Imagination to Image
American Modernism: From Stieglitz to Today
A.H. Wall defined pictorial photography in 1896 as not “a representation or a portrait of a particular scene” but as “a picture”–an autonomous work of art. Most pictorialists rejected combine printing and other devices as too artificial yet adopted even more painterly techniques in their attempts to validate photography as a fine art. In the early part of this century, as pictorialism became more and more self-indulgent and mannered, some former pictorialists and a group of new photographers rejected fuzzy focus and the application of tinted oils to the print in favor of a crisp, sharp-edged look thought to be truer to photography’s inherent nature; this was the movement now called modernism.
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These debates are hashed out on another, more visceral level in three excellent exhibits focused on pictorialist and modernist photography. The Museum of Science and Industry is displaying 71 photographs from its collection that haven’t been exhibited since 1933; this show is heavily weighted toward Chicago pictorialists. In paired exhibits, Catherine Edelman offers 46 mostly pictorial photos and a few modernist ones while Carol Ehlers presents 69 mostly modernist pictures with a few pictorial images thrown in. This intermixing helps show that the movements aren’t as distinct as they might seem and that, even when they are distinct, the photographers are often addressing the same issues. Also, each tradition encompasses a wide variety of work.
Yet the museum and Edelman shows also include fine examples of pictorial photography, which even in its latter stages had some vitality. Though pictorial photography is often said to concentrate on formal beauty rather than the subject, in most of the best pictorial photos here the subject plays an important role. The blurs of white in Paul J. Standar’s Phantom of Speed (1932) at the museum might seem pointless embellishments if the subject were not a skier on a steep slope: they suggest flying snow. Mary Ruth Walsh in The Path of Light (1926) at the museum gives snowy woods a bluish tint by replacing silver with oil in the printing process, adding three-dimensionality to the scene’s irregular topography: the gully and hill pictured seem evidence of nature’s dynamism. And Anne Brigman, an extraordinary feminist-photographer-poet, makes images whose subjects and impressionistic appearance might seem cliched but almost miraculously succeed. In Nixies (c. 1930) at the museum and Invictus (c. 1910) at Edelman, she poses female nudes against trees, the women’s limbs echoing the branches, an overall soft focus sweeping every element into whorls of light that suggest a powerful pantheism.
Modernists often celebrated the machine age by comparing some powerful man-made object with their own image-making machines. M. Gurrie’s Climax in Steel (c. 1930) at the museum frames Chicago skyscrapers through the huge arm of a drawbridge. There may even be a metaphor for image making in Edward W. Quigley’s Ellipsoid (c. 1933), also at the museum: an egg slicer is about to cut into an egg, reminding us that the camera freezes an instant in time, giving us a single “slice” of the visual field.
Such acknowledgements lead the viewer out of photography and back to the world that inspired the works. But most of the greatest pictures also have their own formal complexity. Edward Weston’s sublime untitled image (c. 1938) looking down on a giant mass of kelp washed up on a beach is a symphony of interlocking curves, dark forms highlighted with white. And like the Cunningham image of banana leaves, it’s also an exploration of the medium, of texture and tone and how much detail can be captured in a silver print. This tapestry of photographic possibilities makes you want to go to the coast of northern California–the site of so many Weston images–and look at some real kelp. Ehlers’s observation about modernism’s relation to Emersonian ideals is entirely on the mark: these images both investigate the unique possibilities of photography as art and turn the viewer’s eyes away from photographs, back to the phenomenal world.
