Photo synthesis

By Christopher Knight

March 7, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

A veritable flood of photographs is just now washing into L.A.’s art museums. The Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum and, last but by no means least, the J. Paul Getty Museum are all in High Photo Mode. Down the road a bit, a traveling survey of recent West Coast art at San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art is also dominated by films, video projections and still photographs, while the Long Beach Museum of Art is hosting a photography show from Washington’s National Portrait Gallery.

Together, the four L.A. museum shows will offer well over 700 works of photographic art to public view. That averages more than 175 pictures apiece -- many more than exhibitions in other mediums typically muster. The Hammer’s large fall survey of Lee Bontecou’s career featured 70 sculptures and 80 drawings; MOCA’s big coming survey of the Minimalist era in the 1960s, filling the entire building, will present about 150 works. By any standard, the photography shows are huge.

I dare say that if 700 paintings or 700 sculptures came trundling into L.A.’s special exhibition galleries all at once, audiences would rock back on their heels in stunned astonishment. A like number of photographs we take in stride.

Yet this abundance turns out to have a wholly unexpected aspect. The four shows coincidentally outline a central argument that virtually defined the photographic enterprise for nearly 150 years, beginning with its birth in Europe in the 1830s: Is a photograph an imitation of reality or a work of imagination? Together they offer a rare opportunity for a crash course in photographic history -- and for pondering why that once-central quarrel no longer applies.

Look around. How many pictures do you see in a day? 100? 1,000? 10,000?

The newspaper you’re holding in your hands likely contains more pictures than might be seen in an entire lifetime by the average person living 200 years ago, before cameras. And another paper will arrive tomorrow.

As much as our ancestors were accustomed to a vista dominated by nature, we’re used to living in a landscape of images -- “a forest of signs,” as MOCA once quoted Baudelaire for the title of an exhibition. It’s a defining feature of modern experience, one which differentiates our age from any other.

Still, the experience can be daunting -- and managing it an exercise in seeming futility. Last month, in a reorganization of leadership at the Smithsonian Institution, a curator was appointed for the first time to oversee its various collections of photographs -- about 13 million of them. (Apparently the Smithsonian is “America’s scrapbook,” as well as its attic.) In December, a critic at the Village Voice fretted over his Top 10 list of the year’s best photography books, which he couldn’t whittle from 44 titles.

Before the camera revolutionized the image world in the mid-19th century, pictures were found mostly in rarefied places of institutional authority -- especially palaces and places of worship -- or they were appended to texts in books or pamphlets. Usually a picture didn’t come to you; you went to the picture.

Today when we make a special effort to go see a picture, our destination is most often a movie theater or an art museum. And increasingly, the pictures we go to art museums to see are photographs. A circle seems to be closing.

ART VERSUS REALITY

The big spring show at LACMA is the much-heralded survey “Diane Arbus: Revelations,” which opened last Sunday. This controversial exhibition reconsiders the brief but startling professional life of an artist known for photographs of freaks, eccentrics, social outcasts and other anomalies of humanity -- and for committing suicide in 1971 at age 47, at the zenith of her career.

The Arbus estate has tightly controlled the photographer’s work for more than three decades -- hence the title, “Revelations.” Launched on a seven-city tour of the United States and Europe lasting until fall 2006, it was greeted with enormous press at its debut last fall in San Francisco. Photographs not seen for years, or never seen before, jostled with the classics.

Janet Malcolm observed in a sharp essay in the New York Review of Books that the show and its authorized catalog certainly add great luster to the artist’s reputation. But she also noted that, perhaps inevitably, the event “blurs the radicalism of the achievement that has made her life an object of avid interest.” It’s tough to be radical when you’re an establishment darling adored by thronging crowds.

At MOCA, meanwhile, a second show examines the rise of rough-edged street photography, mostly between the 1950s and the 1970s. Street photography blended documentary aspects of photojournalism with the fictions of art. It meant to distinguish itself from the refinement, self-consciousness and careful printing of what was then commonly called art photography. Nobody would mistake a graceful Edward Weston nude, all Matissean interlaces of arms and legs, for a blunt Garry Winogrand picture of a mixed-race New York City couple holding chimpanzees dressed in children’s clothing. Titled “Street Credibility” and largely drawn from MOCA’s own bounteous collection of this often riveting material, the show might be subtitled “Arbus and Co.”

MOCA says it’s the world’s only art museum to own a complete set of the Arbus photographs that made up her 1972 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art -- a show that cemented her artistic reputation and popular image in the wake of her untimely death. She’s the centerpiece of “Street Credibility,” with more pictures on view than any other photographer. L.A. artist Mike Kelley, who acted as guest curator for the show, assembled savvy examples of her predecessors (Brassai, Walker Evans, Robert Frank and others) and the photographers she influenced (Larry Clark, Lee Friedlander, Sally Mann, etc.). He also included strange pictures by a virtually unknown contemporary -- Theo Ehret, house photographer for the Olympic Auditorium in Hollywood, whose hobby was to photograph women in bikinis wrestling in apartment living rooms.

If street photography -- and sometimes back-alley photography -- represented one attempt to knock art photography off its pedestal, Conceptual art represented another. “The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1982” is the subject of the major spring presentation at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Take a work such as Mel Bochner’s 1967 illusion of a crumpled-up and then flattened-out photograph. It helps chronicle the ways that an art photography fetish for exquisite prints was replaced by more vernacular uses of camera images.

The show is also an assembly of work by artists who -- unlike Arbus and company -- refused to accept the art world ghetto, however glamorous, into which camera work had always been consigned. From Edward Ruscha, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman in the United States to Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke and Gilbert & George in Europe, these artists would never have dreamed of describing themselves as photographers. They weren’t versed in the technical language of f-stops; they didn’t crave a display of darkroom dexterity.

Instead they approached the camera as just a practical tool -- like a pencil. The show’s 61 artists used photographs -- including many that were shot, printed and published by other people -- the same way they might use a typewriter, a chain saw, a piece of plywood or a sheet of graph paper in a work of art.

Their primary target was abstract painting. Twentieth century art photography had arisen in a dialogue with Modern painting. Conceptual art and street photography sought, through different means, to move the conversation elsewhere. From the 1950s through the 1970s artists were entwined with the counterculture, and abstract painting and fine art photography were synonymous with the establishment they sought to upset.

Today, of course, the old separation between a counterculture and an establishment culture is mostly gone. The hubbub over Arbus, as well as her prominence in three of these four shows, attests once more to that. What happened? For better and for worse, the 1980s happened. The decade represents a tipping point for photography.

FOUR KEY EVENTS

All these exhibitions bring us to the brink of that tumultuous whirlwind of a decade, which remains a kind of artistic blind spot in the culture. For photography and its relationship to art, at least four events transpired in the 1980s to change the terms of the debate.

First, and most important, was the arrival of a distinctive artist. Cindy Sherman unabashedly made photographs as photographs, unlike the reigning Conceptualists, but no one ever seriously regarded her as a photographer, the way we do Arbus, street photographers or art photographers. By the end of the decade she was the Queen Mother of the C-print -- the big, painting-size, saturated-color photographs now ubiquitous on the international art scene.

Her “Untitled Film Stills” from the decade’s start are self-portraits, in which Sherman was absorbed -- literally and figuratively -- into the modern image world. More than two dozen are in the Hammer’s rich (if rather dutiful) show. Carefully costumed and posed, as if starring in a cinematic epic unspooling in her head, she reenacted for her camera personae in the culture’s collective consciousness.

There’s the eager working girl newly arrived in the big city, the world-weary sophisticate surrounded by stylish modern trappings, the dangerous but fragile blond and many more. Individual identity is not discovered by peeling back layers to reveal a hidden essence, these pictures insist; it’s assembled from preexisting bits and pieces, like an ensemble off the rack or a costume donned for the party of life.

Before Sherman, photography had always been a second-class citizen in the world of art -- a role, not coincidentally, also occupied by women. The point was not lost when she constructed a multidimensional range of feminine identities from familiar images made by cameras. By the end of the decade, Sherman had produced a body of work that, in scale and impact, eradicated the class distinction that had bedeviled photography since its nominal invention in 1839. Photography had gained historical parity with painting.

Second, the art market exploded. In the wake of Sherman’s aesthetic achievement, photography’s new status melded seamlessly with the internationalizing art world.

A painting or a site-specific installation could only be in one place at one time, but a multiple edition of photographs could be in Cologne, Sao Paulo and Tokyo simultaneously -- and far more cheaply than an edition of sculpture. Unlike multiple etchings or lithographs, photographs are also strictly modern. They satisfied the steady expansion of international exhibition needs and the desires of multiple collectors. Photographic history kept enlarging to include the anonymous and amateur pictures that Conceptual art helped legitimize. An enormous, untapped backlog of salable merchandise appeared. Galleries specializing in photographs, once rare, became common.

The third event made headlines. In 1984, L.A.’s J. Paul Getty Museum announced the stunning, simultaneous acquisition of nine private collections totaling 18,000 photographs, for a figure reported at $20 million. (The Getty has never revealed the purchase price.) A new department of photographs, the only department at the museum to extend into the 20th century, was established. In the flabbergasted words of New York Times photography critic Andy Grundberg, the geographic center of scholarship and connoisseurship in photography shifted west overnight.

Crucially, the Getty’s dramatic commitment also galvanized public attention and collector interest like nothing before or since. The purchase included the two most coveted collections in America -- those of Arnold Crane in Chicago and Sam Wagstaff in New York, both strong in material from photography’s earliest years in Britain and France. The Getty’s new department of photographs instantly surpassed those long established at New York’s MOMA and Metropolitan Museum of Art while leaving important regional centers like Chicago, San Francisco, Tucson and Austin, Texas, in the dust.

On March 16, the museum will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its triumphal coup with “Photographers of Genius at the Getty,” a show featuring 158 images by 38 European and American photographers. The oldest is a direct-negative cyanotype by Hippolyte Bayard, made around 1842 by placing feathers, leaves, flowers and textiles on light-sensitive paper. The most recent is a posthumously printed double portrait of twin girls -- by the now omnipresent Arbus. As artists, Bayard and Arbus could not be more different from each other; but his shadow picture and her twins both say something about photography as a doppelganger.

The Getty’s approach to the subject -- suggested by the grandiloquent title “Photographers of Genius” -- differs from those in the other exhibitions. The show represents the museum’s commitment to an older ideal of art photography, whose overthrow the other shows demonstrate. The Getty has always aimed for sober appraisals of the individual artist and the unique print, with the goal of choosing the most important photographers and representing them in depth.

By the end of 2003, their collection stood at more than 100,000 pictures, only a tiny fraction of which have seen the light of a Getty gallery. Needless to say, no museum visitor will ever have a handle on a collection that large. But “Photographers of Genius” will tell us who the Getty thinks is who.

The fourth watershed was technological, a revolution still underway. In 1981 Sony introduced the prototype for Mavica -- the Magnetic Video Camera -- which recorded still images on floppy disks. It wasn’t a true digital camera, which converts light into electronic impulses, but that door was opened. Through it walked a team of scientists in Calgary, Canada, who that same year built the first digital camera. Electronic imagery would soon intersect with the new universe of the Internet, whose fundamentals date to the time of Sputnik in 1957 but whose first networking protocol (still used today) was introduced in 1983.

By decade’s end the first completely digital consumer camera was on the market. Its arrival coincided with an astounding global event. When CNN got around the Chinese censors at Tiananmen Square by using a Mavica and transmitting its still pictures abroad via telephone lines, the world was galvanized. Suddenly, Tiananmen’s rank as the world’s largest public square took on a second meaning. The nascent digital world would make the public square international, not local. Within months Adobe Systems introduced Photoshop for the privacy of at-home computers, and the Hubble telescope was launched into humanly unreachable deep space.

In one sense, digital photographs take us to the beginnings displayed at the Getty -- to Bayard and his cyanotypes. He didn’t use a camera to make them; likewise digital photographs can be assembled just from the complex coding of 0’s and 1’s in a computer program, no camera needed.

The camera is dead -- long live the camera!

It remains to be seen if digital will entirely replace the type of analog photographs being consecrated at MOCA, LACMA, the Hammer and the Getty. But its development does represent a huge, dawning change in cultural consciousness about photographs. Digital broke the link that always chained photographs to the visible world, obscuring the inherently fictive qualities of photography. Without that link, the imaginative traffic between photographs and mediums like painting and drawing is more promiscuous.

The old fight over photography and art has been made obsolete. Inevitably, a certain exhaustion now hangs over the ubiquitous image world. These shows give us pause to catch our breath.

‘Diane Arbus: Revelations’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Ends: May 31

Price: $10 to $15

Contact: (323) 857-6000

‘The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1982’

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Ends: May 11

Price: $3 to $5

Contact: (310) 443-7000