There’s Too Much Ado About Camille Silvy’s Photograph

Times art critic Christopher Knight has proved himself an aggressive and caustic warrior, with no fear of slaying sacred dragons. Consequently, his lengthy and docile review of the current photography exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum (“An Unprecedented Photo,” Calendar, Jan. 5) is all the more startling for the questions it doesn’t raise.

Evidently, the fearless Knight met his match--and this with a most retrograde opponent, “Camille Silvy’s River Scene, France: The Story of a Photograph,” which focuses on a single landscape by a somewhat unknown 19th-Century commercial photographer.

Silvy vehemently objected to attempts to have photography admitted to the fine arts section at the 1862 International Exhibition. Consequently, the fact that Silvy’s picture has become the center of a major museum exhibition is just too blatant an irony to ignore.

The greater mystery, however, is of the Getty choosing to sponsor an exhibition around one single photograph--no more important than many in its collection of 60,000 or more. Even if Silvy did himself an injustice, which the Getty decided to right 130 years later, why should such an exhibition be organized? And then why fabricate a precious and obscure presentation around a particular photograph instead of rendering a broader historical context?

Knight never questions why a major museum should put together such a hodgepodge exhibition around a single pleasing landscape taken along a French river (accompanied by the only other three existing prints of the image). He does informs us of the Getty’s claim that this is perhaps the first such exhibition built around a single photograph, but being first should not reduce us to drop-dead silence.

Neither does he question the inventive explanation presented in the forward to the catalogue by the Getty curator of photography: “Silvy’s life and art are a reminder that photography is a means of expression which swings like a pendulum between two poles of multiplicity and singularity.”

Even more ambiguous is the observation that the four prints together represent “an enigma within an enigma.”

Knight also fails to explore another intriguing question raised by guest curator Mark Haworth-Booth, keeper of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Speculating on the Getty’s copy of “River Scene, France,” Haworth-Booth confesses: “It may have been printed from a paper negative copied from another print.”

If Haworth-Booth’s speculation is true, that might explain the murkiness of the Getty print--”a russet-colored and grainy image” to use the curator’s own words. In which case, the entire premise of the exhibition may be a case of much ado about nothing.

Insipid reviews only encourage an outdated and narrow approach to photography and photographic history that has become a source of frustration.