Has Photo-Based Art Become Too Dominant? Yes. And No.

by David Schonauer

History is written by the winners. But who is winning at photography?

Recently, the Museum of Modern Art published a new history book, Photography at MoMA 1960-Now, and, as histories will do, it has caused both reflection on the direction of the medium and sharp disagreement over the curatorial choices of the museum.

This month, Time’s LightBox blog featured two contrasting views of MoMA’s mission as it has moved away from the legacy of legendary curator John Szarkowski, whose ideas reigned at the museum fro 1962 to 1991. Art photographer Mark Steinmetz holds that photo-based art has become too dominant. Meanwhile, curator Charlotte Cotton says the museum has opened up to an art form going through great change.

“So many of the photographs in the newly released ‘Photography at MoMA: 1960 — Now’ feel like illustrations of ideas. A large number of them interrogate, in one way or another, the medium of photography or the role of mass media representations in society,” Steinmetz writes. “Fewer might be considered interrogations of the world that we actually live in as it actually looks and fewer still could be considered interrogations of the self.”

In focusing too much on such art, the book makes the mistake of overlooking the ideas that held sway at the museum in years past, notes Steinmetz.

“In the best modernist photography, the kind that Szarkowski championed when other museums were not, from Atget to Robert Adams, the handiwork of the artist is carefully hidden,” he writes.

Steinmetz notes that in the book’s introduction, MoMA’s chief photographer curator, Quentin Bajac, quotes the historian John Tagg, who called Szarkowski’s practices “a programme for a peculiar photographic modernism,” though Bajac does not explain what Tagg means by the word “peculiar,” or whether he shares Tagg’s opinion. The fact that the quote is included, however, may be an indication of Bajac’s feelings about Szarkowski.

Cotton writes that Szarkowski “established an indelibly essentialist criteria that the best photographs cannot be created with any other medium,” adding that his “connoisseurship inevitably created a pretty hermetic and separated set of ideals for photography within a timespan…within which photography moved from needing safe isolation and special attention — like a sickly child — to having its identity as a medium and a discipline fabulously imploded by artists, along with the other technics of art-making.”

The new history, notes Cotton, ties photography’s current practices into a long history of experimentation dating back to the early 20th century, rather than simply viewing today’s work as an addendum or reaction to MoMA’s more recent past.

Originally published by AI-AP

David Schonauer is Editor of Pro Photo Daily, Profiles and Motion Arts Pro. Follow him on Twitter. Jeffrey Roberts is Publisher of American Photography (AI-AP) the finest juried collection of photography in hardcover as well as Pro Photo Daily. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter. Follow Pro Photo Daily on Facebook.

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