An unfortunate number of the photographs, and there are 176 of them, imitate bad paintings and, worse, slick magazine advertisements. Bad paintings, on the other hand, usually imitate good paintings, and this may be the difference between snapping pictures and painting them. However, according to A. Hyatt Mayor, curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the traveling exhibit originated, and one of the 12 jurors, the crucial difference is something else. He said that no photographer can control the grain and texture of his work as thoroughly as a painter. “A snippet cut out of a photograph cannot reveal the identity of a particular photographer the way a snippet cut out of a painting or drawing can reveal the artist. It takes time to paint, during which time the artist’s vision changes so much that his painting becomes a sediment of afterthought.” No amount of darkroom work, however long and complex, can give photographs the multi-layered set of experiences or plasticity of paintings. But the fact remains, and it is demonstrated in the show, that there are photographers who can lay claim to more memorable pictures than some artists. The portraits prove this, and there are quite a few, including such well-known subjects as Braque, Matisse, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jean Cocteau, Churchill, Bernard Berenson and Collette. There is a splendid photograph by Esther Bubley called Brazilian Street Scene, in which a young girl is ogled by two men and two dress dummies. The girl’s grimness and hurry is contrasted by the indolent, wishfully lecherous smiles of the men and the sinister grins of the dummies. The exhibit also points out that the most serious photographers have availed themselves of the important thinking in art. This is evident, for example, in Jerry Cooke’s Football, Robert Boram’s Assembly Line and Jeremy Blodgett’s The Bridge. Each employs the futuristic device of expressing motion by deliberate blurring. Cooke’s yellow mesh of football players is clumsily done, but the others are effective in their use of the device, even if it has become somewhat old hat and, in photography especially, done to death. Factory scenes, still lifes and impressionistic slices of life are included in the show. It’s fun, let’s face it, to look at pictures, and this exhibit, sponsored by the Saturday Review, is no exception.
––Larry Rottersman
