A Letter From
America
#2
Photography as History & Art
From
the Antiquarian Book Review
Ever since the
photography market really got rolling, back in the mid-70s, it has suffered from
a split personality: photography as Art vs. ditto as Text. Of course this was
never in question with artsy European lads like Man Ray and their American peers
from Stieglitz on. It took more effort for the art world to convert other, more
documentary, images into proper art objects. Nowhere is this more true than
nineteenth century American photography, where the recent rage for pristine
daguerreotypes has elevated some previously ignored pictures of nobody in
particular to the realm of Masterworks. Funny how they get significant once they
get expensive-or do they get expensive because they are significant? It’s
confusing.
As it happens, the
book world thought early documentary photographs were important long before the
art museums did. Many of the great collections of nineteenth century photography
were built by libraries, who saw them as evidence; historically valuable,
readable, texts which complimented and extended the reach of published sources
as effectively as manuscripts. There was certainly a recognition that some
images had claims to being works of art as well, but most of the initial
scholarly advocates of early photography in the
Of course, there
was never any confusion about the intentions of many photographers from the late
nineteenth century on to create self-conscious works of art. I hasten to say,
lest you go through the digital manipulation of pointing the finger of scorn at
me, that I, too, think early photographs can be art and often are, even if the
original intent was documentary. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between.
The problem is one of balance, and sacrificing one kind of meaning for another
if the image is stripped of its context, a loss often suffered with elevation to
Masterwork status. Every one of the great albums of Carleton Watkins mammoth
plates to come up for sale has been broken up and scattered, and the market
forces of the art world almost dictate a similar fate for anything of similar
stature.
It’s a pleasure
to say that in American photography at least one art museum is balancing these
contending forces and doing it right. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in
Ft. Worth, Texas has just reopened after being shut for almost two years, during
which most of the facility was completely rebuilt (under the direction of Philip
Johnson, who designed the original museum in 1960). Given my massive expense
account, one of the many perks of writing this column, nothing would do me but
to get down to the opening and check it out.
The Carter has
been a major collector of American photography for many years. Its extraordinary
holdings focus primarily on the American West, reflecting the museum’s roots
as an institution devoted to the art of the frontier, but it has long made
acquisitions designed to broaden its collection to all of
The Carter
collections now begin with daguerreotypes (a remarkable group of most of the
surviving photographic images of the Mexican War) and progress to the suite of
photographs of individuals in the American West they commissioned from Richard
Avedon twenty years ago. In between are classics of American landscape from
Watkins, O’Sullivan, Jackson, and Hillers to Weston, Adams, and Sheeler. The
documentary tradition, celebrating photography’s status as a democratic art,
includes a broad range of nineteenth century images, some by unknown
photographers, to the work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The Carter also
has strong holdings in the pictorial style, from Clarence White and Edward
Curtis to the entire archive of Laura Gilpin.. All of this is well documented in
the museum’s useful catalogue of its collections
-
William Reese