Henry James famously described the novel as "a loose, baggy monster." Photography is a loose, baggy medium. A painting or a symphony has no effective existence beyond the aesthetic realm. Yet a photograph can simultaneously function as art, documentation, keepsake, and technological artifact.
The new show at the PRC, "POV | PRC: Photography Now and the Next 30 Years," which runs through Jan. 28, gets at both of these aspects of "resource." In celebrating the center's 30th anniversary, it offers a double demonstration: how very well the PRC carries out its mission as a local clearinghouse for photography and how wildly various the medium is.
The most astonishing thing about the show is how economically it does this. The PRC asked 30 individuals -- board members, former staffers, and the like -- to nominate a photography-related subject worthy of greater attention and/or likely to have an impact on the medium over the next 30 years. The beauty of such a brief is that "subject" leaves itself open to so many possibilities. The result isn't a comprehensive look at the present (and future?) photographic landscape. Not even the mightiest museum could do that. But "POV | PRC" manages to cover a lot of that ground in a very small space.
Photography begins with photographers, of course, and the show includes 20 of them. They work in a wide range of forms (photojournalism, video art, portraiture, still life) and a dizzying variety of styles. Elijah Gowin seems almost to have abandoned photography, using paper negatives and printing his work on watercolor paper. If his "Clench 1" looked any more painterly it could pass for an oil on canvas. Conversely, Tim Garrett reaches into one of the most retro-mundane recesses of photography for his work. He relies on photo booths to make his images.
