Margery Mann

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  print February 1964

  Richard Conrat at the San Francisco Museum of Art

  IN FIFTY PHOTOGRAPHS, Conrat shows us the people he has seen as he has carried his camera around Mexico and around San Francisco. His photographs avoid being picturesque—quaint natives in quaint costumes—only because Conrat is a good designer. He has an alert eye for capturing satisfying images of people in their settings, the placid Bread Market Couple, Oaxaca with the arrangement and texture of their baskets, with a rebozo, so necessary for the design, draped over a basket; or for expressing the rhythms of their movements against the landscape, women strain to push a boat into Lake Patzcuaro,

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  print December 1963

  Ansel Adams at the De Young Museum

  OVER FOUR HUNDRED PHOTOGRAPHS were chosen by Ansel Adams to represent his forty years as photographer, and the museum has created a truly magnifi­cent setting in the entire wing which is devoted to temporary shows. The show traces Adams’s development from his early pictorialism to the present day. From 1923 to 1930, he, like other photographers of the time, made ro­mantic, soft-focus photographs of peo­ple and landscapes. In 1930 he was connected with the f/64 Group, whose contribution to photography was their insistence that the camera must look honestly and clearly on the world. Since 1930,

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  print December 1963

  Margery Mann at the University of Califor­nia at Davis

  MRS. MANN, A PART-TIME housewife, has assembled a show called “The Safe Way” from photographs she has made of grocery products. She seems to feel that the trend towards increased simplification of life has made life very complex indeed—that the prepackaging (a nest of chicken legs, the sugar decorations for a birth­day cake), pre-fabrication (a TV dinner, a can of potatoes), pre-digestion (the list of ingredients from a cat food package), and pre-dictation (the in­structions for opening and closing vari­ous packages) which are shown in her photographs are indicative of a funda­mental disturbance

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  print October 1963

  Imogene Cunning­ham at Richmond Art Center

  IN 1961, Imogene Cunning­ham saw an exhibit of the Richmond, California, primitive sculptor, John Roeder, and was so fascinated by what she saw that she spent two hours with him, scurrying around, climbing over bushes for more perceptive angles, pho­tographing him and his work. It is re­ported that when Roeder saw the photo­graphs, he burst into tears, because Miss Cunningham’s camera so intimate­ly revealed him to himself.

  It is a pity that these are not the photographs Miss Cunningham shows in Richmond, since the photographs exhi­bited here reveal no such dynamic rap­port. They are rather formal

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  print October 1963

  Wynn Bullock at Toren Gallery

  PARANOIA IS THE OCCUPATIONAL DISEASE of photography—creative photographers most of all. Their position in the art world is that of unloved stepchildren; the status of the best of them is some­what beneath your dear old Aunt Millie who paints beautiful Venetian scenes in black velvet, ever so artistic, and all by hand. Generally ignored by art shows (“open to works in all media” never means to include photographs), insuited by his well-meaning friends (“why don’t you give up this mechanical toy and do something creative?”), the photographer tends to become crotch­ety and evil-tempered; he loses

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  print September 1963

  The World of Werner Bischof at University Art Gallery, U.C., Berkeley

  THIS EXHIBITION, ORGANIZED BY Magnum and circulated by the Smithsonian In­stitute, is the first large-scale show­ing of Bischof’s work in the United States. The photographs—full of love without any hint of sentimentality—re­veal a great human soul who was de­voted to documenting the brotherhood of man. Bischof’s world embraced the people of many countries, England, Hun­gary, India, Indochina, Korea, Japan, Peru, the United States (surprisingly, no photographs of America are included in this exhibition, and, for that matter, none from his native Switzerland), and it reveals to us a photographer

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  print September 1963

  William Jackson at Bolles

  ONE CAN SEE in this small room, in these few photographs, a clear and terrifying pic­ture of what photography is thought to be by the uninformed, and one can realize why the whole field of photog­raphy has such a bad name in the art world.

  Mr. Jackson has gone to the mud flats between Oakland and Emeryville and photographed the sculpture that has mysteriously appeared there built from driftwood, old hub caps, and other as­sorted junk. He has made and framed fifteen or sixteen color prints that are exhibited on the walls, as wen as a number of black-and-white prints and other color prints that

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  print July 1963

  “Photography in the Fine Arts III” at the De Young Museum

  PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE FINE ARTS III, De Young Museum: Ivan Dmitri, who or­ganized the Photography in the Fine Arts III exhibit which has just closed at the De Young Museum, has brought to­gether a distinguished panel of judges, museum directors and experts in paint­ing (the author of The Graphic Work of Mary Cassatt). The only difficulty––and the show well bears this out––is that these painting-oriented people have no more understanding of photography than an equivalent number of sympho­ny conductors, gynecologists, or truck drivers. A photograph is not a painting, and Mr. Dmitri’s attempt to give