ART REVIEW : ‘The New Subjectivity’ Closes Getty Museum Photography Series

While museums throughout the United States and Europe have marked photography’s sesquicentennial in 1989 with enormous survey exhibitions documented by hefty catalogues, the J. Paul Getty Museum has staged a relatively quiet 150th birthday party. The celebration has taken shape in a yearlong series of five small exhibitions on “Experimental Photography,” all drawn from the museum’s extensive collection.

The series has progressed more or less chronologically, from “Discovery and Invention” to “The First Golden Age” to “The Painter Photographer” to “The Machine Age.” The final segment, “The New Subjectivity,” opened recently and will continue through March 4. The exhibition of 43 works by 20 photographers examines the increasingly prominent role of intuition and emotion in American and European photography between World War I and the 1960s.

Like its predecessors, this last show takes a narrow focus while allowing for considerable curatorial discretion. Weston Naef, director of the Getty’s department of photographs, didn’t draw up a grand plan of photography’s greatest examples of subjectivity and borrow the appropriate images. Confined to the Getty’s collection, he was liberated from the burden of constructing a definitive survey and blessed with the freedom to play with ideas and emotional connections.

The result, in “The New Subjectivity,” may be seen as a rather capricious assembly that only skims the surface of an important theme. The criticism is accurate, but Naef’s light touch echoes the aesthetic of personal decision that lies at the heart of subjectivity.

His selection of artworks is not a typical institutional exhibition; it’s an experimental gathering put together by a creative host who gambles that the participants might enjoy each other’s company--and that we might profit by seeing their work together.

In fact, some of the artists knew each other well. Paul Strand was a protege of Alfred Stieglitz and Bill Brandt was an apprentice to Man Ray, so it’s not surprising to see their work together. But W. Eugene Smith, who traveled the world to produce soulful documentary pictures of Albert Schweitzer’s humanitarian efforts, as well as country doctors, a Spanish wake and a Haitian stockade, may seem a strange companion for, say, Josef Sudek. The Czech artist stayed home to photograph such small wonders as “Late Roses,” a mortal still life framed by a rain-streaked window.

Likewise, street photographer Garry Winogrand’s lusty pleasure in women--seen here in a 1964 shot at Los Angeles International Airport--seems a far cry from Minor White’s mystical use of landscape as sexual metaphor.

The point of “The New Subjectivity” is not look-alike pictures or even similar sensibilities; it’s self-expression. Once that is clear, it’s only logical that the 20 “selves” represented would emerge as individuals. What they have in common is loyalty to their feelings. In Smith’s case, this loyalty is translated as passion for big human themes personified by individuals. Stieglitz, on the other hand, photographed cloudy skies as “equivalents” for emotions.

Harry Callahan’s abiding love for his wife, Eleanor, has produced some of the most sensual, palpably fleshy pictures in the annals of photography. As we see in “The New Subjectivity,” he also leads with his heart when he photographs Rhode Island weeds and New York shoppers.

In a recent lecture at the Getty, Callahan was repeatedly at a loss for words to explain his art. As he showed dozens of slides of his work to an overflow audience, he made such statements as, “I don’t know why I photographed this. I just liked it,” or “I don’t have anything to say about this. I just wanted to show it to you.”

All the photographers in the exhibition have important things to show us: a bird’s nest on the Isle of Skye by Bill Brandt, a Quebec barnyard by Paul Strand and Surrealist Man Ray’s uncharacteristically straight shot of a child’s diving lesson. We know these apparently modest subjects are not trivial because of the ways they are presented. In photography’s ongoing struggle between artistic conceptions of truth and beauty, “The New Subjectivity” presents beauty as the winner.