Art: Mirrors and Windows

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If "issues of importance" are no longer available to the camera, if all photography can make of big events is a scribble of light that promises more information than it delivers, what can photography do? What are its proper subjects? The argument of Szarkowski's show is that photography has undergone changes similar to those that overtook painting and sculpture. "The general movement of American photography," Szarcowski writes, "has been from public to private concerns." Photography has become more and more aware of its own history and limits as a medium: a debate about these is built into the art, so that photography, instead of being an unproblematic record of appearances, is also selfcriticism.

During the '20s, space itself—articulated air—became the subject of constructivist sculpture and painting, whereas before it had been the frame for a subject. In the '60s and '70s, the language of photography rather than the pattern of events tended to become the essential subject for many photographers. The retreat from public posture also combined with personal fantasy, reverie and wit. The result has been a rather low-pressure art that refuses to strum on the heartstrings. For convenience, Szarkowski divides the images in this show into "mirrors"—pictures that mean to describe the photographer's own sensibility—and "windows"—realist photos of fact, including the facts of photography seen as a system. In short, the romantic vs. the realist: but it is not a very strict dichotomy, as Szarkowski himself stresses. The typical photo in this show, mirror or window, is cool, low in narrative content, linguistically sophisticated, beautifully made and, by the conventions of photojournalism, not very arresting. Its pleasures have to do with formal wit, mild irony and surrealist incongruity. One sees a thing nailed down with a decisive tap, as when Lee Friedlander, a deceptively casual imagemaker, positions his eyeline on an ordinary suburban street to get a flowering shrub directly behind a lamppost, so that the street light seems to be emitting great sprays of blossom in broad daylight. In one way, Elliott Erwitt's New Jersey, 1953, is a most plainly observed view by a roadside: sky, bushes, bus stop. But the cannon muzzle poking over the top of the bushes removes it to another tract of the imagination. For a moment the areas "out there" and "in here" fuse in an image of brilliantly calculated mystery, all the more effective for its offhandedness.