud of unknowing. According to Minor White, “the state of mind of the photographer while creating is a blank ... when looking for pictures. ... The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and feel it better.” Cartier-Bresson has linked himself to a Zen archer, who must become the target so as to be able to hit it; “thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards,” he says, “never while actually taking a photograph.” Thought is regarded as clouding the transparency of the photographer’s consciousness, and as infringing on the autonomy of what is being photographed. Determined to prove that photographs could - and when they are good, always do - transcend literalness, many serious photographers have made a photography a noetic paradox. Photography is advanced as a form of knowing without knowing: a way of outwitting the world, instead of making a frontal attack on it.
But even when ambitious professionals disparage thinking - suspicion of the intellect being a recurrent theme in photographic apologetics - they usually want to assert how rigorous this permissive visualising needs to be. “A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept,” Ansel Adams insists. “The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography - be which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good - is fatal to serious results.” To take a good photograph, runs the common claim, one must already see it. That is, the image must exist in the photographer’s mind at or before the moment when the negative is exposed. Justifying photography has for the most part precluded admitting that the scattershot method, especially as used be someone experienced, may yield a thoroughly satisfactory result. But despite their reluctance to say so, most photographers have always had - with good reason - an almost superstitious confidence in the lucky accident.
Lately, the secret is becoming avowable. As the defense of photography enters its present, retrospective phase, there is an increasing diffidence in claims about the alert, knowing state of minds that accomplished picture-taking presumes. The anti-intellectual declarations of photographers, commonplaces of modernist thinking in the arts, have prepared the way for the gradual tilt of serious photography toward a skeptical investigation of its own powers, a commonplace of modernist thinking in the arts. Photography as knowledge is succeeded be photography as - photography. In sharp reaction against any ideal of authoritative representation, the most influential of the younger American photographers reject any ambition to pre-visualize the image and conceive their work as showing how different things look when photographed.
Where the claims of knowledge falter, the claims of creativity take up the slack. As if to refute the fact that many superb pictures are by photographers devoid of any serious or interesting intentions, the insistence that picture-taking is first of all the focusing of a temperament, only secondarily of a machine, has always been one of the main themes of the defense of photography. This is the theme stated so eloquently in the finest essay ever written in praise of photography, Paul Rosenfeld’s chapter in Stieglitz in Port of New York. By using “his machinery” - as Rosenfeld puts it - “unmechanically,” Stieglitz shows that the camera not only “gave him an opportunity to express himself” but supplied images with a wider and “more delicate” gamut “than the hand can draw.” Similarly, Weston insists over and over that photography is a supreme opportunity for self-expression, far superior to that offered by painting. For photography to compete with painting means invoking originality as an important standard for apprising a photographer’s work, originality being equated with the stamp of a unique, forceful sensibility. What is exciting “are photographers that say something in a new manner,” Harry Callahan writes, “not for the sake of being different, but because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.” For Ansel Adams “a great photograph” gas to be “a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”
That there is a difference between photography conceived as “true expression” and photography conceived (as it more commonly is) as faithful recording is evident; though most accounts of photography’s mission attempt to paper over the difference, it is implicit in the starkly polarized terms that photographers employ to dramatize what they do. As modern forms of the quest for self-expression commonly do, photography recapitulates both of the traditional ways of radically opposing self and world. Photography is seen as an acute manifestation of the individualized “I,” the homeless private self astray in an overwhelming world - mastering reality by a fast visual anthologizing of it. Or photography is seen as a means of finding a place in the world (still experienced as overwhelming, alien) by being able to relate to it with detachment - bypassing the interfering, insolent claim of the self. But between the defence of photography as a superior means of self-expressing and the praise of photography as a superior way of putting the self at reality’s service there is not as much difference as might appear. Both presuppose that photography provides a unique system of disclosures: that it shows us a reality as we had not seen it before.
The revelatory character of photography generally goes by the polemical name of realism. From Fox Talbot’s view that the camera produces “natural images” to Berenice Abbott’s denunciation of “pictorial” photography to Cartier-Bresson’s warning that “the thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived,” most of the contradictory declarations of photographers converge on pious avowals of respect for things-as-they-are. For a medium so often considered to be merely realistic, one would think photographers would not have to go on as they do, exhorting each other to stick to realism. But the exhortations continue - another instance of the need photographers have for making something mysterious and urgent of the process by which they appropriate the world.
To insist, as Abbott does, that realism is the very essence of photography does not, as it might seem, establish the superiority of one particular procedure or standard; does not necessarily mean that photo-documents (Abbott’s world) are better than pictorial photographs. Photography’s commitment to realism can accommodate any style, any approach to subject matter. Sometimes it will be defined more narrowly, as the making of images which resemble, and inform us about, the world. Interpreted more broadly, echoing the distrust of mere likeness which has inspired painting for more than a century, photographic realism can be - is more and more - defined not as what is “really” there but as what I “really” perceive. While as modern forms of art claim some privileged relation to reality, the claim seems particularly justified in the cast of photography. Yet photography has not, finally, been any more immune than painting has to the most characteristic modern doubts about any straight-forward relation to reality - the inability to take for granted the world of observed. Even Abbott cannot help assuming a change in the very nature of reality: that it needs the selective, more accurate eye of the camera, there being simply much more of it than ever before. “Today, we are confronted with reality on the wastes scale mankind has known,” she declares, and this puts “a greater responsibility on the photographer.”
All that photography’s program of realism actually implies is the belief that reality is hidden. And, being hidden, is something to be unveiled. Whatever the camera records is a disclosure - whether it is imperceptible, fleeting parts of movement, an order that natural vision is incapable of perceiving or a “heightened reality” (Moholy-Nagy’s phrase), or simply the elliptical way of seeing. What Stieglitz describes as his “patient waiting for the moment of equilibrium” make the same assumption about the essential hiddenness of the real as Robert Frank’s waiting for the moment of revealing disequilibrium, to catch reality off-guard, in what he calls the “in-between moments.”
Just to show something, anything, in the photographic view is to show that it is hidden. But it is not necessary for photographers to point up the mystery with exotic or exceptionally striking subjects. When Dorothea Lange urges her colleagues to concentrate in “the familiar,” it is with the understanding that the familiar, rendered by a sensitive use of the camera, will thereby become mysterious. Photography’s commitment to realism does not limit photography to certain subjects, as more real than others, but rather illustrates the formalist understanding of what goes on in every work of art: reality is, Viktor Shklovsky’s word, de-familiarized. What is being urged is an aggressive relation to all subjects. Armed with their machines, photographers are to make an assault on reality - which is perceived as recalcitrant, as only deceptively available, as unreal. “The pictures have a reality for me that the people don’t,” Avedon has declared. It is through the photographs that I know them.” To claim that the photography must be realistic is not not incompatible with opening up an even wider gap between image and reality, in which the mysteriously acquired knowledge (and the enhancement of reality) supplied by photographs presumes a prior alienation from or devaluation of reality.
As photographers describe it, picture-taking is both a limitless technique for appropriating the objective world and an unavoidably solipsistic expression of the singular self. Photographs depicts realities that already exists, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual temperament, discovering itself through the camera’s cropping of reality. For Mogoly-Nagy the genius of photography lies in its ability to render “an objective portrait: the individual to be photographed so that the photographic result shall not be encumbered with subjective intention.” For Lange every portrait of another person is a self-portrait of the photographer, as for Minor White - promoting “self-discovery through a camera” - landscape photographs are really “inner landscapes”. The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
Maholy-Nagy’s demand for the photographer’s self-effacement follows from his appreciation of how edifying photography is: it retains and upgrades out powers of observation, it brings about “a psychological transformation of our eyesight.” (In an essay published in 1936, he says that photography creates or enlarges eight distinct varieties of seeing: abstract, exact, rapid, slow, intensified, penetrative, simultaneous, and distorted.) But self-enhancement is also the demand behind quite different, anti-scientific approaches to photography, such as that expressed in Robert Frank’s credo: “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” In both views the photographer is proposed as a kind of ideal observer - for Mogoly-Nagy, seeing with the detachment of a researcher; for Frank, seeing “simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street.”
One attraction of any view of the photographer as ideal observer - whether impersonal (Maholy-Nagy) or friendly (Frank) - is that it is implicitly denies that picture-taking is in any way an aggressive act. That it can be so described makes most professionals extremely defensive. Cartier-Bresson and Avedon are among the very few to have talked honestly (if ruefully) about the exploitative aspect of the photographer’s activities. Usually photographers feel obliged to protect photography’s innocence, claiming that the predatory attitude is incompatible with good picture, and hoping that a more affirmative vocabulary will put over their point. One of the more memorable examples of such verbiage is Ansel Adam’s description of the camera as an “instrument of love and revelation”; Adams also urges that we stop saying that we “take” a picture and always say we “make” one. Stieglitz’s name for the cloud studies he did in the late 1920s - “Equivalents,” that is, statements of his inner feeling - is another, soberer instance of the persistent effort of photographers to feature the benevolent character of picture-taking and discount its predatory implications. What talented photographers do cannot of course be characterized either as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. Photography is a paradigm of an inherently equivocal connection between self and world - its version of the ideology of realism sometimes dictating an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates the self. One side or the other of the connection is always being rediscovered and championed.
An important result of the coexistence of these two ideas - assault on reality and submission to reality - is a recurrent ambivalence toward photography’s means. Whatever the claims for photography as a form of personal expression on a par with painting, it remains true that its originality is inextricably linked to the powers of the machine: no one can deny the informativeness and formal beauty of many photographs made possible by the steady growth of this powers, like Harold Edgerton’s high-speed photographs of a bullet hitting its target, of the swirls and eddies of a tennis stroke, or Lennart Nilsson’s endoscopic photographs of the interior of a human body.
But as cameras get ever more sophisticated, more automated, more acute, some photographers are temped to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are really not armed, and prefer to submit themselves to the limits imposed by the pre-morden camera technology - a cruder, less high-powered machine being though to give more interesting or expressive results, to leave more room for the creative accident. Not using fancy equipment has been a point of honor for many photographers - including Weston, Brandt, Cartier-Bresson, Frank - some sticking with a battered camera of simple design and slow lens that they acquired early in their careers, some continuing to make their contact with nothing more elaborate than a few trays, a bottle of developer, and a bottle of hypo solution.
The camera is indeed the instrument of “fast seeing,” as one confident modernist, Alvin Langdon Coburn, declared in 1918, echoing the Futurist apotheosis of machines and speed. Photography’s present mood of doubt can be gauged by Cartier-Bresson’s recent statement that it may be too fast. The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates with the wish to return to a more artisanal, purer past - when images still had a handmade quality, an aura. This nostalgia for some pristine state of the photographic enterprise underlies the current enthusiasm for daguerreotypes, stereograph cards, photographic cartes de visite, family snapshots, the work of forgotten nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century provincial and commercial photographers.
But the reluctance to use the newest high-powered equipment is not the only or indeed the most interesting way in which photographers express their attraction to photography’s past. The primitivist hankering that inform current photographic taste are actually being aided by the ceaseless innovativeness of camera technology. For many of these advances not only enlarge the camera’s powers but also recapitulate - in a more ingenious, less cumbersome form - earlier, discarded possibilities of the medium. Thus, the development of photography hinges on the replacement of the daguerreotype process, direct positives in metal plates, be the positive-negative process, whereby from an original (negative) an unlimited number of prints (positives) can be made. (Although invented simultaneously in the late 1830s, it was Daguerre’s government supported invention, announced in 1839 with great publicity, rather than Fox Talbot’s positive-negative process, that was the first photographic process in general use.) But now the camera could be said to be turning back upon itself. The Polaroid camera revives the principle of the daguerreotype camera: each print is a unique object. The hologram (a three-dimensional image created with laser light) could be considered as a variant on the heliogram - the first, cameraless photographs made in the 1920s by Nicéphore Niepce. And the increasingly popular use of the camera to produce slides - images which cannot be displayed permanently or stored in wallets and albums, but can only be projected on walls or on paper (as aids for drawing) - goes back even further into the camera’s prehistory, for it amounts to using the photographic cameras to do work of the camera obscura.
“History is pushing us to the brink of a realistic age,” according to Abbott, who summons photographers to make the jump themselves. But while photographers are perpetually urging each other to be bolder, a doubt persists about the value of realism which keeps them oscillating between simplicity and irony, between insisting on control and cultivating the unexpected, between the eagerness to take advantage of the complex evolution of the medium and the wish to reinvent photography from scratch. Photographers seem to need periodically to resist their own knowingness and to remystify what they do.
Questions about knowledge are not, historically, are not photographer’s first lint of defense. The earliest controversies center on the question whether photography’s fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine did not prevent it from being a fint art - as distinct from a merely practical art, an arm of science, and a trade. (That photographs give useful and often startling kinds of information was obvious from the beginning. Photographers only started worrying about what they knew, and what kind of knowledge in a deeper sense a photograph supplies, after photography was a accepted as an art.) For about a century the defence of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was a vanguard revolt against ordinary standards of seeing, no less worthy an art than painting.
Now photographers are choosier about the claims they make. Since photography has become so entirely respectable as a branch of the fine arts, they no longer seek the shelter that the notion of art has intermittently given the photographic enterprise. For all the important American photographers who have proudly identified their work with the aims of art (like Stieglitz, White, Siskind, Callahan, Lange, Laughlin), these are many more who disavow the question itself. Whether or not the camera’s “results come under the category of Art is irrelevant,” Strand wrote in the 1920s; and Moholy-Nagy declared it “quite unimportant whether photography produces ‘art’ or not.” Photographers who came to maturity in the 1940s or later are bolder, openly snubbing art, equating art with artiness. They generally claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing, exploring themselves - anything but making works of art. At first it was photography’s commitment to realism that places it in a permanently ambivalent relation to art; now it is its modernist heritage. The fact that important photographers are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their work is not involved with art, shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is to the traditional aims of art. And modernist taste has welcomed this unpretentious activity that can be consumed, almost in spite of itself, as high art.
Even in the nineteenth century, when photography was thought to be so evidently in need of defense as a fine art, the line of defense was fare from stable. Julia Margaret Cameron’s claim that the photography qualifies as an art because, like painting, it seeks the beautiful was succeeded by Hanry Preach Robinson’s Wildean claim that photography is an art because it can lie. In early twentieth century Alvin Langdon Coburn’s praise of photography as “the most modern of the arts,” because it is a fast, impersonal way of seeing, competes with Weston’s praise of photography as a new means of individual visual creation. In the recent decades the notion of art has been exhausted as an instrument of polemic; indeed, a good part of the immense prestige that photography has acquired as an art form comes from its declared ambivalence toward being an art. When photographers now deny that they are making works of art, it is because they think they are doing something better that. Their disclaimers tell us more about the harried status of any notion of art than about whether photography is or isn’t one.
Despite the efforts of contemporary photographers to exorcise the specter of art, sometimes lingers. For instance, when professionals object to having their photographs printed to the edge of the page in books or magazines, they are invoking the model inherited from another art: as paintings are put in frames, photographs should be framed in white space. Another instance: many photographers continue to prefer black-and-white images, which are felt to be more tactful, more decorous than color - or less voyeuristic and less sentimental or crudely lifelike. But the real basis for this preference is, once again, an implicit comparison with painting. In the introduction to his book of photographs The Decisive Moment (1952), Cartier-Bressom justified his unwillingness to use color by citing technical limitations: the slow speed of color film, which reduced the depth of focus. But with the rapid progress in color-film technology during the last two decades, making possible all the tonal subtlety and high resolution one might desire, Cartier-Bresson has had to shift his ground, and now proposes that photographers renounce color as a matter of principle. In Cartier-Bresson’s version of that persistent myth according to which - following the camera’s invention - a division of territory took place between photography and painting, color belongs to painting. He enjoins photographers to resist temptation and keep up their side of the bargain.
Those still involved in defining photography as an art are always trying to hold some line. But it is impossible to hold the line: any attempt to restrict photography to certain subjects or certain techniques, however fruitful these have proved to be, is bound to be challenged and to collapse. For it is in the very nature of photography that it be a promiscuous form of seeing, and, in talented hands, an infallible medium of creation. (As John Szarkowski observes, “a skilful photographer can photograph anything well.”) Hence, its longstanding quarrel with art, which (until recently) meant the results of a discriminating or purified way of seeing, and a medium of creation governed by standards that make genuine achievement a rarity. Understandably, photographers have been reluctant to give up the attempt to define more narrowly what good photography is. The history of photography is punctuated be a series of dualistic controversies - such as the straight print versus the doctored print, pictorial photography versus documentary photography - each of which is a different form of the debate about photography’s relation to art: how close it can get while still retaining its claim to unlimited visual acquisition. Recently, it has become common to maintain that all these controversies are now outmoded, which suggests that the debate has been settled. But it is unlikely that the defense of photography as art will ever completely subside. As long as photography is not only a voracious way of seeing but one which needs to claim that it is a special, distinctive way, photographers will continue to take shelter (if only covertly) in the defiled but still prestigious precincts of art.
Photographers who suppose they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified in painting by taking pictures remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from art, or Art, by the act of painting (that is, by treating the canvas as a field of action rather than as an object). And much of the prestige that photography has recently acquired as an art is based in the convergence of its claim with those of more recent paintings and sculpture. The seemingly insatiable appetite for photography in the 1970s expresses more that the pleasure of discovering and exploring a relatively neglected art form; it derives much of its fervor from the desire to reaffirm the dismissal of abstract art which was one of the messages of the pop taste of the 1960s. Paying more and more attention to photographs is a great relief to sensibilities tired of, or eager to avoid, the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical modernist painting presupposed highly developed skill of looking, and a familiarity with other art and with certain notions about the history of art. Photography, like pop art, reassures viewers that art isn’t hard; it seems to be more about subjects than about art.
Photography is the most successful vehicle of modernist taste in its pop version, with its zeal for debunking the high culture of the past (focusing on shards, junk, odd stuff; excluding nothing); its conscientious courting of vulgarity; its affection for kitsch; its skill in reconciling avant-garde ambitions with the rewards of commercialism; its pseudo-radical patronizing of art as reactionary, elitist, snobbish, insincere, artificial, out of touch with the broad truths of everyday life; its transformation of art into cultural document. At the same time, photography has gradually acquired all the anxieties and self-consciousness of classic modernist art. Many professionals are now worried that this populist strategy is being carried too far, and that the public will forget that photography is, after all, a noble and exalted activity - in short, an art. For the modernist promotion of naїve art always contains a joker: that one continue to honor its hidden claims to sophistication.
It cannot be coincidence that just about the time that photographers stopped discussing whether photography is an art, it was acclaimed as one by the general public and photography entered, in force, into the museum. The museum’s naturalization of photography as art is the conclusive victory of the century-long campaign waged by modernist taste on behalf of an open-ended definition of art, photography offering a much more suitable terrain than painting for this effort. For the line between amateur and professional, primitive and sophisticated is not just harder to draw with photography than it is with painting - it has little meaning. Naїve or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken be anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as representative of photograph’s characteristic powers as a Stieglitz or an Evans.
That all the different kinds of photography form one continuous and interdependent tradition is the once startling, now obvious-seeming assumption which underlies contemporary photographic taste and authorizes the indefinite expansion of that taste. To make this assumption only became plausible when photography was taken up by curators and historians and regularly exhibited in museums and art galleries. Photography’s career in the museum does not reward any particular style; rather, it presents photography as a collection of simultaneous intentions and styles which, however different, are not perceived as in any way contradictory. But while the operation has been a huge success with the public, the response of photography professionals is mixed. Even as they welcome photography’s new legitimacy, many of them feel threatened when the most ambitious images are discussed is direct continuity with all sorts of images, from photojournalism to family snapshots - charging that this reduces photography to something trivial, vulgar, a mere craft.
The real problem with bringing functional photographs, photographs taken for a practical purpose, on commercial assignment, or as souvenirs, into the mainstream of photographic achievement is not that it demeans photography, considered as a fine art, but that the procedure contradicts the nature of most photographs. In most uses of the camera, the photograph’s naїve or descriptive function is paramount. But when viewed in their new context, the museum or gallery, photographs cease to be “about” their subjects in the same direct or primary way; they become studies in the possibilities of photography. Photography’s adoption by the museums makes photography itself seem problematic, in the way experienced only by a small number of self-conscious photographers whose work consists precisely in questioning the camera’s ability to grasp reality. The eclectic museum collections reinforce the arbitrariness, the subjectivity of all photographs, including the most straightforwardly descriptive ones.
Putting in shows on photographs has become as featured a museum activity as mounting shows of individual painters. But a photographer is not like a painter, the role of a photographer being recessive in much in much of serious picture-taking and virtually irrelevant in all the ordinary uses. So far as we care about the subject photographed, we expect the photographer to be an extremely discrete presence. Thus the very success of photojournalism lies in the difficulty of distinguishing one superior photographers work from another’s, except insofar as he or she monopolized a particular subject. These photographs have their power as images (or copies) of the world, not of an individual artist’s consciousness. And in the vast majority of photographs which get taken - for scientific and industrial purposes, by the press, by the military and the police, by families - and trace of the personal vision of whoever is behind the camera interferes with the primary demand on the photograph: that is record, diagnose, inform.
It make sense that a painting is signed but a photograph is not (or it seems bad taste if it is). The very nature of photography implies an equivocal relation to the photographer as auteur; and the bigger and more varied the work done by a talented photographer, the more it seems to acquire a kind of corporate rather than individual authorship. Many of the published photographs by photography’s greatest names seem like work that could have been done by another gifted professional of their period. It requires a formal conceit (like Todd Walker’s solarized photographs or Duane Michals’s narrative-sequence photographs) or a thematic obsession (like Eakins with the male nude or Laughin with the Old South) to make work easily recognizable. For photographers who don’t so limit themselves, their body of word does not have the same integrity as does comparably varied work in other art forms. Even in those careers with the sharpest breaks of period and style - think of Picasso, of Stravinsky - one can perceive the unity of concerns that transcends these breaks and can (retrospectively) see the inner relation of one period to another. Knowing the whole body of work, one can see how the same composer could have written Le Sacre du printemps, the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, and the late neo-Schoenbergian works; one recognizes Stravinsky’s hand in all these compositions. But there is no internal evidence for identifying as the work of a single photographer (indeed, one of the most interesting and original of photographers) those studies of human and animal motion, the documents brought back from photo-expeditions in Central America, the government-sponsored camera surveys of Alasks and Yosemite, and the “Clouds” and “Trees” series. Even after knowing they were all taken by Muybridge, one still can’t relate these series of pictures to each other (though each series has a coherent, recognizable style), any more than one could infer the way Atget photographed trees from the way he photographed Paris shop windows, or connect Roman Vishniac’s pre-war portraits of Polish Jews with the scientific microphotographs he has been taking since 1945. In photography the subject creating unbridgeable gaps between one period and another of a large bode of work, confounding signature.
Indeed, the very presence of a coherent photographic style - think of the white backgrounds and flat lighting of Avedon’s portraits, of the distinctive grisaille of Atget’s Paris street studies - seem to imply unified material. And subject matter seems to have the largest part in shaping a viewer’s preferences. Even when photographers are isolated from the practical context in which they may originally have been taken, and looked at as works of art, to prefer one photograph to another seldom means only that the photograph is judged to be superior formally; it almost always means - as in more casual kinds of looking - that the viewer prefers that kind of mood, or respects that intention, or is intrigued by (or feels nostalgic about) that subject. The formalist approaches to photography cannot account for the power of what has been photographed, and the way distance in time and cultural distance from the photograph increase our interest.
Still, it seems logical that contemporary photographic taste has taken a largely formalist direction. Although the natural or naїve status of subject matter in photography is more secure than in any other representational art, the very plurality of situations on which photographs are looked at complicates and eventually weakens the primacy of subject matter. The conflict of interest between objectivity and subjectivity, between demonstration and supposition, is unresolvable. While the authority of a photograph will always depend on the relation to a subject (that it is a photograph of something), all claims on behalf of photography as art must emphasize the subjectivity of seeing. There is an equivocation at the heart off all aesthetic evaluations of photographs; and this explain the chronic defensiveness and extreme mutability of photographic taste.
For a brief time - say, from Stieglitz through the reign of Weston - it appeared that a solid point of view had been erected with which to evaluate photographs: impeccable lighting, skills of composition, clarity of subject, precision of focus, perfection of print quality. But this position, generally thought of as Westonian - essentially technical criteria for what makes a photograph good - is now bankrupt. (Weston’s deprecating appraisal of the great Atget’s as “not a fine technician” shows its limitations.) What position has replaced Weston’s? A much more inclusive one, with criteria which shift the center of judgment from the individual photograph, considering as a finished object, to a photograph considered as an example of “photographic seeing.” What is meant by photographic seeing would hardly exclude Weston’s work but it would also include a large number of anonymous, unposed, crudely lit, asymmetrically composed photographs formerly dismissed for their lack of composition. The new position aims to liberate photography, as art, from the oppressive standards of technical perfection; to liberate photography from beauty, too. It opens up the possibility of a global taste, in which no subject (or absence of subject), no technique (or absence of technique) disqualifies a photograph.
While in principle all subjects are worthy pretexts for exercising the photographic way of seeing, the convention has arisen that photographic seeing is clearest in offbeat or trivial subject matter. Subjects are chosen because they are boring or banal. Because we are indifferent to them, they best show up the ability of the camera to “see”. When Irving Penn, known for his handsome photographs of celebrities and for fashion magazines and ad agencies, was given a show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975, it was for a series of close-ups of cigarette butts. “One might guess,” commented the director of the museum’s Department of Photography, John Szarkowski, “that [Penn] has only rare enjoyed more than a cursory interest in the nominal subjects of his pictures.” Writing about another photographer, Szarkowski commented what can “be coaxed from subject matter” that is “profoundly banal.” Photography’s adoption by the museum is now firmly associated with those important modernist conceit: the “nominal subject” and the “profoundly banal.” But this approach not only diminishes the importance of subject matter; it also loosens the photograph from its connection with a single photographer. The photographic way of seeing is far from exhaustively illustrated by the many one-photographer shows and retrospectives that museums now put on. To be legitimate as an art, photography must cultivate the notion of the photographer as auteur and of all photographers taken by the same photographer as constituting a body of work. These notions are easier to apply to some photographers than to others. They seem more applicable to, say, Man Ray, whose style and purposes straddle photographic and painterly norms, than to Steichen, whose work includes abstractions, portraits, ads for consumer goods, fashion photographs, and aerial reconnaissance photographs (taken during his military career in both world wars). But a meaning that a photograph acquires when seen as part of an individual body of work are not particularly to the point when the criterion is photographic seeing. Rather, such an approach must necesarily favor the new meanings that any one picture acquires when juxtaposed - in ideal anthologies, either on museum walls or in books - with the work of other photographers.
Such anthologies are meant to educate taste about photography in general; to teach a form of seeing which makes all subjects equivalent. When Szarkowski describes gas stations, empty living rooms, and other bleak subjects as “patterns of random facts in the service of [the photographer’s] imagination,” what he really means is that these subjects are ideal for the camera. The ostensibly formalist, neutral criteria of photographic seeing are in fact powerfully judgemental about subjects and about styles. The revaluation of naїve or casual nineteenth-century photographs, particularly those which were taken as humble records, is partially due to their sharp-focus style - a pedagogic corrective to the “pictorial” soft focus which, from Cameron to Stieglitz, was associated with photography’s claim to be an art. Yet the standards of photographic seeing so not imply an unalterable commitment to sharp focus. Whenever serious photography is felt to have been purged of outmoded relations to art and to prettiness, it could just well accommodate a taste for pictorial photography, for abstraction, for noble subjects rather cigarette butts and gas stations and turned backs.
The language in which photographs are generally evaluated is extremely meager. Sometimes it is parasitical on the vocabulary of painting: composition, light and so forth. More often it consists in the vaguest sorts of judgments, as when photographs are praised for being subtle, or interesting, or powerful, or complex, or simple, or - a favorite - deceptively simple.
The reason the language is poor is not fortuitous: say the absence of a rich tradition of photographic criticism. It is something inherent in photography itself, whenever it is viewed as an art. Photography proposes a process of imagination and appeal to taste quite different from that of painting (at least as traditionally conceived). Indeed, the difference between a good photograph and a bad photograph is not at all like the difference between a good and a bad painting. The norms of aesthetic evaluation worked out for painting depend on criteria of authenticity (and fakeness), and of craftsmanship - criteria that are more permissive or simply non-existent for photography. And while the tasks of connoisseurship in painting invariably presume the organic relation of a painting to an individual body of work with its own integrity, and to schools and iconographical traditions, in photography a large individual body of work does not necessarily have an inner stylistic coherence, and an individual photographer’s relation to schools of photography is a much more superficial affair.
One criterion of evaluation which painting and photography do share is innovativeness; both paintings and photographs are often valued because they impose new formal schemes or changes in the visual language. Another criterion which they can share is the quality of presence, which Walter Benjamin considered the defining characteristic of the work of art. Benjamin considered he defining characteristic of the work of art. Benjamin thought that a photograph, being a mechanically reproduced object, could not have genuine presence. It could be argued, however, that the very situation which is now determinative of taste in photography, its exhibition in museums and galleries, has revealed that photographs do possess a kind of authenticity. Furthermore, although no photograph is an original in the sense that a painting always is, there is a large qualitative difference between what could be called originals - prints made from the original negative at the time (that is, at the same moment in the technological evolution of photography) that the picture was taken - and subsequent generations of the same photograph. (What most people know of the famous photographs - in books, newspapers, magazines, and so forth - are photographs of photographs; the originals, which one is likely to see only in a museum or a gallery, offer visual pleasures which are not reproducible.) The result of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin says, is to “put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself.” But to the extent that, say, a Giotto can still be said to possess an aura in the situation of museum display, where it too has been wrenched from its original context and, like the photograph, “meets the beholder halfway’ (in the strictest sense of Benjamin’s notion of the aura, it does not), to that extent an Atget photograph printed in the now unobtainable paper he used can also be said to possess an aura.
The real difference between the aura that a photograph can have and that of a painting lies in the different relation to time. The depredations of time tend to work against paintings. But part of the built-in interest of photographs, and a major source of their aesthetic value, is precisely the transformations that time works upon then, the way they escape the intentions of their makers, given enough time, many photographs do acquire an aura. (The fact that color photographs don’t age in the way black-and -white photographs do ma partly explain the marginal status which color has had until very recently in serious photographic taste. The cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the photograph from patina.) For while paintings or poems do not get better, more attractive simply because they are older, all photographs are interesting as well as touching if they are old enough. It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones, Photography’s adoption by the museum only accelerates that process which time will bring about anyway: making all work valuable.
The role of the museum in forming contemporary photographic taste cannot be overestimated. Museums do not so much arbitrate what photographs are good or bad as offer new conditions for looking a all photographs. This procedure, which appears to be creating standards of evaluation, in fact abolishes them. The museum cannot be said to have created a secure canon for the photographic work of the past, as it has for painting. Even as it seems to be sponsoring a particular photographic taste, the museum is undermining the very idea of normative taste, its role is to show that there are no fixed standards of evaluation, that there is no canonical tradition of work. Under the museum’s attentions, the very idea of a canonical tradition is exposed as redundant.
What keeps photography’s Great Tradition always in flux, constantly being reshuffled, is not that photography is a new art and therefore somewhat insecure - this is part os what photographic taste is about. There is a more rapid sequence of rediscovery in photography than in any other art. Illustrating that law of taste given its definitive formulation by T.S.Eliot whereby each important new work necessarily alters our perception of the heritage of the past, new photographs change how we look at past photographs. (For example Arbus’s work has made it easier to appreciate the greatness of the work of Hine, another photographer devoted to portraying the opaque dignity of victims.) But the swings in contemporary photographic taste do not only reflect such coherent and sequential processes of reevaluation, whereby like enhances like. What they more commonly express is the complementarity and equal value of antithetical styles and themes.
For several decades American photography has been dominated by a reaction against “Westonism” - that is, against contemplative photography, photography considered as an independent visual exploration of the world with no evident social urgency. The technical perfection of Weston’s photographs, the calculated beauties of White and Siskind, the poetic constructions of Frederik Sommer, the self-assured ironies of Cartier-Bresson - all these have been challenged by photography that is, at least programmatically, more naїve, more direct; that is hesitant, even awkward, but taste in photography is not that linear. Without any weakening of the current commitments to informal photography and to photography as social document, a perceptible revival of Weston is now taking place - as, with the passage of enough time, Weston’s work no longer looks timeless; as, by the much broader definition of naїveté with which photographic taste operates, Weston’s work also looks naїve.
Finally, there is no reason to exclude any photographer from the canon. Right now there are mini-revivals of such long-despised pictorialists from another era as Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson, and Robert Demachy. As photography takes the whole world as its subject, there os room for every kind of taste. Literary taste does exclude: the success of the modernist movement in poetry elevated Donne but diminished Dryden. With literature, one can be eclectic up to a point, but one can’t like everything, with photography, eclecticism has no limits. The plain photographs from the 1870s of abandoned children admitted to a Lindon institution called Doctor Barnardo’s Home (taken as “records”) are as moving as David Octavius Hill’s complex portraits of Scottish notables of the 1840s (taken as “art”). The clean look of Weston’s classic modern style is not refuted by, say, Benno Friedman’s ingenious recent revival of pictorial blurriness.
This is not to deny that each viewer likes the work of some photographers more than others: for example, most experienced viewers today prefer Atget to Weston. What it does mean is that, by the nature of photography, one is not really obliged to choose; and that preferences of that sort are, for the most part, merely reactive. Taste in photography tends to be, is perhaps necessarily, global, eclectic, permissive, which means that in the end it must deny the difference between good taste and bad taste. This is what makes all the attempts of photography polemicists to erect a canon seem ingenuous or ignorant. For there is something fake about all photographic controversies - and the attentions of the museum have played a crucial role in making this clear. The museum levels up all schools of photography. Indeed, it makes little sense even to speak of schools. On the history of painting, movements have a genuine life and function: painters are often much better understood in terms of the school or movement to which they belonged. But movements in the history of photography are fleeting, adventitious, sometimes merely perfunctory, and no first-rate photographer is better understood as a member of a group. (Think of Stieglitz and Photo-Secession, Weston and f64, Renger-Patzsch and the New Objectivity, Walker Evans and the Farm Security Administration project, Cartier-Bresson and Magnum.) To group photographers in schools or movements seems to be a kind of misunderstanding, based (once again) on the irrepressible but invariably misleading analogy between photography and painting.
The leading role now played by museums in forming and clarifying the nature of photographic taste seems to mark a new stage from which photography cannot turn back. Accompanying its tendentious respect for the profoundly banal is the museum’s diffusion of a historicist view, one that inexorably promotes the entire history of photography. Small wonder that photography critics and photographers seem anxious. Underlying many of the recent defenses of photography is the feat that photography is already a senile art, littered be spurious or dead movements; that the only task left is curatorship and historiography. (While prices skyrocket for photographs old and new.) It is not surprising that this demoralization should be felt at the moment of photography’s greatest acceptance, for the true extent of photography’s triumph as art, and over art, has not really been understood.
Photography entered the scene as an upstart activity, which seemed to encroach on and diminish an accredited art: painting. For Baudelaire, photography was painting’s “mortal enemy”; but eventually a truce was worked out, according to which photography was held to be painting’s liberator. Weston employed the most common formula for easing the defensiveness of painters when he wrote in 1930: “Photography has, or will eventually, negate much panting - for which the painter should be deeply grateful.” Freed be photography from the drudgery of faithful representation, painting could pursue a higher task: abstraction. Indeed, the most persistent idea in histories of photography and in photography criticism is this mythic pact concluded between painting and photography, which authorized both to pursue their separate but equally valid tasks, while creatively influencing each other. In fact, the legend falsifies much of the history of both painting and photography. The camera’s way of fixing the appearance of the external world suggested new patterns of pictorial composition and new subjects to painters: creating a preference for the fragment, raising interest in glimpses of humble life, and in studies of fleeting motion and the effects of light. Painting did not so much turn to abstraction as adopt the camera’s eye, becoming (to borrow Mario Praz’s words) telescopic, microscopic, and photoscopic in structure. But painters have never stopped attempting to imitate the realistic effects of photography. And, far from confining itself to realistic representation and leaving abstraction to painters, photography has kept up with and absorbed all the anti-naturalistic conquests of painting.
More generally, this legend doesn’t take into account the voraciousness of the photographic enterprise. In the transactions between painting and photography, photography has always had the upper hand. There is nothing surprising in the fact that painters from Delacroix and Turner to Picasso and Bacon have used photographs as visual aids, but no one expects photographers to get help from painting. Photographs may be incorporated or transcribed into the painting (or collage, or combine), but the photography encapsulates art itself. The experience of looking at painting may help us to look better at photographs. But photography has weakened out experience of painting. (In more than one sense, Baudelaire was right.) Nobody ever found a lithograph or an engraving of a painting - the popular older methods of mechanical reproduction - more satisfying or more exciting than the painting. But photographs, which turn interesting details into autonomous compositions, which transforms true colors into brilliant colors, provide new, irresistible satisfactions. The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. Photographs make normative an experience of art that is mediated, second-hand, intense in a different way. (To deplore that photographs of paintings have become substitutes for the paintings for many people is not to support any mystique of “the original” that addresses the viewer without mediation. Seeing is a complex act, and no great painting communicates its value and quality without some from of preparation and instruction. Moreover, the people who have a harder time seeing the original work of art after seeing the photographic copy are generally those who would have seen very little in the original.)
As most works of art (including photographs) are now known from photographic copies, photography - and the art activities derived from photographic taste - has decisively transformed the traditional fine arts and the traditional norms of taste, including the very idea of the work of art. Less and less does the work of art depend on being a unique object, an original made by an individual artist. Much of painting today aspires to the qualities of reproducible objects. Finally, photographs have become so much the leading visual experience that we now have works of art which are produced in order to be photographed. In much of conceptual art, in Christo’s packaging of the landscape, in the earthworks of Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, the artist’s work is known principally by the photographic report of it in galleries and museums; sometimes the size is such that it can only be known in a photograph (or from an airplane). The photograph is not, even ostensibly, meant to lead us back to an original experience.
It was in the basis of this presumed truce between photography and painting and painting that photography was - grudgingly at first, then enthusiastically as a fine art. But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art - it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure - photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac’s Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget’s Paris. Photography is not an art like, say painting or poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art,t he activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, from the beginning the photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography - and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns - is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.
Painting and photography are not two potentially competitive systems for producing and reproducing images, which simply had to arrive at a proper division of territory to be reconciled. Photography is an enterprise of another order. Photography, though not an art form in itself, has the peculiar capacity to turn all its subjects into works of art. Superseding the issue of whether photography is or not an art is the fact that photography heralds (and creates) new ambitions for the arts. It is the prototype of the characteristic direction taken in our time by both the modernist high arts and the commercial arts: the transformation of arts into meta-arts or media. (Such development as film, TV, video, the tape-based music of Cage, Stockhausen, and Steve Reich are logical extensions of the model established be photography.) The traditional fine arts are elitist: their characteristic form is a single work, produced by an individual; they imply a hierarchy of subject matter in which some subjects are considered important, profound, noble, and others unimportant, trivial, base. The media are democratic: they weaken the role of the specialized producer or auteur (by using procedures based on chance, or mechanical techniques which anyone can learn; and by being corporate or collaborative efforts); they regard the whole world as material. The traditional fine arts rely on the distinction between authentic and fake, between original and copy, between good taste and bad taste; the media blur, if they do not abolish outright, these distinctions. The fine arts assume that certain experiences or subjects have a meaning. The media are essentially contentless (this is the truth behind Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated remark about the message being the medium itself); their characteristic tone is ironic, or dead-pan, or parodistic. It is inevitable that more and more art will be designed to end as photographs. A modernist would have to rewrite Pater’s dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music. Now all art aspires to the condition of photography.