When Jean-Luc Godard went from writing film criticism to making movies, he said that he saw no essential difference between the two. In most mediums this is true, or at least possible. The core of the criticism has often been written by the artists themselves anyway (think of how T.S. Eliot’s essays on poetry shaped literary criticism in general in this century), so those involved in the field move naturally from critic to artist and back again. But in photography, this has not been the case. The reason this medium doesn’t have a rich tradition of criticism is not that there’s nothing to be said about it, but that the photographers themselves have been reluctant or unable to speak. The greatest practitioners have more often than not been taciturn people who don’t enjoy the gregariousness of critical dialogue and don’t readily verbalize their ideas. Criticism requires extreme powers of consciousness, especially self-consciousness. Photography, particularly with the modern hand camera requires almost the opposite. It needs to push the mind aside to get at immediate feeling. To be good at it one has to get rid of all the self-examination and mental construction.
The color photographs that Max Kozloff produced when he first took up photography seemed to me virtual icons of this dilemma. There, in the shop window that was invariably his subject, would be Kozloff’s own reflection staring back at him as he took the picture. His effort to become a photographer was predictably being haunted by this ghost of the critic. The pictures were not without beauty, but it was a beauty of a rather precious, almost inhibited kind. Kozloff is a big man with a sonorous voice. As an art critic—he is a former editor of this magazine and has written widely on modern painting as well as photography—he is assertive, provocative, expansive, sure of his ideas, even gruff at times. His photographs seemed excessively delicate by comparison. They seemed to suffer from a kind of art direction whose correlative was the over-decorated windows that were their subject.
A few of these pictures were in Kozloff’s show. But most of the new work moves away from the contained, constricted frame of the windows and out into the world at large. The course of his growth as a photographer can be traced in the metamorphosis his sense of certain colors has undergone. One of these is a swimming-pool green, a color which can take on at dusk the luminescence of a radium dial glowing in a darkened room. A photographer discovers the special properties of a color like this in the processing of his work, and then tries to remain alert to them whenever he goes out to photograph again. This color first appears in Kozloff’s work in some window pictures, and similar instances in which he has responded to it can be found in pictures of an art nouveau building facade and of a trellis entwined with artificial flowers.
In these pictures this color achieves at best the prettiness which was intended, and undoubtedly not achieved, in reality itself. In a couple of other pictures where this green occurs, however, Kozloff seems to reach a whole new level of response to it. One is a picture of the soggy remains of a charity bazaar set in an enclosure of brick walls and brownstones, and the other is of a playground carpeted in Astroturf and surrounded by autumnal leaves. In these pictures we can feel the surprise of discovery, Kozloff’s unique recognition of a unique scene. In the earlier pictures the effort to throw off preconceptions and premeditation seems to have resulted only in his being lulled by the sensuousness of the color. In these two pictures we can feel his responses to the world being heightened rather than lulled.
The same green even shows up in one of the many portraits in Kozloff’s show, a picture of a man in a green sport shirt gazing at himself in a mirror next to a mauve blanket with a lime tennis ball on it. Again, the effect is of a picture that has been too carefully art-directed. A woman in a parti-colored dress of metallic hues sitting on a leopard-print couch gives the same impression, as do a number of others. Portraiture is here reduced to a kind of set decoration in which the decor is a person. But among the portraits, too, there are at least a couple that break free of such flower arranging—a picture of a mother and two daughters caught as they composed themselves for the picture, and another of a man who is sitting on a horse and chewing on a giant cigar.
In a way the best pictures in this show are the few that have almost no color drama, like the one in which the slate-blue jacket and umbrella of a man crossing the street match the color of the light in which the picture was taken, or the one where a face is caught in a chip of sunshine underneath a row of plastic ducks hung on a storefront. In these two pictures, and three or four more, Kozloff seems to break free of the tether of thought. For this reason alone they are more advanced than many of the others that may seem less bland. He gets beyond the habits of intellection that tend to compromise photography and result in mere prettiness. He makes a promising start as a color photographer, especially when you consider the disadvantages he’s had to overcome.
—Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr.
