Exercise: The Judgement Seat of Photography.

Exercise: The Judgement Seat of Photography.

From a photographic print, for example, one can make a number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” point makes no sense.

That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.

My ideal is to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike and to be able to circulate them at a price no higher than the price of a popular magazine or daily paper.  To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the path that I have chosen.

Alfred Stieglitz, catalogue preface to his exhibition at the Anderson Galleries 1921.

Industrial simulacrum.

Jean Baudrillard, L’Exchange symbolique et la mort, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1976.

A photographic print is a much less predictable product that the print from an engraving or an etching plate.  The likelihood of a photographer’s being able truly to duplicate an earlier print is very slight.

John Szarkowski,  “Photography and the Private Collector”.  Aperture, vol 15 1970.

A the singular original gave way to the plurality of increasingly praise copies, so wold the previously unbridgeable gap between art and its audience give way to universal availability and accessibility.

Christopher Phillips, The judgement Seat of Photography.

Mohly-Nagy, Photokunst.  Stieglitz, Kunstphotographie.

Photographic art versus art photography.

What is lacking in the present exhibition is an assessment of photography in terms of pure aesthetic merit-

Lewis Mumford,  “The Art Galleries”,  The New Yorker, 3rd April ,1937.

Newell likewise located two main traditions of aesthetic satisfaction in photography: from the optical side, the detail, and from the chemical side, tonal fidelity.

Christopher Phillips, The judgement Seat of Photography.

The melancholy beauty of the condemned and vanished past.

Newell, Photography: 1839-1937.

Each print is an individual personal expression.

Beaumont Newhall, “The Exhibition: Sixty Photographs”, The Bulletins of the Museum of Modern Art, vol. 8 no. 2 (December-January 1940-41), 5.

On Civil War photographs taken by Brady and Co. Newhall, while admitting that they were “without any implied aesthetic intent” claimed them for art on the grounds that they seemed, to him, undeniably “tragic and beautiful”.

Beaumont Newhall, “Photography as an Art”, in A Pageant of Photography.

“American Photographs at $10.”

The exhibition and sale is an experiment to encourage the collecting of photographs for decoration and pleasure.  Once a photographer has worked out a suitable relationship between grade of paper, exposure and development to make one fine print, he can at the same time make many more of identical quality.  Thus the unit cost can be lowered.

Wall label for “American Photographs at $10. MoMO.

Dorner hailed the Bauhaus for its “ explosive transformation the very idea art; bursting with energies which, once set to work in the practical context of life, might well influence life on a tremendous practical scale”.

Dorner, The Way Beyond Art.

The modern exhibition should not retain its distance from the spectator, it should be brought close to him, penetrate and leave an impression on him, should explain, demonstrate, and even persuade and lead him to a planned and direct reaction.  Therefor we may say that exhibition design runs parallel with the psychology  of advertising.

Herbert Bayer, “Fundamentals of Exhibition Design”, Production Manager, December/January 1939/40.

During the war I collected photographs and organised an exhibition called “Road to Victory”, and it was that exhibition which gave ideas to the board of directors of the Museum.  Here was something new in photography to them. Here were photographs that were not simply placed there for their aesthetic values.  Here were photographs used as a force and people flocked to see it.  People who ordinarily never visited the museum came to see this.  So they passed the proposition on to me that I keep on along those lines.

Edward Steichen, “Photography and the Art Museum”, in Museum Service, June 1948.

On the 1942 Road to Victory exhibition.

The photographs are displayed by Bayer as photographs have never been displayed before.  They don't sit quietly on the wall.  They jut out from the walls and from the floors to assault your vision.

Ralph Steiner, Production Manager, 31st May 1942.

A rough summary of Edward Steichen’s operation procedures.

To prise photographs from their original contexts, to discard or alter their captions, to record their borders in the enforcement of a unitary meaning, to reprint them for dramatic impact, to redistribute them in new narrative chains consistent with a predetermined thesis.

Ansel Adams on this style of exhibition.

The success application of such techniques entails, of course, two major factors: the all-but-total disappearance of the individual photographers within the larger fabric, and a disregard of the supposed personal- expressive qualities of the “fine print”.  

The quality of the prints-of all his exhibits of this gross character-was very poor…. If a great Museum represented photography in such a style and quality, why bother about the subtle qualities of the image and the fine print?

For the modern photographer the end product of his efforts is the printed page, not the graphic print… The modern photographer does not think of photography as an art or his photograph as an art object.

Irving Penn, “What is Modern Photography”, American Photography, March 1951.

A survey of the installation views of MoMO’s photographic exhibitions from the early 1960s to the present induces a dizzying realisation of the speed of photography’s repackaging.  Steichen’s hyperactive, chock-a-block displays metamorphosed before one’s eyes into the cool white spaces of sparsely hung galleries.

Christopher Phillips, The judgement Seat of Photography.

During photography's first century it was generally understood…that what photography did best was to describe things: their shape and textures and the situations and relationships.  The highest virtues of such photographs were clarity of statement and density of information.  They could be read as well as seen; their value was literary and intellectual as well as visceral and visual.

Szarkowski,  “Photography and Mass Media”.

Szarkowski recommended to younger photographers the works of Atget, Sander, and Francis Benjamin Johnson-all “deliberate and descriptive; constructed with the poise and stability which suggest Poussin or Piero.  Such pictures are not only good to look at, they are good to contemplate.”

For Szarkowski, it does not follow that one ought to seek a supplement to the image beyond the frame. (What is at stake,after all, is the self-sufficiency of the photograph.)  He recommends, instead, a particular mode of transformation of pictorial content: “If photographs could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols”.

John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, New York, MoMA, 1965.

On press photographs.

They could be seen, in Szarkowski’s word, as “short visual poems-they describe a simple perception out of context”.

John Szarkowski, From the Picture Press, New York, MoMO, 1973.

On Winogrand.

As we study his photographs, we recognise that although in the conventional sense they may be impersonal, they are also consistently informed by what in a poem we would call a voice.  This voice is, in turn, comic, harsh, ironic, delighted,, and even cruel. But it is always active and distinct-always, in fact, a narrative voice.

John Szarkowski, “American Photography and the Frontier Tradition”. 1979.

Thus endowed with a privileged origin-in painting-and an inherent nature that is modernist avant la lettre , photography is removed to its own aesthetic realm, free to get on with its vocation of producing “millions of profoundly radical pictures.” As should be apparent, this version of photographic history is, in truth, a flight from history, from history’s reversals, repudiations, and multiple determinations.  The dual sentence spelled out here-the formal isolation and cultural legitimation of the “great undifferentiated whole” of photography-is the disquieting message handed down from the museum’s judgement seat.

Christopher Phillips, The judgement Seat of Photography.