Article
Mirrors and Windows - Outdoor Photography Jan 2006
Over 25 years ago now I bought one of my first photography books, Mirrors and Windows, American Photography since 1960. Essentially a catalogue to accompany an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it also contains an erudite essay on the exhibition's theme by the Museum's then director of photography, John Szarkowski.
Re-reading Szarkowski's text recently proved taxing. Allow me to quote:
"This arrangement is designed to illustrate a critical thesis which I hope may offer a simple and useful perspective on the bewildering variety of technical, aesthetic, functional, and political philosophies that characterise contemporary photography's colloquium. This thesis suggests that there is a fundamental dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think of photography as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as a method of exploration."
Excuse me? What he means, I think, is this:
"Some photographers are more interested in themselves, and some are more interested in their subject matter."
After four pages ploughing through this dense prose I was exhausted and fell asleep. Yet the essence of the idea, mirrors and windows, still strikes me as powerful.
Although the reproduction is poor by contemporary standards, Szarkowski's book incudes many fascinating individual photographs, and there are also series, and sequences (images only ever intended to be seen together), and three dimensional installations made by artists who I doubt would have characterised themselves 'photographer'. While many photographs are of people in man-made surroundings, including the obligatory freakish and erotic images, there are a significant number of landscapes, and it is these that really interested me in light of the 25 years that have passed since.
In spite of the book's title, Szarkowski makes no attempt to split the photographs up into opposing camps, the Mirrors versus the Windows, so to speak. The more I looked through the pictures the more I realised such a distinction could not really exist. While many artists might have had an obviously (indulgently) self-obsessed perspective, their photographs still depicted some recognisable slice of time and light. More obviously figurative images, such as Paul Caponigro's monumental, sombre photographs of Avebury, still tell us a lot about the individual who made the picture, albeit obliquely. They also lend themselves to a non-literal interpretation.
When I did eventually finish Mr Szarkowski's essay (with an aching brain) I was pleased to discover that his intention had not been to divide photography into two discrete factions:
"On the contrary, it has been to suggest a continuum, a single axis with two poles."
To put it another way, there's a bit of mirror and a bit of window in every photograph.
Photography's mechanical means may suggest to the uninitiated an emotionless medium, one ideally suited to the objective recording of dry facts. When photography appeared, painting was at first threatened by, then liberated by the new kid on the block. Freed from the shackles of accurate representation painters were encouraged to indulge in self expression. (Although we should remember that painters such as Turner knew that painting did not need figurative representation to reflect the artist's own aesthetic truth before photography.)
However, the notion that photography was objective was never going to last long. The so-called 'pencil of nature' has proved itself an extremely dishonest instrument in the hands of governments, distorting the facts, supporting propaganda, and in the case of Stalin's Russia, wiping people out of history. On the other hand, the camera has also been heroically deployed to condemn the horror of war, to celebrate the dignity of the human spirit, to record the awesome beauty of the earth, and to document great moments of discovery, exploration and endeavour. In all cases, it reflects the point of view of the photographer, for no passionate, involved photographer can be truly objective.
In fact, photography has been deployed for consciously artistic intent since the earliest days of the medium. In recent times it has also become the art form of the people, now easy and cheap enough for people the world over to try their hand.
The idea of photography as 'art' remains difficult for us here in Britain. Perhaps the residual Puritanism of our culture finds photography too 'easy'. Perhaps our powerful photojournalist tradition, so earnestly seeking to inform, or educate, or provoke outrage casts too dark a shadow. Perhaps none of this matters, because whether a reader of Outdoor Photography considers photography an art or not, they will know that photography is uniquely special, that it both records the appearance of things in a given time and place, yet also expresses something about the vision of the photographer.
To return to the book, Mirrors and Windows, once more; it is notable that the vast majority of landscapes herein are in black and white. Most also include elements of the built environment, and some that do not include buildings show landscapes despoiled by clearcutting, or slash and burn. I could not find one image in the American heroic tradition of landscape exemplified by Ansel Adams. Were no great 'heroic' landscape photographs made in America between 1960 and 1980? That seems unlikely. Instead, the book reflects the taste and mood of a generation, as well as the perspective of the Museum of Modern Art, truly the Establishment Elite.
Landscape photographs made in a spirit of protest, or in a mood of apparently detached, aloof observation, as in the New Topographics movement, are often justified and presented as profound philosophical, political and intellectual statements. Those of us who do not operate in the rareified ambience of the Art Establishment simply do the work we passionately want to do, believing that we can record the appearances of the world and express our feelings for it simultaneously. Images that capture the subtle beauty, or the transient sunlit splendour of landscape still have meaning, and that meaning can be enhanced in the light of Mirrors and Windows. It just so happens that the meaning can be understood without a long academic treatise (and a large English dictionary) to explain it.
