Art: Mirrors and Windows

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The show abounds in deliberately "poetic" photographs, over which surrealism—which, one is I reminded, Susan Sontag claims to be the natural mode of photographic vision—presides. Some are deliberately manipulated montages, like Jerry N. Uelsmann's dream pictures. Others are plain sights deliberately set up, like Ralph Gibson's The Enchanted Hand, 1969—a delicately ectoplastic fantasy, very much in the spirit of Joseph Cornell. Some photographs are manifestly the product of chance, an incongruous moment caught in flight. The most startling of these is Mark Cohen's Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, June 1975, which shows a girl's head almost occluded by a sinister, balloon-like object (bubble gum, probably) with a hand rising behind her head like a crown of flesh. Thanks largely to the contrast between the light on her hair, which prickles electrically, the vague street background and the greasy, diffused surface of the bubble, it is an image of unrepeatable weirdness.

Of course, not all the photos in the show partake of surrealism. We still have a few descendants of the Ansel Adams-Minor White tradition, the makers of perfect, eloquent prints recording some aspect of nature with a lyrical gravity of inspection. Perhaps the best of them is Paul Caponigro, whose photographs of the prehistoric standing stones at Avebury in England (one of them looking surprisingly like Rodin's rough-hewn monument to Balzac) are of astounding fidelity to the substance they depict; every grain in the print corresponds, in some way, to the age and density of the rock.

Szarkowski's show is not the last word on the state of American photography; in deed, some of his choices, no less than his uncompromisingly aesthetic position, will be a subject of harsh debate. But it deserves to be seen and seen again, for its emphasis on the apolitical, the uneventful, the odd, the dumb and the chancy is now a kind of official view with which photography itself must reckon.

—Robert Hughes