TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/022789/02278900.006

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 5.7 KB | 102 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.