I have always enjoyed going to photography exhibitions. I saw a number of them recently in New York, with the result that I began to change my thinking about photography. The first show I went to was the AIPAD show at the Park Avenue Armory. This show, like the similar art shows that take place at the same venue, is a large event featuring many photography galleries and dealers, some of them familiar New York ones, and others unknown to me. It was that familiar combination of showing art for its own sake, and selling it. The emphasis was on selling. I found very little of interest; almost all of the work was that of the tried and true photographers. It was also disconcerting that many of the dealers had open bins of photographs that you could riffle through like at a flea market, except that the images were normally priced between $2,000 and $10,000. At first I thought they were just fake reproductions! All of which made me think more about the nature of photographs. When you buy a painting, it is one of a kind (unless it is by Damien Hurst). When you are buying a photograph, presumably you are buying an image that has been personally produced by the photographer, usually in some limited quantity. But what strikes me is that, in this day of increasingly sophisticated printing techniques for books, it is increasingly harder to tell the difference between an original print and a high quality book reproduction. For example, the late Henri Cartier-Bresson was relatively indifferent to the visual quality of his prints; they don't look that different in books. What matters is the content of the image. On the other, a carefully produced gelatin silver print can be a truly sensuous object. Joseph Sudek's prints come to mind. All of which is to say that often times these days, what you are buying when you buy a photograph is an image for both its content/meaning and for its certification as a genuine object produced in limited quantities. If I can just as easily cut a Cartier-Bresson photo out of a book and frame it and put it on a wall, why pay many thousands of dollars for an original print, that, for most viewers, from a distance would look the same? Then you see an absolutely gorgeous print that cold not possibly be reproduced, and in theory, one would understand paying a big chunk of money for it.
I did succumb to the general aura of the market place by buying several very cheap photographs. They were aerial photographs, taken in WWI, of the front. Mysterious patterns of trenches and bombardments, seen from directly above. Photographs meant for military use, but possessing a visual poetry of their own.
The other shows I saw resonated with the above. There was a show of photographs taken by the renowned photojournalist Robert Capa. The novelty was that they were in color. Recently printed from his slides, they were mostly produced for magazine commissions. The photographs showed no particular aesthetic quality; the most interesting were the ones shot in the Soviet Union, where the reds of the Stalinist propaganda were enlightening. (We expect photographs of the Stalinist era to be in grainy black and white.) We look at them for their content, for what they tell us about people and places and history. The Morgan Library now has a photography department. (Mr. Morgan did not collect them, no surprise.) Their show was something rather silly; a roomful of photographs, with each adjacent photograph sharing an obvious and usually trivial connection to its neighbor. (This photograph has a hand in it, and wow, the one next to it does too!) What was more provocative was the juxtaposition of work by renowned photographers with vernacular, found photographs. I do like vernacular photographs; like the kind where the amateur photographer has somehow managed to visually decapitate his subjects. But what does this say about the medium? I have never seen a painting exhibition that does the same thing. Imagine a show which juxtaposed a Rembrandt portrait, with, say, a portrait painted by an ex American president.
(For a very funny review of Bush's paintings read
this in the Guardian.) It might be interesting, but I can't imagine it ever happening.
The best show I saw was that of the photographs of Paris by Charles Marville at the Met.
The best of these photos were the ones taken before Hausmann's demolitions; documenting a much older Paris, without its Grand Boulevards. Marville's photos combine both a documentary interest with a beautiful sense of composition. They also exhibit an extraordinary technical skill, given the limitations of photographic equipment of that period. They do resemble the later photographs of Atget, who was also interested in documenting the streetscapes of Paris, but they lack the peculiar poetry of Atget's photos. I love the vision of the street beyond the entrance to the courtyard in this one.
There was an adjacent show of photographs of Paris by other photographers; Atget, as always, was my favorite.
So what did I think? Not easy to say... Traditional photography is a strange brew of reality, visual composition, technique, and happenstance. Nowadays it is one aspect of the larger artistic practice of image making, while at the same time part of the domain of the billions of images that are uploaded and shared constantly. A photographer like Marville needed a lot of heavy equipment, patience, and time to create an image; in the present, all we need is our everpresent cell phones to create an image.
