PHOTOGRAPHY NOW
IN A SENSE IT SEEMS pointless, or perhaps just redundant, to write about John Szarkowski’s show “Mirrors and Windows,” which was seen last summer and fall at the Museum of Modern Art and is now traveling. The show itself is an essay, rather than just a show in the usual sense, dealing with American photography since 1960. Since Szarkowski became head of the museum’s Department of Photography in 1963, the period covered by his show is roughly that of his own tenure, which means that he should be in a position to know what he’s talking about. The specialness of his position is half the result of the policy of his department, and half the result of its power. The policy is to be open to any work that comes in the door. Any photographer who wishes to can leave a portfolio of work to be examined, without the need for any recommendation or prerequisite, and each Thursday morning the staff assembles to go through the week’s offerings under Szarkowski’s supervision. The catch is, of course, that many call up but few are chosen. Szarkowski’s virtually unique power is that he’s the one photography curator whose primary job is to encourage and develop new photography, not just collect the old.
Szarkowski conceives of his work in this regard as being not that of a kingmaker so much as a cartographer. When he gives new work a show, you get the impression that it is not because he thinks the work is unarguably great—he seems to try conscientiously not to make those kinds of judgments,orto leave them to posterity—but simply because he feels the work genuinely is new. The photographer who catches Szarkowski’s curatorial eye is the one who in his opinion pushes back a bit the limits and limitations of photography, the one who seems to be out on the frontiers of the medium rather than at the center of the action. This is what often attracts so much controversy and criticism to Szarkowski’s shows, I think, as when he gave the relatively unknown William Eggleston the museum’s first important color show. It was the eccentricity of the show that disoriented and surprised people. But look at Szarkowski’s most influential book, Looking at Photographs, which includes everything from “Art” photography to aerial reconnaissance done by the military. He has always wanted to cover the whole territory equitably, and he responds to whatever enlarges his idea of what the territory includes.
Nonetheless, since much of the photography that he surveys in “Mirrors and Windows” is the work that he himself gave preference to in the first place, the show is something of a closed circuit. No one else has been in as privileged a position as he, a position to see as much work as he has and to know what’s going on, so no one is in a position to dispute the representativeness of his show. The essay that Szarkowski has written in the catalogue that accompanies the show seems to clinch the case for regarding him as a hierophant. Since most photography criticism these days is uncertain of its standards and photography itself seems, as Sontag rather snidely put it, “littered with dead movements,” the authority and originality of Szarkowski’s essay sweeps all other opinions aside. Perhaps most notable among the essay’s merits is its ability to make sense out of the muddy transition period that led to the work in the show.
The key development, as Szarkowski sees it, was the decline of professional opportunities for photographers, not only in photojournalism, where the big picture-news magazines went broke one by one, but in other areas where “a score of . . . vernacular functions that were once thought to require the special skills of a professional photographer are now increasingly being performed by naive amateurs with sophisticated cameras.” At the same time, it was this new omnipresence of photographic activity, Szarkowski guesses shrewdly, which encouraged the absorption of photography into college curricula: “an intuitive recognition that photography was ceasing to be a specialized craft (like stone carving), and becoming a universal system of notation (like writing), perhaps made it easier for educators to believe that it did fit within the proper boundaries of liberal education.” (Szarkowski does not comment, however, on the fact that the ability to write is once again becoming a specialized craft, like stone carving, which fewer and fewer students acquire. The resistance educators have had to photography courses has in part been due to the feeling that such alternate means of expression were the reason for the decline of interest in learning how to write.)
The other side of the coin was that “as the influence of the professional diminished, the content of American photography became increasingly personal and often progressively private.” The task Szarkowski has set himself with this show is to describe the consequences of this shift toward the “personal,” and there are two milestones in the photography of the 1950s which he takes to be the beginnings of the change in direction. One is Minor White’s founding of Aperture magazine in 1952, and the other is Robert Frank’s publication of Les Americains in 1958. These men’s works are the two halves of the dualism that Szarkowski is describing with the metaphor of “mirrors” and “windows.” “It seems to this viewer,” he explains,
that the difference between White and Frank relates to the difference between the goal of self-expression and the goal of exploration . . . The distinction may be expressed in terms of alternative views of the artistic function of the exterior world. The romantic view is that the meanings of the world are dependent on our own understandings . . . It is the realist view that the world exists independent of human attention, that it contains discoverable patterns of intrinsic meaning, . . . Realist is used here . . . to stand for a more generous and inclusive acceptance of fact, objective structure. Romantic is used . . . as a term that suggests the central and indispensable presence in the picture of its maker, whose sensibility is the photograph’s ultimate subject . . .
Returning again to these distinctions in the last sentence of his essay, Szarkowski concludes by posing a question about the two sorts of photographers:
The distance between them is to be measured . . . in terms of their conceptions of what a photograph is: is it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world?
A certain sense of humor about his own “conception” of “Mirrors and Windows” can perhaps be inferred from Szarkowski having used as a logo in early announcements of the show, and on the back of its catalogue, Ralph Gibson’s “The Enchanted Hand,” which is a picture of a door. The usual number of photography pundits, who howl every time Szarkowski opens his mouth, could also be relied upon to find his distinction between mirrors and windows specious. Kidding himself a bit may have been Szarkowski’s way of stealing his detractors’ thunder. The truth is that if we have difficulty with Szarkowski’s essay, it is not because the essay isn’t coherent, but because looking at the show at first makes us wonder whether the essay isn’t more coherent than the recent history of photography. Presumably that history is what has suggested the distinction between “mirrors” and “windows” to Szarkowski in the first place. Yet how can he tell which is which among the photographs themselves? Why is George Tice’s Petit’s Mobil Station and Watertower, Cherry Hill, New Jersey in the “mirrors” part of the show, for instance, while Frank Gohlke’s Grain Elevators and Lightning Flash, Lamesa, Texas, is in the windows section? What makes Elliott Erwitt’s Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami Beach a “window,” while Lewis Baltz’s Construction Detail, East Wall, Xerox, 1821, Dyer Road, Santa Ana or Roy De Carava’s Hallway are “mirrors”? Why is Jerome Liebling’s Slaughter House or Danny Lyon’s Ellis Prison, Texas a “mirror,” and the catalogue’s cover picture, Diane Arbus’ Man at a Parade on Fifth Avenue, New York City a “window”?
For all the quibbles and questions I might raise with Szarkowski’s show, I think that in the end the discrimination he makes between “mirrors” and “windows” does hold up. And it does so where it counts: not just in the essay, but among the pictures themselves. What the “windows” ultimately seem to have in common is that the photographic event, the thing to which the photographer was responding, happened out there in reality. It is the monkey in the back seat of the convertible, the three girls each standing on one leg in the kitchen, the advertisement half-peeled from the billboard and hanging down the side of the building. In most cases the photograph records some bizarre juxtaposition of things in the world itself. There is a relationship—a man stands next to a trash can that uncannily resembles his own, bald head—or a disrelationship—the cannon peeps out of the bushes next to the bus-stop sign—that the photographer’s “exploration” of reality discovers.
Among the “mirrors,” by contrast, it is the way we perceive the subject that is the event. Pictures take on the property of an optical illusion, as in Paul Capinigro’s Fungus, Ipswich, Massachusetts, Robert Mapplethorpe’s Tulips or an untitled 1974 work by John Divola, all of which give us difficulty with figure-ground relationships. The only event in the world itself to which the “mirror” photographer is attracted is the action of light. It is not the relationship of different elements within the scene, but the way that light falls on the scene which occasions the picture. This is the one event that can come and go without changing the substance of reality, indeed without leaving any trace whatsoever, except in the photograph. Its fugitive, evanescent quality appeals to photographers concerned with invisible, internal experience.
It is because of these qualities of illusion or illumination that some quirky pictures we might have thought of as “windows” turn up among the “mirrors” instead. What Baltz’s Construction Detail has in common with DeCarava’s Hallway, but not with Erwitt’s Fontainebleau, is a certain illusoriness, a peculiar hint of distortion. The Baltz and DeCarava pictures warp the space photographed in a way that Erwitt does not. The only warpage Erwitt’s picture suggests is in in the minds of the people who built the Fontainebleau Hotel in the first place. Similarly, what distinguishes Tice’s Mobil Station from Gohlke’s Grain Elevator is the magical nature of the light in the former. Where Gohlke’s photograph is about lightning as an event, Tice’s is about light as a phenomenon. This is what Tice’s photograph shares with flash-lit work in the “mirrors” section like Richard Misrach’s Stone #4 (Stonehenge #1), Roger Merton’s Tree, Rochester, New York or Mark Cohen’s Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, June, 1975.
Szarkowski stresses in his essay that the difference between “mirrors” and “windows” is not one between manipulated and straight photography, which is true. In fact, the tenuousness of the effects they go after often makes the “mirrors” seem a straighter kind of photography, a more dead-pan observation of the world, than the “windows.” Elusiveness of the image characterizes the “mirrors” even where some distortion is involved, as it is in DeCarava’s Hallway or Baltz’s Construction Detail. The illusion itself is elusive here. Like the action of light elsewhere, the distortions in these photographs are so slight as to suggest something fugitive. They imply a subject that is ultimately intangible. Perhaps because he anticipates our puzzlement over the “mirrors” section of the show, Szarkowski creates in his catalogue some juxtapositions that seem aimed at helping us understand why a particularly difficult picture is where it is. Thus Tice’s Mobil Station faces an untitled Linda Connor picture which is more immediately recognizable as a “mirror.” The mosquito net hanging over a lamp in Connor’s photograph and trapping the lamp’s light reflects in shape the water tower hovering over the gas station in Tice’s picture. In this way Connor’s photograph suggests that Tice’s is really about the apparitional quality that that water tower takes on because of the lighting. Lyon’s picture and Liebling’s, on opposite pages, comment on each other to similar effect. The surprising brightness of prisoners’ uniforms against the drab of the underbrush in Lyon’s picture calls attention to a little spray of light over the heart of the figure in Liebling’s. The two pictures together explain the inclusion of each in that section of the show.
If there is one ubiquitous difference that shows through the two sets of photographs with which Szarkowski has presented us, it is, I would say, the difference between sincerity and irony. “Mirrors” are photographs through which a photographer is trying to tell us how he feels about himself. “Windows” are those in which he is trying to tell us how he feels about the world. For the former, only sincerity will do. The whole modern obsession with knowing one’s innermost feelings is based on a belief in sincerity. And at the same time, saying how one feels about the world in our age almost necessarily requires irony. Especially in an objectifying medium like photography, which shows us the unaesthetic reality of life, it is impossible to deal with the world without some detachment, some sardonic laughter, some irony. This difference in intention toward both his subject matter and his audience is to me the fundamental difference between Minor White and Robert Frank and all their respective inheritors. Again, this is not to say that I find Szarkowski’s own distinctions nebulous. Those he makes between Romanticism and Realism are perhaps a bit too grand. They imply an historical fullness, and a completeness, that I’m not sure photography has yet. But the only real difficulty into which Szarkowski gets is not so much that his distinctions aren’t valid as that they are slippery and paradoxical. They are like one of those trick drawings where the figure seems to be protruding forward one minute, but looks as if it recedes back the next; and we have little voluntary control over which way it appears to us at any given time. Szarkowski himself admits that the two photographic modes he’s describing are not “discrete,” but lie along a “continuous axis.” When he is discussing photography in his essay, he is able to keep the poles apart. In the picture themselves, on the other hand, the extent to which each mode contains and implies its opposite is irrepressible.
When Szarkowski claims that all photography has become “personal” in nature, or even “private,” he is saying in effect that all photographers are becoming artists. All are now coming to think of themselves as artists. This is what happens in our age when a medium loses its social utility, when it is no longer needed to convey information. Those who work in the medium fall back on the “self” as their subject, and the medium becomes an art in that alienated, introverted, peculiarly modern sense. Thus has the lyric become the dominant form of modern poetry, abstraction the dominant form of modern painting, etc. When photography came along, painters turned into “impressionists” and “expressionists.” Now that television has displaced photojournalism, photography is also turning to those private-isms, including realism, that characterize modern art. The only difference is that since all photographs carry with them at least the ghost of objective reality, photography will always remain more ambiguous in intent than other modern arts. While this makes photographs hard to classify and discuss, it also ought to make photography, in potential anyway, the richest modern art of all. At the very least, Szarkowski’s show suggests just how rich and various that might be.
—Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr.
