ART REVIEW : LACMA Surveys 150 Years of Photography

Imagine an exhibition that presents tiny daguerreotype portraits in velvet-lined cases along with a 9x6-foot mug shot of artist Chuck Close.

Too big a jump to fathom? Well, how about a show that stretches from mid-19th-Century travelers’ pictures of Egyptian monuments to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s 1977 photograph of Mars?

“On the Art of Fixing a Shadow,” which opens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, takes both of these leaps and a good many more. The survey of 150 years of photography--from its invention in 1839 to the present--includes about 380 images in dozens of techniques. This may not be the photography show of the ages, but it is certainly the largest, most serious survey of the medium ever to visit Los Angeles. Capping a year of sesquicentennial celebrations throughout the United States and Europe, “Fixing a Shadow” is also unlikely to inspire a sequel any time soon.

Which is to say, don’t miss this exhibition if you have any interest in photography’s birth, growth and development into a medium that pervades all the visual arts. Wear your walking shoes and plan to spend a couple of hours or more. If you go soon, you’ll have time for a return trip, as the show continues through Feb. 25.

The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago. Four curators, David Travis, Sarah Greenough, Joel Snyder and Colin Westerbeck, selected works and contributed essays to the immense catalogue. At Los Angeles, the last stop for the traveling show, a rich assortment of photographs snakes through several galleries in the Hammer building.

What to make of this sprawling assembly?

The catalogue says that the exhibition “shows the art of photography to be an intricate, ever-changing dance.” Tug-of-war might be a more accurate analogy.

One of the most striking--and interesting--aspects of the show is that despite the curators’ attempts to make history flow along smoothly, the art resists following a logical progression. Contradictory forces run throughout photography’s history and set up a palpable tension.

Take the ongoing battle between old and new. The camera once seemed to be the epitome of modernity--a scientific device that rendered painting obsolete--but artists haven’t always seen it that way. Images in the show betray a perpetual tussle between nostalgic and progressive attitudes.

Among older works, the urge to artfully document and preserve the familiar opposes a fascination with frontiers, foreign lands, modern transportation and bold new architecture. As the show moves through time, dreamy pictorialism pits itself against “straight” images and classical abstractions take a stand against efforts to deconstruct the notion of photography.

There’s also a continuing tension between art and life. On the art side of the fence are Alphonse Terperau’s startlingly modern, 1884 view of a bridge spanning the Dordogne River, Julia Margaret Cameron’s romantic literary allegories and Robert Mapplethorpe’s elegant abstraction composed of a man’s bald head and rounded shoulders.

As for life, consider August Sander’s extraordinary attempt to record the strata of society in pre-World War II Germany. Samples on view picture a poker-straight police officer with a shoulder-width mustache and a group of disturbingly solemn children. Dorothea Lange’s photographs are classics of the Great Depression. More recently, Walker Evans took touching portraits of subway riders and Lee Friedlander has captured multilayered action in cities.

Sometimes art and life overlap to such a degree that they blur the lines of battle. Richard Avedon’s stark portrait of a sinewy carnival worker is too astonishing to be dismissed as one more example of his stylish formula, but it does impose a fashion photographer’s eye on a human being. Likewise, Stephen Shore’s photograph of a bleak commercial building can be seen as an indictment of dreary cities or as a neutral abstraction that rises above mundane subject matter.

Technology and expression also appear as opposing forces. The exhibition’s emphasis is definitely on the latter, but there’s no question that technical breakthroughs have led to experimentation and dictated suitable images for everything from daguerreotypes and stereographs to computer-generated images.

The tension between technique and expression becomes most extreme among contemporary artists who range from fast-shooting street artists--such as the late Garry Winogrand, whose camera might have been an extension of his arm--to those who expose the nature of camera mechanics and filmic images. Jan Dibbets, for example, shows a collage of color prints that simultaneously pictures an architectural dome and a camera’s aperture. Vito Acconci’s series of “Twelve Pictures” was taken while he stepped across a stage and shot the audience--including a photographer who was photographing Acconci.

Yet another split arises between inclusive and exclusive vision. We sometimes get the idea that only modern artists have been clever enough to see the artistic possibilities in cropping or zeroing in on details, but panoramic and democratic views run straight through the history of photography, as do closely observed compositions.

Given the tenaciousness of such opposing forces, is there anything new in recent photography? The exhibition, which explodes in the mid-’60s into big, colorful, conceptual works, insists that there have been considerable changes.

The most significant is that photography is no longer isolated from painting and sculpture, as we saw in greater depth two years ago in a show called “Art and Photography.” While early photography often aped painting, photography has now infiltrated all of the visual arts.

At the same time, photographs have lost some of their preciousness. Chuck Close’s mug shot, for example, is composed of 16 sheets of curling paper. In his large collage of Pearblossom Highway, David Hockney has patched together a loving view of a litter-strewn desert road--as well as a commentary on the flickering quality of human vision.

One other obvious change is contemporary artists’ attitude toward the human body. Developing Surrealist and Dada ideas--and taking them into a post-modern context--artists often see the body as an object to be dissected or transformed.

“On the Art of Fixing a Shadow” suffers from two inherent dangers in big surveys. One is viewers’ tendency to feel simultaneously overwhelmed by volume and cheated when they don’t find all their old favorites. The other is the difficulty of including a concise survey of contemporary photography in a historical panorama. The choices become exceedingly problematic as artists proliferate and techniques cross-breed.

To their credit, the organizers of “Fixing a Shadow” haven’t simply trotted out photography’s greatest hits. Instead they have presented an increasingly complex continuum that is open to interpretation.