Measuring the Medium of Photography
THE DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPH AS A WORK OF ART:
AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS, 1860-1876 at the David and Alfred Smart Gallery
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EDOUARD BOUBAT at the Lacy Armour Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JANE WENGER at Artemisia Gallery
By Sandra Hytken
The history of photography is largely a history of technical achievement. Parallel to advances in the science of photography runs a growing awareness of the medium’s artistic possibilities. Just how far it has progressed can be measured by three major photography exhibitions currently on display in Chicago. At the University of Chicago’s Smart Gallery, an exhibit of
“The Documentary Photograph as a Work of Art: American Photographs, 1860-1876” has been mounted as a bicentennial tribute. This display of over 200 photographs from the Civil War era and the exploration of the Western frontier is, without doubt, the most impressive bicentennial exhibit I have seen in any gallery. Through it, we become profoundly aware of the awesome changes our culture has undergone in the short span of 100 years.
The Civil War photographs depict what seems by today’s standards a romantic, primitive conflict. The spoked-wheel-mounted cannons, the tent and log-cabin encampments among the pines, and the decorative elegance of the uniforms lend a certain naive dignity to the events. But the images of cities in ruin, bodies and skeletal remains of dead humans and animals in the trenches, and the despairingly serious look in the eyes of every live soldier, prisoner, and worker depicted all tell at what cost.
The Western frontier photographs begin with shots of breathtaking vistas (Shi-no-mi Altar, Cathedral Rocks, Shoshone Falls, Mount Shasta) taken as part of an extensive geographical survey in the early 1870s. But not far behind the survey, civilization pursued, as seen in the form of railroads, mining camps, forts, and missions. Indian life, caught in a period of quick subjugation to the white man, is duly recorded the Dakota delegation to Washington dressed in bits and pieces of cast-off military garb, the Shivwiti leaders being baptized by the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, and the Pottawattamie in Indian schools. One photograph in particular of the officers’ headquarters at Fort D.A. Russell, Wyoming, showing a gathering of small-town frame houses on a vast barren plain, filled me with wonder that our ancestors, with all their aggressive innocence, ever survived.
Are these photographs art? It’s a difficult question. Considering the incredible odds against doing even acceptable photographs outside a studio in the days of wet-plate photography, when the camera took a 20-by-24-inch negative that required a three-minute exposure, these photographs are remarkable achievements. Yet I found myself responding not to the balance of the compositions, the illusiveness of the images, or the differing interpretations of the photographers, but to the foreignness of the time portrayed.
Admittedly, my response is colored by the shift in aesthetic expectations that has accompanied the technological growth of photography. With the development of instantaneous exposure and highly portable, versatile equipment, we have come to value the spontaneous quality of photography rather than the monumental. No longer do we find it enough for the photographer to impersonally record static vistas and scenes. Instead, we expect the photographer to capture and interpret the momentary encounter between his or her unique sensibility and a fleeting image. These changed objectives can be seen in the work of French photographer Edouard Boubat, currently on exhibit in the Lacy Armour Gallery outside the cafeteria at the Art Institute.
Like the earlier American photographs, Boubat’s pictures are documents of life in lands afar. But Boubat focuses on individual people captured in moments of significant action, not panoramic scenes. The images in this exhibit are grouped around various themes, yet all are unified by a gentle, accepting vision that sees in humanity a beauty that transcends time.
Boubat has a special ability to see unlikely nuances of female beauty. His studies of Lella capture the fierce radiance tempered by shyness beneath an adolescent woman’s seeming awkwardness. The photographs of Agnes, a small girl preparing for the Festival of the Virgin, reveal the charming blend of eagerness and hesitation that surrounds a child’s first participation in a pageant. And his images of motherhood around the world define the unwieldy grace that accompanies a woman at this stage in her life. In all of his photographs whether they be of women, life in Paris, the Village Barbezieux, or India Boubat has sought out symbolic faces and moments within a culture, captured them in the instant, and then, through darkroom technique, manipulated the images into their most evocative form.
The importance of darkroom artistry is more obvious in the photographs of Jane Wenger, now on display at Artemisia. For the past two years, Wenger has been shooting studies of the male nude outdoors in nature. Early photographs in this series portray the figure against, yet visually entwined with, a landscape background. But the majority of images in the exhibit are low-angle shots of parts of the body against a background of sky. Photographing nudes can be a delicate business so easily the images become either trite or vulgar. Further, spontaneity must be sacrificed to the obvious interaction required between the photographer and model. Yet Wenger avoids these problems by concentrating on the male body as a source for abstract forms and deliberately exploiting the artificiality of the situation to achieve a surreal effect.
In the darkroom, she works to heighten this effect, cropping each image until the forms become tensely compressed into a small space. Individually, this gives the images a monumental, almost mythic power. However, the process of editing does not end here. The arrangement of the entire exhibit is also a highly conscious artistic act. When viewed in series, the images take on the form of an animation, and the mythic quality of the individual images is undercut by their flow as a distorted, comic dance. Through all the work runs a sensibility that relishes such contradictions.
As photography has progressed into its current level of technological sophistication, our concept of photography as an art form has evolved. We no longer expect the photographer to be a faithful recorder, but an image-maker. And we judge photographers’ success on how well they mediate between reality, the undeniable source of photographic images, and their individual perceptions of it.