ROAM HOME TO A DOME: From R. “Bucky” Buckminster Fuller, that is, the apostle of geodesic domes, Dymaxion houses, positive effectiveness, and other benign nonsense. And meant to be sung to the tune of “Home on the Range.” No doubt you’ll be keeping your delivery ironic.
Snap Judgments
An intelligent, and quite cheeky, view of photography, by contributor Owen Edwards.
No one really knows that much about photography, and no one is even particularly sure what he likes. The history of the medium is so short—Nicéphore Niépce made the first photograph, a grainy little garden scene, in 1827 (though if you point out that Thomas Wedgwood might have been first, in 1802, many will be impressed)—that its salient points can be picked up in an afternoon. And the exact nature of photography is so much in dispute that you can call it an art, a fraud, or a virus without much danger of being provably wrong. Indisputably, however, there are categories, giving such comfort as categories do, and here’s what you ought to know about each. LANDSCAPE
Not long ago, everything you needed to say about landscape photography was Ansel Adams. The straight, somewhat unimaginative wisdom holds that Adams is the greatest landscape photographer ever. The revisionist stance is that Adams is passé by about a century, and that after Timothy O’Sullivan photographed the West following the Civil War, landscape was played out as a theme anyway. Neorevisionism, however, says it’s OK to like Adams even if he is the Kate Smith of photography. Or you can end the discussion by saying that the only great landscape pictures nowadays are being made by NASA robots in the outer limits of the solar system.
A trendy group of landscapists now shows up at environmental disasters like Weegee homing in on a gangland hit in 1940s New York City. Poisoned horses and sheep, shot and skinned deer, and other gloomy slices of outdoor life are what the full moon rises on in the pictures of such as Richard Misrach and James Balog. It pays to know that nowadays, pretty pictures of awful scenery are a lot hipper than plain old pretty pictures. FASHION
Though it was discovered only recently that fashion photographers might be artists, no one has ever mistaken them for plain working stiffs. The first fashion photographer of note was Baron de Meyer. His title was suspect, but useful nevertheless; he created the archetype of the social photographer, the inside man who not only knew about haute couture, but knew the women who could afford it. Then Edward Steichen came along and did a better de Meyer. (Steichen always did everything better; when in doubt, say Steichen.) Then a Hungarian photo-journalist named Munkacsi appeared in the mid-Thirties and revolutionized fashion photography by making his models run along beaches and jump over puddles. Then Richard Avedon got out of the Coast Guard and did a better Munkacsi. And from then on, wannabes like Patrick Demarchelier, Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and Steven Meisel have been raking in mind-boggling fees trying, unsuccessfully, to do a better Avedon. Only Avedon could really manage that trick, however, reinventing himself right up until his death in 2004. FINE ART
The answer to the tedious and irrepressible question “Is photography art?” is yes, but almost never when it thinks it is. Most of the avowed art photographers of the nineteenth century are considered quaint at best, grotesque at worst, while the pictures that have pried money out of the arts endowments look like what Fotomat used to promise not to charge you for. The great photographic art has been made by people doing something else: by Eugène Atget, trying to document Paris, or August Sander, trying to codify all the faces in prewar Germany, or Irving Penn (arguably America’s greatest artist/photographer since Steichen) dutifully helping fill the pages of Vogue. It’s perfectly safe, then, to dismiss any art photographer as hopelessly misguided. Except Man Ray, who was really a painter, and so can’t be blamed for his failures. And László Moholy-Nagy, who discovered that the more things you did wrong, the better the photograph looked.
The great muddler of art photographers is also the medium’s most revered saint, Alfred Stieglitz, who, early in this century, encouraged his fellow Photo Secessionists to blur, draw on, scratch, or otherwise manipulate their pictures to ensure that the hoi polloi would know they were artists. Stieglitz, by the way, was not Steichen, though even people with vast collections of lenses continue to think so. Steichen was a disciple of Stieglitz who fell out of favor when he began to make a bundle in advertising. (Stieglitz, being a saint, was not much fun.) In 1961, Stieglitz discovered Paul Strand’s unmanipulated masterpieces, decided that his followers were hopeless and misguided, and consigned them to oblivion. The resulting confusion has never quite cleared up.
Left: Edward Steichen, The Flatiron Building Below: Man Ray, Nusch Éluard
The photographers most likely to be granted acceptance by the haute scribblers of the art world are those who have been careful to stay clear of the low-rent precincts of the world of photography. David Hockney, whose cubist collages of Polaroids command rapt respect, is one of these drop-ins. And William Wegman, a painter who makes unspeakably kitschy dogs-as-people pictures, is another. As is Cindy Sherman, high priestess of high concept who time-travels through female stereotypes with a few props—wigs, go-go boots, girdles—to create provocative reflections of the American psyche. My advice: When a photographer uses the word “artist,” reach for your gun. FINE ART, ABSTRACT DIVISION
Abstract photography is a disaster, invariably boring. Though photography is by nature an abstract of reality, it’s always of something, so attempts to make it of nothing seem silly. The viewer wants to know what he’s looking at, leans closer and closer, and ends up frustrated and peeved. The closest thing to true abstraction a photographer can manage is to take something and make it look like nothing. Most grants are awarded to photographers who are good at doing that. FINE ART, STILL-LIFE DIVISION
The most overrated still-life photograph in the universe is Edward Weston’s jumbo-sized pepper, made in the classic More-Than-Just-a-Vegetable style that has since accounted for more than half a century of abysmal amateur efforts. (Weston is probably the most overrated photographer, too, in large part due to the efforts of sons, lovers, and half the population of Carmel, California, to keep the legend alive.) The real contest for World’s Greatest Still-Life Photographer is between Irving Penn, who studied drawing and illustration with Alexei Brodovitch in Philadelphia, and Hiro, who worked as a photographer for Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar. (Remember Brodovitch—he was tough, selfish, often drunk, said, “If you look through the viewfinder and see something you’ve seen before, don’t click the shutter,” and was guru to two generations of great photographers.) Everybody knows about Penn; his prints are at least as good an investment as Microsoft stock. Few people know about Hiro except the knowing. PHOTOJOURNALISM
This is the most problematic kind of photography for everybody, especially Susan Sontag, who couldn’t bear the idea that the camera might tell an occasional fib. It’s what most people think of when they think of photography at all, and what most photographers start out wanting to be, and then spend a lifetime trying to retire from. The word—an awful-sounding hybrid (why not “journography”?)— was invented by Henri Cartier-Bresson so that he wouldn’t be accused of making art while he made art, and it wrongly implies that one or more photographs can tell a story. Without words—usually a thousand or more—pictures are powerful but dumb.