PROJECT DOCUMENTARY IN THE GALLERY SPACE

Exercise 5.2

Read the article ‘The Judgement Seat of Photography’ (in Bolton, 1992, pp.15–48)

Core resources: TheJudgementSeat.pdf

Add to your learning log the key research materials referenced in the text. (Open College of the Arts, 2014:103))

The essay describes The Museum of Modern Art’s (MOMA) evolving relationship with the photograph as art. Curators/directors of MOMA have strongly influenced attitudes to photography generally and the MOMA in particular. Phillips focuses on three influential people in the history of the MOMA and its photography department.

In Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) he proposes the terms “cult value” (arts origins in magical or religious rituals) and “exhibition value” (the changing function of a work of art as it becomes portable and can be duplicated). This then leads to greater availability and a lessening of a work’s aura.

Theodor Adorno was sceptical about Benjamin’s arguments but in 1932 the MOMA showed photographs for the first time in “Murals by American painters and Photographers”.

It was Beaumont Newhall’s (the first curator of the museum) exhibition Photography 1839-1937 that was the first major acceptance of photography as museum art; he focused on the techniques that evolved rather than aesthetics. Barr’s “Cubisim and Abstract Art” (1936), and “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism” (1936) as well as “Bauhaus 1919-1928” (1938) also showed MOMA’s modernised thinking. Newhall’s catalogue essay articulates his judgement that photographs when taken out of the realms of documentary and journalism, should focus on the qualities of prints and techniques. Newhall suggested that photography should be looked at in terms of the Optical (details) and chemical laws (tonal fidelity). Newhall’s first exhibition as curator was “60 photographs: A survey of Camera Aesthetics’”, which concentrated on authenticity, and personal expression.

Moholy Nagy shared the same photographic vision as Newhall as did Ansel Adams. Later Newhall became the director of photography and Edward Steichen the head of the department; apparently Newhall failed to elevate photography to the status of fine art. Steichen’s approach was different, less the photographer as an autonomous artist and more curators as “orchestrators of meaning” with exhibitions “The impact of War” (1951), “The road to victory”, “The family of man” and “The bitter years” (1962). Steichen’s installations were more about design, and popularising photography, than the photographer’s eye or the individuality of images. I first looked closely at Steichen’s work at the Tate Modern exhibition The radical eye. Modernist photography from the Sir Elton John collection (November 2016). I was fascinated by his portrait of Gloria Swanson which looks almost 3 dimensional. Here Steichen shows how he evolved from photographing in soft focus to a modernist crisp focus.  As a curator he was responsible for showing that photography could be channelled into mass media, but weakened the “cult value” of photography as fine art.

John Szarkowski succeeded Steichen in 1962 as director of MOMA’s department of photography and returned to a more formal museum space and revives Benjamin’s “cult value” of photographic work. Szarkowski reconstructed a modernistic aesthetic for photography, photography in its own aesthetic realm; he presented his ideas on photography’s formal properties in his book The Photographers Eye (1964), and the individual qualities of photographers. I read his book a while ago when first studying how to read photographs.  Szarkowski set out his intention for his book as “an investigation of what photographs look like, and of why they look that way” (Szarkowski, 2009).

I found it interesting how he makes clear that photography invaded the territory of art, could not work to old standards and had to find its own ways of making its meaning clear. Photography was invented by scientists and painters but the professional photographers it produced were varied in their skills and had increased vastly by the early twentieth century. There was a deluge of pictures, describing new things and in new ways, most especially the ordinary. Szarkowski listed five issues he believed are inherent in photography and organised his selected images in these groups: the thing, the detail, the frame, the time, the vantage point. This gave me another way to look at images and I asked myself them whether any were more influential on a photographer than another. A few years on I realise that these will of course vary according to purpose, mood and inclination. Szarkowski prepared the way for a photographers “aestheticized authorial voice” and re-elevated photography as art in its own right.

Peter Glassi’s (curator at the MOMA) 1981 exhibition “Before Photography” supported Szarkowski’s idea that photography is its own entity.

My learning:

I have a greater awareness now of the impact of directors and curators of museums on the position of photography in art; I was surprised how much influence the MOMA had on isolating and culturally differentiating photography as an art form. It was also good to set in context some previous learning and reading. Today there are many more factors beyond museums and books, such as social media, the internet, that will determine the photograph’s place in the art world.

References:

Benjamin, W. (1935) Art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Newhall B. (1949) A history of photography from 1939 to the present day. The museum of modern art, distributed by Simon and Shuster, New York.

Open College of the Arts (2014) Photography 2: Documentary-Fact and Fiction (Course Manual). Barnsley: Open College of the Arts.

Phillips, C. (1982) The Judgement Seat of Photography. October, Vol22 9Autumn, 1932), pp27-63. At: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778362.The MIT Press. (Accessed 20/02/2021).

Szarkowski, J. (2009). The photographer’s eye. The Museum of Modern art. New York.

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