Art: Mirrors and Windows

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In the past ten years photography has swept, as it were, from the magazine to the museum. There is no debate left on whether photography is an art; it is universally accepted as such, although the arguments for this or that aesthetic of photography are as brisk and rancorous as ever. Avidly collected, taught on an industrial scale, buoyed up by reams of historical exegesis and critical debate, photography in America has moved into the public eye, rather as painting did in the 1960s, and no American institution has done more to create this state of affairs than the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, through its photography director, John Szarkowski. MOMA's main summer show is entitled "Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960." It is a sampling of 200 works by 100 American photographers, curated and introduced by Szarkowski in his usual eloquent, aphoristic and pugnacious style. It is, inevitably, a grab bag, but one with coherent strands in it, and likely to hold considerable influence for the future.

The most striking thing illustrated by the show is how far behind photography—meaning the photographs Szarkowski designates as "serious"—has left its old role as witness to public events. Not one picture in the exhibition, except for an exquisitely formal-looking image of a fire in Minneapolis by Irwin B. Klein, looks in any way like a news photo. This must seem strange at first, since the past 20 years have been the most photographed in history. Everything that happened, one might suppose, happened before a camera; there has never been anything like the sheer bulk of visual documentation left as the residue of a popular-photography culture. People and events seem ghostly unless they have been verified by a camera. Wars, elections, riots, disasters, communal ecstasies, the speeches of politicians and their deaths—all are eaten up by the omnivorous lens, as photography (through journalism) defines the terms of our fictitious intimacy with the world.

This intimacy means a ravenous consumption, rather than contemplation, of images. Szarkowski, an aesthete to the fingertips, will have none of it. His catalogue essay describes the decay of the relationship between serious photography and the dying picture magazines in the '60s, along with what he terms the growing realization among photographers that the camera's testimony about news was "opaque and superficial." He roundly states that "good photographers had long since known—whether or not they admitted it to their editors—that most issues of importance cannot be photographed." So one of the messages of the show is clear: in the judgment of MOMA—the first American museum to treat photography systematically as an art and perhaps the most powerful taste-forming museum in the country—the documentary or "concerned" tradition, which ran from Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine through figures like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith, has petered out.