What unites the work in this mammoth exhibition is the seemingly unshakeable faith in the optical that nearly every picture demonstrates. Not here will you find the contemporary suspicion of the image, or of the manipulative and coercive nature of the photographic exchange. Instead this work demonstrates a striking brashness, an apparent belief that the world can be understood by depicting it; further, that it can be changed by seeing it in a new way. However foolhardy such confidence in pictorial progress may seem now, looking back from an age battered by mass media, these pictures remain stirring, and touching in their optimism. Linking pictorial exploration with psychological and societal growth, the artists represented here were able to produce formal innovations that remain startling today in their expressive freedom, and that at the time must have carried the added charge of articulating a progressive social ethos as well. It’s hard not to come out of this show feeling better about the future. Unfortunately, the future that you feel better about is now our past. And in the end that future turned out not so hot after all. But is it the artists’ fault that the world turned out to be itself, while they were busy dreaming their dreams of the possible?
Officially this exhibition was the first showing by the Metropolitan of the John C. Waddell collection, which the museum acquired in 1987. But it presented such a seemingly thorough and far-reaching image of photography between the wars that it offered a chance to reassess that period—and implicitly the premises underlying Modernism as well. The work in the show cut across the various genres and movements of the period, from Constructivism to Surrealism to social documentation to Hollywood star portraits. The result emphasized the prevailing zeitgeist more than the esthetic assumptions and intentions behind each work or each movement. What we’re left with is the feel of the time, the visual clues that signify Modern photography: high angles, solarization, Surrealist juxtapositions, and so on.
Among the many well-known images—Berenice Abbott’s view down a concrete canyon (Exchange Place, 1933); Henri Cartier-Bresson’s two feline-faced Mexican whores (Calle Cuauhtemoctzin, Mexico City, 1934); Man Ray’s otherworldly solarizations—were more than a few unfamiliar gems, among them Walker Evans’ early tormented self-portrait; El Lissitzky’s Muybridge-like Runner in the City, 1926; Ralph Steiner’s tiny, breathtaking look up into the slit between skyscrapers, New York, 1926. And sprinkled here and there were a few oddball images (for example, an anonymous production shot of the horde of dancers in “Lullaby of Broadway”, from “The Gold Diggers” of 1935) that in the context further underscored the idea that whatever the apparent differences may have been among the artists included here, their similarities—the shared properties of the time—were greater.
And so, for all the wonderful pictures in it, in the end this was a show about art history, not about art. Judging the exhibition for its relevance to today, one is left with a series of “if only”s: if only we could still believe in industrialism the way people seemed to then; if only we didn’t suspect the limits of formalism as we do; if only we hadn’t seen, marveled over, dreamt about so many of these pictures before—then what freedom, what a sense of an open artistic field would lie ahead! But “if only”s don’t make for possibility; they merely keep us in the nebulous historical position we already know we’re in—trapped between hope and knowledge, nostalgia and skepticism.
—Charles Hagen
