In 2005 The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the Gilman Collection of over 1350 photographs and photographic albums, a collection remarkable for its depth of examples in the history of early photography put together from 1974 to 1998 by Richard Gilman of the Gilman Paper Company. In some cases, such as in the works of Fox Talbot, these photographs are one of a kind. Others duplicated works already owned by the museum and so the two collections were studied closely and where possible, owing to limits made by other bequests, etc, some of the works were placed for auction in 2006. The Sotheby’s Catalogue for that auction carries this full story as well as reproductions of the prints that were offered to the public.
Two years ago when I was making efforts to understand why photography is an art form I was fortunate to buy a copy of that catalogue from a local bookseller. Seeing that the museum had mounted this present exhibit incorporating some of those works, I was very determined to see it.
While we have come to expect that each painter will paint in a style uniquely his own, with his own palette and brush work, that each will have his distinctive penmanship, and, especially in modern art, create his own signature image or images, it is always a revelation to me that a number of men and women limited to using a simple machine can make such distinctively different images and suggest such individual responses to the life in front of that machine.
This exhibition has abundant examples to illustrate my wonder. Perhaps most specifically in this exhibition I can compare the works of Atget, Marville, and Baldus, each of whom worked in Paris at approximately the same time but who made images that are so very different that they hardly seem to have been made in the same city or in the same historic era.
This exhibit shows a very marked contrast of the technical limits of early photography and the visual appeal of the works produced. Giving my attention to this art form these past several years I have come to define photography as being a luminous experience on a fragile ground. Not only are the results exhibited here wonders of technical innovation but almost without exception each is a visual experience well within my definition.
The oldest works in this exhibit, and perhaps in photography itself, are those made by William Fox Talbot. One photograph is dated 1840. Many of these very early works are so fragile and light sensitive that only facsimiles can be shown. Some are what we now refer to as photograms, objects placed over treated paper. Concerned with the fugitive quality of his prints, Fox Talbot experimented endlessly to create a system through which the prints could be made more permanent, hoping to find a way in which they could be made with inks. In one example, the seeds of a dandelion were placed on a sheet of copper treated with the light sensitive chemicals. Whatever the results of that method were, that it could or could not produce multiple prints, this is the only known print of that effort.
Because most of the works in this exhibit are large format contact prints, many of them have the quality of seeming to be very fine engravings, especially the Marville “Imperial Louvre Library”, a photograph he made to illustrate the ability of the medium to convey detail with great specificity and the value of photography to the study of architecture. And there is enough here to define the difference between the pictorialists and the purists. But with pictures as excellent as these that old argument is indeed moot. What is more readily apparent is that using the large format and working from a tripod, each of these compositions is carefully framed, the photographer has waited until the light is “just right”, and there is a sense in all of them of time as an eternal present.
Many of these early works were made from paper or glass negatives and it is brought home to us in this exhibit that some of the very earliest glass negatives were very large: there being no electricity and no light bulbs, there were as well no enlargers. The works of Carleton Watkins and Julia Margaret Cameron are 18 by 24 inches. Because she made portraits so large a negative could no doubt be worked with somewhat easily in a studio, but in Watkins case, his results are phenomenal. Watkins was an early champion of Yosemite; he was an inspiration for Ansel Adams’ work. He packed not only his camera and these very large sheets of glass for his trips up into the wilderness areas, but his portable darkroom as well…the negatives having to be developed while the plates were still wet. Doing some further research I have learned that he traveled with a team of twelve mules!
As most of us are aware that 19th Century houses have rippled glass windows, that glass of that time had other imperfections, having to do with the difference between rolled and sheet glass, I also began to wonder where the photographers were able to find “museum” quality glass to make these distortion free images.
Watkins’ views of the mountains he loved are radiant. Unlike the very similar work of Adams, who often seems overly involved in the technical aspects of the making of the photograph, Watkins used his mastery of the technology to make photographs that are a joyous sharing of the visions that met his eyes.
In the exhibition, the big change of tempo comes with the work of Henri Cartier Bresson. Bresson was the first, in this exhibit, to use the 35 mm camera, a Lieca. His photographs by contrast are extremely animated and lively. His images were captured moments within a movement. And from this and seeing how close he came to missing or not getting what he saw, we can deduce that he was a man of quick intelligence, quick decision, and quick action….and that he had a complete and innate understanding of the possibilities of his medium. And it is remarkable that his small images, compared to the 18 by 24 of the others, have so much more energy within their smaller format.
The work of Walker Evans has that eternal, monumental character of the larger format works although in the sense of the classical as opposed to the academic. His photograph of the Bedford A and P rigidly adheres to the Greek dictates of classical balance. While he might have worked at times with a 35mm camera I am more inclined to think the photographs here were made with an 8 by 10 view camera.
One of the insights I’ve had regarding photography is that the paper on which the photograph appears is often of very great importance to the photographer. In the earliest of these works I could not discern that the paper had any particular quality that had been chosen specifically for these prints. This reminded me that at that time there were no corner camera shops or wholesale art supply stores with ready supplies of printing papers and other materials. Pressing as close to the glass as I was able to do in the museum, I believe I could see that the paper was rather bland, similar to Bristol vellum, that it had been mounted to another paper backing, whether by the photographer or collector I do not know, and that it had then been matted and framed with the edge of the photograph visible inside the matte. In the later works, specifically Walker Evans’ and Bresson’s, the paper is noticeably a better quality paper but still rather anonymous and without distinctive character…but they are clearly not Kodak or HP Printing Papers.
While this exhibit has a wonderful range of interesting pictorial works, as a survey of one hundred years of photography, in the end it raised more question than it attempted to answer.
It would have been very informative to have been told or to have been shown what the cameras were like that each of these photographers used…the cameras, the lenses, the lens sizes, and the mechanical options available to them…i.e. f-stops, bellows, etc. In almost all of these photographs there is a very noticeable lack of convergence in the parallel lines; is that because of the placement of the camera or the bellows, lenses, etc.?
I was also curious to know how, if there were no enlargers and no electric light bulbs, how these prints had been made. I assume each was a contact print but I do not know what source was used to transmit light through the negative to make the print.
It would have been very interesting, if there were no light meters or range finders, to know how the exposures and the focus had been determined. The Carleton Watkins photographs have such distinct areas of different tonal values one might almost think he had invented Adams’ Zone System. In the notes to the Cameron portraits it was stated that she made very long exposures, sometimes of many minutes duration. It would have been very interesting to know how she came to make that decision.
The Museum has scheduled two gallery talks regarding this exhibition and there are films about two of the photographers that will be shown, but I would have preferred having all of that information made available to the visitor’s within the exhibition. For the general public to understand why photography is a fine art, museums need to do more to make the process understandable to the museum going public: just to look at old pretty pictures should not be the sole reason to invite visitors to museum exhibitions. Photography is first a craft and without an understanding of that craft there can be only a poor understanding of the art.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/framing/century_images.asp
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Post a Comment