print December 1964

Wynn Bullock at the Toren Gallery

Like Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock is deeply concerned with the problem that has been uppermost in man's mind since he began to think in abstract terms: his interrelationship with nature in the cosmic scheme. But whereas Adams seems to reject man as an unimportant and accidental manifestation (mountains are eternal; man's life is fleeting; one man is very like another), Bullock seems always to look at nature subjectively—the natural world around him exists for his possession and enjoyment. Adams calls attention to the grandeur of nature. Bullock's nature is intimate, personal, a symbolic extension

print December 1964

Adam Clark Vroman at Foohill College

EXHIBITS WHICH PLACE TODAY’S photography in its historical framework are rare in the Bay Area. Last year, to mark the centennial of the Civil War, Ansco circulated widely through northern California a set of enlargements of photographs by Mathew Brady and his coworkers. Occasionally, the San Francisco Museum of Art shows prints from its permanent collection—a collection particularly rich in the work of Alfred Stieglitz. The Farm Security Administration show, “The Bitter Years,” revealed the more widely remembered past. But as a rule, we see photographs which have been made recently and which

books September 1964

BOOKS

Harry Callahan, Photographs (Santa Barbara: El Mochuelo Gallery), 1964. 126 plates.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS THAT Harry Callahan has chosen to include in the present volume radiate such intense visual sophistication that one wonders if he is not the epitome of the photographer's photographer, the degree of the viewer's response depending on how deeply he is saturated with the photographic mystique. For Callahan is completely committed; his eyes and hands cooperate to bring us images that are important and individual. From the unlikely amalgam of influences on his work of Ansel Adams, whose straight

print May 1964

“Walnut Grove: Portrait of a Town” at the San Francisco Museum of Art

WALNUT GROVE IS A LITTLE TOWN on the Sacramento River about thirty miles south of Sacramento. It was founded by miners who were disillusioned with the search for gold, and who moved to the fertile flatland to grow food. By 1870, it was a lively community flourishing on agriculture and gambling. By 1871, boats going up and down the river between Sacramento and San Francisco stopped daily at Walnut Grove with cargoes of freight and passengers; the town had a pony express stop, a stage coach station, a steamboat landing, and a railroad depot. The abolition of gambling and the common use of the

print May 1964

“Group 10” at the Kaiser Center, Oakland

IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE that anyone at the Oakland Museum could be so naive that he would sponsor this exhibit to represent what is going on in Bay Area photography. The show is an incredible mishmash of the clichés of the salons and of hack commercial photography for the past forty years. There is the swan framed by drooping wands of leaves; the wooden bowl full of onions; the caladium leaf pattern; the high-key photograph of eggs and cups. There is even the metal tankard and bunch of grapes with Rembrandt lighting. And of course there is the weathered door with the knob in the middle. If every

print April 1964

Brett Weston at Toren Gallery

THE TOREN GALLERY, at 30 West Portal Avenue, San Francisco, should be high on the list of places to be visited by students of photography. Mr. Toren, a commercial photographer himself, opens the front part of his establishment to occasional extensive shows by other photographers. Here we saw the recent color abstractions by Wynn Bullock. The current exhibit contains about fifty black-and-white contact prints by Brett Weston, a cross section of his work for a number of years. Weston’s photographs capture a wide variety of subjects—the ocean; landscapes, particularly in the southwest; plant forms;

print April 1964

“The Woods” at San Francisco Museum Of Art

McLEOD VOLZ AND MARY MOSTELLER have followed and photographed two children as they played freely and let their imaginations encompass the trees and flowers, frogs and insects, of Muir Woods. The show has an introduction by Harold Gilliam which makes it a plea for conservation: preserve open, unspoiled areas where children may play and dream. The show, as spread on the two sides of a corridor in the San Francisco Museum, tells a less poetic story than it does in the book published last year, although the reproduction of the photographs in the book is abominable. Without the careful interweaving

print April 1964

Grover Sales, Jr. at City Lights

Amidst some rather standard portraits of jazz musicians and night club personalities—Pee Wee Russell, Barbara Streisand, Dizzy Gillespie—which would seem at home in the entrance of a night club or perhaps on a record jacket, Sales has included a portrait of Ansel Adams which reduces him to a quaint character with a beard and a funny hat, and of Allen Ginsberg which merely shows us that he was really and truly so close to him that Ginsberg waved at him. The rest of the photographs are camera clubby. The oh-so-dear little girl in the short shorts twisting her body to look coyly sideways at Bronzino’s

print April 1964

Jaqueline Paul at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor

Miss Paul spent three and a half years in Japan, studying and documenting the effect of the rapid westernization of Japanese culture on the young people of Tokyo. In her current exhibit, “The Search,” and in her recent book, Japan Quest, she shows the people of Tokyo living much like people in the western world: they ride on the subway; they go on picnics; they marry young; they have children; they participate in sports. But they have suddenly embraced western ways, and they are often attracted by the surface appearance, which they have attempted to superimpose on their traditional way of life.

print March 1964

“Ideas in Images” at the Oakland Art Museum

The current exhibit at the Oakland Art Museum, “Ideas in Images,” selected by Peter Pollack, former Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, and author of the handsome but rather superficial “Picture History of Photography,” includes Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Harry Callahan, Bruce Davidson, Andreas Feininger, William Garnett, Gyorgy Kepes, Arnold Newman, Gordon Parks, and Todd Webb. They provide a broad picture of present-day photography, its diversity, its successes, its limitations. Each photographer shows ten prints which are grouped together at some distance from

print March 1964

Hal Roth at the San Francisco Museum of Art

For “Some Images of Chinatown” Mr. Roth has created an imaginary day in the life of the Chinese community; at the beginning, an old woman surveys the new day from her window; at the end, a merchant adds up his accounts after everyone else has gone to sleep. Between morning and night, Roth takes us to schools, a funeral, the theatre—all external, public events that could be seen by any curious tourist. Roth’s understanding is tourist superficial, and his photographs are shallow and pedestrian. At best, they look as if his photographic imagination had been weaned on back issues of the National

print February 1964

“The Bitter Years” at the San Francisco Museum of Art

BETWEEN 1935 AND 1941, there occurred a unique period in the history of photography. The New Deal administration, faced with the reality of destructive depression, was eager to experiment in many fields to bring the economy back to prosperity, and the government turned to photographers to tell the story of how the depression had affected rural America. In 1935, President Roosevelt had created the Resettlement Administration within the Department of Agriculture, and had appointed Rexford Guy Tugwell, then Under Secretary of Agriculture and formerly Professor of Economics at Columbia University,

Margery Mann