No Such Thing As Photography?

I went to the latest installment of MOMA's ongoing annual series of new photography show.   I looked very hard to try to find some sort of rectangular printed objects made with a camera and hung on a wall.   I found a few.   But, clearly, whatever it is that people have called photography is not being exhibited at MOMA.   As one of the curators of the exhibit, Quentin Bajac, said in an interview:

 “I hope that the visitor will get the feeling that there’s no such thing as photography,” he said, “that there’s not one definition of photography.”

OK, then, if that is the case, then:

Photography   1840-2015  R.I.P.

Or more from the MOMA website:

"Ocean of Images presents bodies of work that critically redefine photography as a field of experimentation and intellectual inquiry, where digital and analog, virtual and real dimensions cross over. These artists explore contemporary photo-based culture, specifically focusing on connectivity, the circulation of images, information networks, and communication models."

Instead of photography, it would seem, there are materials that comment about images and how we use them.   I suppose that is a natural reaction at a time when everyone on the planet with a smartphone is taking photographs at an astonishing rate.   And a lot of them end up on the internet.  But in trying to be ahead of the curve on the latest artistic developments, they end up ignoring all that is not trendy.  And much of what is shown is very superficial.  One photographer simply made prints of architectural photographs of the Imperial Villa at Katsura that her father, a famous Japanese photographer, had taken, and then arranged them on stands set in a room, which somehow commented on the architecture.  In her words:

"I wanted to disassemble the structure of the photographic body, to experiment with both the functionality of the physical aspect and the insubstantiality of the image."

Another item consists of printouts from web pages that used a photo that the photographer managed to insert into a Wikipedia page on mood disorders.   So photographs get spread around the internet? What an artistic revelation!   I am emphasizing the worst, of course.
 
Ultimately, for me this is the kind of exhibit which would really be better off as a book or article; the ideas of the curators could easily be expressed in words.   Or, in the (apocryphal) words of Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn, "If you want to send a message, send a telegram!".    It's also worth noting that the annual New Photography show will now happen every other year.  (If there is no such thing as photography, then there is no reason to have an annual new photography show?)  And that the ICP  put on a very similarly themed show a few years ago, equally uninteresting from a visual point of view.

Subsequently I saw a show at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU of Japanese photography of the 1960's. I was struck by how the concerns of the 1960's Japanese photographers were very similar to those of the photographers in the MOMA show, albeit without Photoshop and the internet.   Questioning the nature of the medium and its ability to represent "reality"; conceptualizing photography, etc., with many ideas arising from the conflicts in Japan and the social protest movements in the 1960's.  Have we moved beyond that?  It would seem not.

There was also a show of photography at the Guggenheim entitled "Photopoetics; An Anthology".   While not as internet/media oriented as the MOMA show, it was still mostly work that needed a explanatory note in order to help you make sense of what it was about.
Conceptualism of some sort ruled.  I didn't like any of it.   For art museums working hard to be in the forefront of contemporary culture, contemporary photography is a small subset of image-related artistic practices.  Curators seem to no longer recognize any value in the purely pictorial qualities of a photograph.

I did see a wonderful show at the Jewish Museum of Soviet photography from the 1920's and 1930's.   Most of the photographs were taken to celebrate the Soviet Union and the "new man" of the socialist world; i.e. they were propaganda.   The best photographers took that to mean the the photographs should look "new" too, that they should look at things from unexpected perspectives, and be stimulating visually.  One of the interesting aspects of the show was when photographs that looked very "new" were juxtaposed with photographs of similar subjects where the photographer made no effort to do anything interesting.  For example, there were two photographs of worker's street parades juxtaposed.   One was simply a straightforward shot; the other was extravagantly tilted and disjunctly composed to suggest the forward motion of the parade.  Alas, we know how the avant-garde fared in 1930's Stalinist times, and eventually anything or anyone that deviated from the bland and orthodox was suppressed.   (Nowadays, if you are doing the equivalent agitprop, there seems to be no impulse to make it look interesting; the message suffices.   Stalin would be happy.)

Alexander Rodchenko:

“In order to educate man to a new longing, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations. New objects should be depicted from different sides in order to provide a complete impression of the object,”


For example:

All of this served to recall why I became interested in photography in the first place, when looking at a classic Cartier-Bresson photograph of a chance moment on the street made you look at the world around you in a different way.

Some classic Cartier-Bresson photographs:

I know that when I walk around in cities, my eyes are influenced by the many images I have seen in great photographs.   Or I think about how Robert Frank's images of America in the 1950's are indelibly seared into my brain as representations of what 1950's America must have been like.  Or how Lee Friedlander's images of complex cityscapes make me see the visual patterns of our cities.  Or how Berenice Abbott's beautifully composed images of the 1930's cityscapes create a sense of life in New York the 1930's.

(We recently saw Todd Hayne's film "Carol", set in 1950's New York.   It is a visually sumptuous recreation of the period, featuring the extraordinary cinematography of Ed Lachman.   I was intrigued to read that Haynes requested Lachman to try to create the color palette of the photographs of the late Saul Leiter, who was a pioneer in color photography.   I love Leiter's color photographs of New York in the 50's and 60's.   I can't resist a few examples I found on the web.) (Though the film was shot in Cincinnati, and not New York, and lost some authenticity as a result.)

 (This is Paris, but it looks like a shot from "Carol".)

In his introduction to the newest, expanded edition of William Eggleston's extraordinary photo book "The Democratic Forest", Mark Holborn describes Eggleston's photographs as being "suspended between the descriptive view and the abstraction".   I can't think of a better description of what I find appealing about photography.

I also saw a small exhibition of photography from Iran in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.   Apparently one of the Shahs was given a camera at an early age, and was obsessed with taking pictures and having pictures taken.   What I saw was fascinating glimpses of the people of the royal courts, street life (often posed), and some of the amazing ruins from the ancient past in their truly neglected state.  

While I don't really have any answers for those who suggest that art photography as we have known it has no value in today's image saturated world, I also know that I have very little interest in going to a museum and gallery to receive information that could best be conveyed in words.   I also wonder exactly what goes through the minds of the multitudes of people who visit these exhibits about contemporary image making; I have no clue.