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Letting photography be photography

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 14, 2012|By Mark Feeney

Boris Ignatovichs Tramway Handles. (APERTURE FOUNDATION INC./PAUL…)

MANCHESTER, N.H. - “A New Vision: Modernist Photography,’’ which runs at the Currier Museum of Art through May 13, is three shows. It’s a gapped history of 20th-century photography (the first photograph here, actually, is from 1880). It’s a somewhat wayward survey of the modernist aesthetic in photography - wayward as any show consisting of nearly 150 photographs by more than 60 photographers not only has to be but ought to be. And “A New Vision’’ is a well-deserved celebration of the Currier’s photography holdings.

The museum began to collect photography seriously in the late 1970s. “A New Vision’’ represents about a 10th of what the Currier owns. Among the photographers represented here are Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Andre Kertesz, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Edward Weston, W. Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, Harry Callahan, and Eliot Porter. That’s a pretty swell list.

The most important image, in terms of the exhibition, may well be Paul Strand’s “Akeley Motion Picture Camera,’’ from 1923. Deservedly famous, it’s a fine picture in and of itself. But its significance as regards the show lies in the reminder it brings of a fact so obvious it’s usually ignored. Looking at the gleaming metal parts of the Akeley, one can’t help but notice that a camera is a machine.

This reminder is central to “A New Vision.’’ For much of photography’s early history, its most ambitious artistic practitioners wanted the camera to be considered akin to brush or burin or other traditional aesthetic implement. When William Henry Fox Talbot published the first commercial volume to contain photographs, he chose for its title “The Pencil of Nature.’’ The assumption was that photography should ape traditional visual art forms through the use of painterly effects and portrayal of customary subjects like rural landscapes and domestic scenes.

Modernism, with its abhorrence of tradition, seized upon photography as a splendidly untraditional means to practice art. The best way to pursue that practice was through those very qualities that distinguished photography from painting: clarity, high contrast, novel perspectives, and up-to-the-minute subject matter. Even if the types of machinery recorded by Margaret Bourke-White in “Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co.’’ and Boris Ignatovich in “Tramway Handles’’ had been in existence in the middle of the 19th century, photographers would have avoided turning their cameras on them.