Photography’s Post-Birthday Bash : The Museum of Modern Art weighs in with what may be the final word on the sesquicentennial celebration

Photography celebrated its 150th birthday in 1989 with a year-long round of exhibitions. They went on and on, and traveled around the country until it seemed that photography was about the only art to be seen while sesquicentennial mania persisted.

Major museums hosted massive surveys while smaller outposts gathered photographs under geographic or thematic mantles. American tourists in Europe soon discovered that the bonanza wasn’t a national phenomenon. In London, the Royal Academy of Art imported “The Art of Photography: 1839-1989” from Houston while the Barbican Art Gallery offered “Through the Looking Glass: Photographic Art in Britain, 1945-1989”; Paris’ Georges Pompidou Center booked an international survey while the auto racing city of Le Mans boasted a dozen shows of French photographers’ work in schools and community centers.

Now that we’re well into 1990 and the party is over, the Museum of Modern Art has opened “Photography Until Now.” The long-promised exhibition is a revisionist historical survey organized by John Szarkowski, director of the museum’s department of photography. The show, sponsored by Springs Industries, Inc., will be at MOMA to April 29, then travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art, June 27 to Aug. 19. It will not come to Los Angeles.

The timing of “Photography Until Now” is problematic. It infuriates those who see it as a calculated move--like a fashionably late entrance staged to prove superiority or avoid associating with the riff-raff. But it is also appropriate for MOMA to have the last word.

The museum has a distinguished history of involvement with photography--a distinction that few institutions can claim--and Szarkowski has made MOMA the country’s premier photography powerhouse during his 28-year tenure. He has, of course, been criticized for the way he wields that power, and his program often seems to lag well behind current thinking. At the same time, he is credited with discovering such unconventional talents as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus, as well as organizing seminal exhibitions and writing blissfully readable essays.

Given all that, it must be said that “Photography Until Now” is a predictable exercise for Szarkowski. It is as brilliant, revelatory and delightful as it is hidebound. Probably the best thing going for it is that the show feels like a real person with an idea is behind it. That comes as no small relief after a year of committee-organized photography surveys that contained wonderful images and provided broad perspectives, but sometimes seemed pointless.

Szarkowski’s point is that the art of photography can’t or shouldn’t be divorced from the technology that makes it possible. That doesn’t sound like a big deal until you recall that photography’s passionate search for acceptance as fine art has depended upon sweeping technology into the closet. What matters is the art, not how it’s made, goes the argument.

Szarkowski would probably agree while pointing out that photography is different from other art because the look of it is the result of (if not determined by) technical processes.

This thesis holds up well in the early years of photography. When pioneering photographers had to transport entire darkrooms with them in order to prepare, expose and process wet plates quickly, for example, they could not operate spontaneously. However, the cumbersome process was “splendid for the disciplined, methodological description of every ancient monument in Egypt, or every locomotive built in Manchester,” Szarkowski notes, and that’s exactly the sort of picture that proliferated.

It wasn’t until the 1880s that photographers were free to take chances and shoot pictures more or less as they found them. By then they were working with dry plates that could be prepared in advance and processed long after exposure. Once hand-held cameras and flexible film were developed it was probably inevitable that photographers such as Winogrand would shoot thousands of frames on the street to produce a few pictures.

When you think about the art/technology partnership along these lines, it makes perfect sense to weave them together in an exhibition. “Photography Until Now” does that quite successfully for the first 100 years or so.

In the beginning, when photographers were trying to figure out what to do with an invention that was not born of need, they quite naturally thought small and concentrated on the people around them. Daguerreotypes yielded wondrously detailed, one-of-a-kind likenesses and lent themselves to intimate investigations. A lovely group of portraits on metal, which seem to expose all the warts and wrinkles of unlovely people, launches the historical survey.

Calotypes, on the other hand, produced softer, broader pictures that could be reproduced by means of paper negatives. This revolutionary development encouraged photographers to look outward--at landscapes, architecture and subjects that might appeal to a wider audience and be disseminated among new customers. William Pumphrey, for example, photographed the Norman porch of a church in York, Henri-Victor Regnault pictured a cozy, cluttered view of the Sevres porcelain factory and Linneaus Tripe captured a columned corridor in India as if it were a one-point perspective drawing.

The wet plate method, which produced negatives on glass instead of paper, combined the clarity of daguerreotypes with the reproducibility of calotypes. Despite its physical drawbacks, the process proved irresistible and took over in the mid-1850s. Francis Frith packed glass plates off to Egypt and came back with pictures of pyramids that remain archetypes.

Other photographers worked with glass plates at home, staging dramatic scenes or simply recording appearances. Fallon Horne’s “Youth and Age,” for example, depicts a trembling boy under the spell of a weighty old sage. It’s such a sappy bit of drama that it’s lovable. An unknown photographer’s stiff pictures of American workers, on the other hand, are touchingly revealing.

As time went on, the useless invention of photography became increasingly functional, as we see in mug shots of prisoners (who look like solid citizens) and sequential pictures of human and animal locomotion. When technology became so advanced that it was controlled by laboratories, photography became even more useful--and more expressive.

Social reformers such as Lewis Hine could use it to argue for the rights of workers. Photographers who labored under the Works Progress Administration could produce soul-burning pictures of bread lines and migratory workers during the Great Depression.

These artists’ motives may have been mixed, and indeed some of their pictures invite contradictory readings. Dorothea Lange’s close-up of a cotton picker wiping his mouth with the back of his hand depicts a young man pleading for relief even as his gesture suggests a desperate wish for privacy from the camera. Powerful as they are as social documents, her pictures are inevitably artworks.

The invention of the halftone block, at the end of the 19th Century, made it possible to print photographs in ink and send them out to an ever-widening audience. Life and other picture magazines provided a vast market for photographers but dictated subject matter and eventually lost their vigor.

At the same time, photographic images mixed with text in advertising and art. The magazines’ collage approach was paralleled by Surrealist Max Ernst and Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, whose photographic self-portrait is a conceptually dense piece of work that overlays the artist’s eye, hand and face with a grid, a drawing implement and typography. In one modest picture, he brings the history of artistic vision into the age of mechanical reproduction.

And so it goes through dozens of fascinating examples, until we arrive at the troublesome ‘60s.

This is hopelessly sticky territory because photography goes off on so many tangents and gets so mixed up with painting that it can’t be adequately tracked in a historical summary. The other big surveys that have tried to deal with the explosion of contemporary photography have generally confused the issue or left gaping holes.

“Photography Until Now” just fizzles out and looks distracted when it approaches “Now.” The show pays dutiful homage to the colorful inventions of Andy Warhol (celebrity portraits reproduced by silk screen), Robert Rauschenberg (collages of found images printed on cloth), Cindy Sherman (chameleon-like self-portraiture), William Wegman (droll conceptual work featuring the artist’s dog) and David Hockney (composite Cubist portraits).

But these works appear as an aberration when the exhibition cycles back to recent black-and-white work that recalls much earlier photographs. Nicholas Nixon’s picture of an emaciated man dying of AIDS, for example, might be an update of social criticism from the 1930s. Chris Killip’s 1987 shot of a girl with a hula hoop has the wild, romantic tones of late 19th-Century landscape. The final photograph in the show, Judith Joy Ross’ 1988 shot of adolescent girls in bathing suits, is wistfully reminiscent of daguerreotype portraits.

Does this mean that photography has gone nowhere in 150 years? No, but it does lead viewers to conclude that technology can’t explain contemporary photography.