Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents This is the Photo League Leo Hurwitz Spring 1949 THIS IS THE PHOTO LEAGUE was an experience quite different from most photographic exhibitions. Although many of the pictures commanded particular interest, I found myself reacting to the show as a whole rather than to the individual photographs. There is a binding force in the exhibit that creates a single atmosphere, despite the fact that ninety-six photographers have contributed to it. It is an exhibition charged with feeling and provocative of basic questions. The following are some of the notations I jotted down as I walked around the gallery: "What is it in a work of art permits you to return again and again and find something new? Why do you not exhaust the visual information of a good picture in the first looking?" "What are the expressive materials of photography? "Photography's unique materials are: the actual lineaments and textures of the visible world; the full range and nuance of sensitized film and paper; moments sliced out of the stream of time in which all the elements are contemporaneous and specific (not conceptual or historically accumulated). "In common with the other graphic arts, photography utilizes the relationships of area, volume, line and tone values; the compositional integration which binds a picture into a functioning whole; the expressive values of objects and their special combination which generates new meanings." "What theme and common attitudes run through this show, through the successful pictures and the failures?" This show is the Photo League, a very live institution despite the tolling of Mr. Clark's bell. It is also an essential insight into America, and an important key to the state and strivings of contemporary photography. In it are discoveries of people as they are not represented in the widely published photographs of journalism and advertising. The America of the modern photographic medium is by and large "advertised America"--the America whose ideals are: the girl with skin as smooth as a store-window model; the room whose chairs, walls and frigidaires have been untouched by human hand; the smile that is pristine and specifically for the occasion; sex that is light without heat, pure surface come-on; childhood that glows with cereal energy goodness; life without individuality, without struggle and lived before a mirror. This is clearly no exaggeration as far as advertising photographs go. It is also largely true of journalistic photography. Consider how many stories are stimulated by press agents and public relations departments. Where the subject matter won't quite fit this approach, then lighting and printing help out. And frequently, even when the photographer has other intentions, still the habits of his profession, standardized lighting, choice of angle, disregard for the fine reproductive values of the photographic medium combined with editorial selection and cropping, tend to betray his intention. THIS IS THE PHOTO LEAGUE shows a large group of American photographers in reaction from these primary professional uses of photography, from the limited aspects of life reflected by it, its specious gimmicks, its surface penetration, its artificial standards of interest, its illustrational function, whereby the nature of the event is more often conveyed by the text. The photographs in this show explore aspects of life not considered slick enough for advertising, or too real; not newsworthy enough for the daily paper or weekly. The observations here are motivated by the needs and interests of the photographer, his wandering and penetrating eye, his own feelings about people, rather than by the peculiar editorial mores of our time. THIS IS THE PHOTO LEAGUE reveals a rawness that seldom faces you on the pages of our magazines. It reveals moments that are lived, not wished by the caption writer or account executive: intimate discoveries of the specificities of living; penetrations through the shuttered moment into wider meanings and feelings. Among many others I think of such discovered moments as: Engel's young girl, alone in a Coney Island crowd, contemplating the roundness of her belly; Rosenblum's life-heavy faces watching an event off screen; Ehrenburg's Greek women whose black shapes are woven together in calm tragedy by the twisting tree; Timberman's round-shouldered old-age; Grossman's happy-tragic children at play; Witt's shrouded, faceless woman pouring water from a jar; Palfi's young Jehovah's Witness whose wide eyes seem driven into a corner; Abbot's patient, blinded Joyce; Sandra Weiner's puzzling fraction of a child's laugh; Model's acid comment on slum-destroyed people; Lange's gentle insight into the face of a farm child; Joseph's sad-eyed little girl who has often wanted and seldom received. Two large qualities emerge out of the show. The first is a keen sympathy for the struggles of everyday people, and a warm interest in the textures of their lives. Hungers and needs are photographed; but rarely the strength, the ability of these people to answer their needs or solve their problems. The second is a fascination with the fractions of life, the snatched moments of expression or gesture in movement--providing visual material available to no other graphic art but photography. As a result of the first quality, there is fact after photographic fact that demonstrate hard. ships and insecurity; but there is no synthesizing point of view that relates these facts to any larger meaning or struggle. As a result of the second, the photographer is too frequently satisfied with the recording of a compelling moment snatched out of the stream of time without regard to the expressive unity of the photograph as a whole. THIS IS THE PHOTO LEAGUE presents a compelling aggregation of facts. But rarely are these facts integrated into organically unified pictures. Often the backgrounds, out of focus or spatially disturbing, destroy the concentration of the main subject. Many pictures, splintering into two and three parts, prevent the eye from coming to rest on them. Lines and shapes are cut by the framed edge of photographs without purpose; elements are included that are unnecessary to the functioning of the photographs. There is a common disregard of the potentialities of photography: to yield a wide scale of values, truth of texture and tone, the full depth and dimension of objects. The photographer is too early satisfied with the arresting discovery. the socko fact, and too little concerned with the other expressive materials available to him. Such satisfaction prevents the completion of the picture and restricts its effect. For once the discovery is made by the viewer. Once the fact is absorbed, the experience given by the picture is over. A return to it yields very little more. Too many of the photographs exhaust themselves on the first look. There is a wall in the exhibition devoted to the work of Strand Weston and Adams. The subject matter here is nature at rest, in contrast to the mobility of the rest of the show. The subjects are circumscribed. Yet, in the successful pictures here. elements of enjoyment and insight emerge that are lacking in the rest of the show. In Strand's small Gaspe landscape, the architecture of the picture is so complete and essential that its interest continues long beyond the absorption of its content. The texture of the subjects are true and expressive. Its small areas have a density of visual interest. The opatian relationships of line and volume are so final that the eye willingly stays within the picture. And this organic integration of form and content crates a new living object, the picture whose overall meaning and mood is more than the sum of its visual facts. The comparison between the sense of completeness of some of the photographs on the wall and the sense of fragmentation of most of the other pictures is provocative. Certainly it is not simply the difference in subject matter that accounts for the contrast (though. without doubt, it is more difficult to make a completely integrated photograph where the photographer's eye and hand have to work with split second timing). It seems to me the contrast results from the basic attitude: that the interesting fact is enough, that the photographer is essentially a recorder of visual information, not an interpreter, a documentalist, not an artist. This may seem a strange time to reopen the question of whether photography is an art. In truth I am not reopening this discussion. It has been clearly established that photographs can be art. In the valid search to extend the frontiers of photography in its probings, serious photographers have themselves forgotten that photography can be a larger force, art. Photography in its beginnings was a new and extraordinary instrument for recording life more accurately than painting. As such, and retaining much of the traditional standards of the graphic arts, some important art was produced in the work of Hill, Brady and others. Then photography became ART. Its techniques were used to imitate the older arts. Retouching became more important than the lens; mood became more important than reality. In this phase of photography, though its influence grew, no art was produced. Then the camera was rediscovered as a means for seeing the world and the truth of objects. Its specific and unique capacity to transpose the finest detail and the exact form of nature was recognized as one of photography's expressive materials. The violations of photography's essential function that characterized the previous period were consigned to the dustbins of salons and camera clubs. In this period a body of important art was produced; Steiglitz, Strand, Atget, Steichen and others. Then the world of advertising discovered photography. It learned that textural truths as well as falsifications could pin down the eye and sell commodities. Light and composition better than the retouching brush could he manipulated to push the right buttons to make customers say: I want that. B.O. could become a national institution, perfume could be made to smell on the magazine page, canned beans could be made to stimulate the salivary glands--all by photography. All along the controversy raged: Is photography art? And for some, the well textured pictures of Cannon towels proved it. Thc controversy over whether photography was art died without a bang when some photographers became aware that advertising photography, salon photography, journalistic photography, and even the work of the photographic masters had documented very little of the visible expressions of life in our era. The word "documentary" was born, and this rivulet of the phototographic tradition became a broad stream. Aspects of the work of Brady, Steiglitz, and Strand, the work of Riis, Hitle, Atget, the Film and Photo League in the early years of the depression, the work of Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Shahn, Lange and the Farm Security group merged to become the dominant trend among serious photographers. And this trend began to affect photographic journalism, sending the editorial eyes of Life and Look into corners of life that would have been shocking in the Hoover era. In the war that began in China and Spain, and ended in Berlin and Tokyo in 1945, the documentary camera brought back a full and unique record. The present era of the cold war is something else. Many of the facts of life are no longer so interesting commercially. And with such tidal restrictions on where the camera may explore, photographic qualities tend to change. They tend to become slicker, and less truthful both to beauty and ugliness. It is in this framework that the League Show is so challenging. Its restless striving to grasp reality drives forward the best traditions of photography's brief history. The awareness of its tendency to limit the photograph to a recording opens up the size of the job to be done. The job is to continue to explore the wider the more spontaneous and mobile, the unrested aspects of life and still make photographs that maintain their power after the first seeing. The job is to use the full values of photography, and with these communicate the essential experiences of our time. the hardships and the struggles, and the strength to fulfill our needs.
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