TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022789/02278900.006

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6KB | 112 lines

                                                                                PHOTOGRAPHY, Page 64

Drawn by Nature's Pencil


For the 150th anniversary of camera art, Houston maps a world
of images

By Richard Lacayo

    No one can put a date on the cave drawings at Lascaux or on
the first drumbeat.  But photography has a birthdate of sorts,
1839, the year it was ushered loudly into the world in a clamor
of patents and the claims of two separate inventors, Louis
Jacques Mande Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in
England. For that reason 1989 is being marked as a
sesquicentennial -- 150 years in which photographers have
remade the world in their own images.

    All through the calendar, museums in the U.S. and abroad
will be mounting shows that will attempt to map the many lines
drawn by what Talbot boasted was "the pencil of nature." The
first, and one of the most ambitious, is at the Museum of Fine
Arts in Houston until April 30 (stops in Canberra, Australia,
and London follow). Curated chiefly by the collector Daniel
Wolfe, "The Art of Photography: 1839-1989" is a thorough but
not a definitive history -- one version of the story, splendidly
but narrowly focused upon questions of style through the work
of just 85 major figures. It would be possible to assemble
another equally large exhibition from the prominent names left
out -- Mathew Brady, Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams and
Richard Avedon, to name a few -- but the shortcomings of the
show are paltry compared with its pleasures.

    In the mid-19th century, the modern world was taking shape,
in some respects the shape that photography gave it. The new
art form fostered the trend by which the antique notion of fame
was supplanted by the more salable idea of celebrity. And in
the great age of imperial expansion, the camera was just the
tool to bring home views of the exotic places that had been
gathered in by the Western powers.

    By the early 1840s, the world's first portrait studios had
sprung up in New York City and Philadelphia, churning out
likenesses of glassy-eyed sitters who looked as though they had
been whacked with a board. But it was in England and France that
photography took on the character of an art in the work of men
like the Parisian caricaturist Nadar, who brought a warm-blooded
gravity to camera portraiture.

    Yet the device remained for decades an exotic box, a
contraption mostly for adventurers and the wealthy. That changed
after 1888, the year George Eastman introduced the inexpensive
Kodak. Amateur photography became the new folk art, and fine-art
practitioners had to scramble for a way to distinguish
themselves from the mobs of snapshooters. Their response was
pictorialism, an international style of soft focus, poetic
yearnings and darkroom tricks that were beyond the abilities of
the untrained.  During the pictorialist phase of their careers,
Alvin Langdon Coburn in England and Edward Steichen in the U.S.
turned away from mere realism toward a metaphysical art, one of
 broad hazy forms that hinted at an elusive realm of ideas and
spirit.

    Though they produced all too many pictures of farmers
wrapped in a fog borrowed from Whistler, the pictorialists made
the invaluable discovery that the camera could create a new
kind of symbol. In a photograph, almost any object could be made
to appear as a correlative for the artist's interior state.  By
World War I, pictorialism was in retreat before an emerging
modernism pledged to clear focus, high detail and unvarnished
fact. Yet even modernists like Edward Weston and Paul Strand
would still sift the world for facts that would be expressive of
spirit. For Gustave Le Gray, working on the coast of France in
the mid-1850s, the cloud-streaked sky was an atmospheric effect
to be rendered as lustrously as the equipment of the day would
permit. For Alfred Stieglitz some 70 years later, long after he
had abandoned the pictorial style, the clouds above Lake George,
N.Y., were still "equivalents" for his own shifting emotions.

    Even when it was used as a blunt instrument, the camera
could make reality turn this way and that. In the photographs he
took across an America burdened by the Depression, Walker Evans
worked to see how much feeling could be extracted from plain
fact, severely rendered: a storefront approached head-on or a
pedestrian caught in rapt self-absorption. But in the same years
in Europe, the surrealist Man Ray used the camera to give a
gleeful stamp of reality to the patently unreal.

    In the years after World War II, the mood of American
photography in particular had turned edgy. To see the great work
that W. Eugene Smith did for LIFE not far from the somber,
inward-looking images of Harry Callahan draws out the way both
men shared in a progressive darkening of temperament. In the
1950s it hung over the pictures of Robert Frank, who produced a
cross-country document of the American scene as a place of
canceled expressions, glum highway strips and spent energies.
That cloud cast shadows on the landscape too. Ansel Adams could
go on making nature appear awesome, but Joel Sternfeld has
become the recording angel of a more beleaguered land:
polluted, invaded by concrete and minced into real estate.

    The show ends with a too brief sampling of postmodernism,
work by photographers like Cindy Sherman and Boyd Webb, who
stage scenes for the camera. The essence of postmodernism is
the belief that in advanced societies reality is a secondhand
experience, a slippery substance filtered through a ghostly
scrim of media images.  Movie stills, news pictures,
advertising -- the world is a deck of pictures; the artist's job
is to shuffle and deal, making images that comment upon images.
 In the end, the pencil of nature has drawn a house of mirrors.