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Photography as an Art
John Haberin New York City
Andy Mattern, John Cyr, and Brian Conley
The 2018 AIPAD Photography Show
Case closed: photography is an art. Still, art itself has broadened and moved on, and some champions of photography have responded by looking back.
Andy Mattern and John Cyr reconsider the tools of its trade, while Brian Conley puts photography on the map. It is his own map, too, of politics in the Middle East. The AIPAD Photography Show once again champions the medium, but quite apart from Conley's photojournalism. It appears not just as fine art, but somehow finer than the state of the art. 
Guides to photography
For years, photography struggled for acceptance as fine art, and it has more than succeeded: for those without patience for the darkroom, it has become downright quaint. When Walter Benjamin wrote "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in 1936, he asked how prints could subvert the uniqueness of a painting. His essay become a touchstone for Postmodernism, in its denial of the "originality of the avant-garde" and, as Rosalind E. Krauss put it, "other modernist myths." What, though, if mechanical reproduction was not so mechanical after all? Two shows look to the tools of analog photography in the age of the digital.
Both stress the subjectivity of the photographer. Before digital prints and Richard Benson, photographers had developer's trays. And before Photoshop and automated filters, they had circular slide rules as "guides" to the light. I still have a very similar "sizing rule" for determining the dimensions of a published image, from well before calculator apps. I would have to pull out my cell phone to tell you when editors like me relied on it. As a further irony, the guides also went by the name of "computers."
Andy Mattern renders those computers, their geometry and function partially obscured by paint. Their circles and numeric scales collide happily with Mattern's bright colors. Following him at the same gallery, John Cyr photographs developer's trays with the signs of long use. Naturally, they belong to others, with a past. One could mistake them, too, for paintings or collage. Both artists work between gesture and Minimalism, realism and abstraction, photography and paint.
Cyr in particular is preserving history. One can delight in knowing which photographers, like Peter Hujar at the Morgan Library now, did their own developing and printing. One can delight, too, in knowing that Walker Evans kept his tray as pristine as Yosemite, Sally Mann left hers as muddled as family secrets, and George Eastman let his chemicals accumulate to the thickness, texture, and dark yellow of oils for an old master. In a brief essay, Robyn Day draws further connections. In each instance, the tray appears face out against a dark background. Its edges, like (when visible) the ridges at the bottom of the tray, at once echo the picture frame and belong to the image—much as the image belongs to both a past photographer and Cyr.
One can read too much into pictures. The terminology of those guides can provide enough puns on averages and determinations to deconstruct almost anything. The blue swirls of a tray for Linda Connor may recall Mark Rothko, and she did seek out the spiritual in art. Yet she sought it not in floating rectangles, but in the temple architecture of other cultures. Besides, you may not know all that terminology, no more than I, and you may not have known of Connor or many another as well. The pictures have their interest all the same.
It can be a more familiar interest than the obvious history lets on. Early photographers played at theater as much as mechanical reproduction, like Charles Marville or Julia Margaret Cameron. And Cyr fits in just fine with a revival of abstraction with an assist from photography. Galleries have been exhibiting "Post-Analog Painting" and photo-abstractions in the hands of such artists as Jason Tomme, Scott Lyall, and Sara VanDerBeek. Benjamin, too, recognized photography's "strange magic," citing Luigi Pirandello, the playwright, on "the feeling of strangeness of the actor before the camera." As Benjamin writes, the old argument over photography as art "seems devious and confused"—and now you can take out your phone and look it up.
Cairo in space and time
Most people think of events unfolding in time. Brian Conley sees them unfolding in space. He uses an entrance wall for a dense street plan of Cairo without buildings, people, places, or names. Behind it lie his photographs, with little hint of where they might fall—but also a facing wall with an even larger map. It may not serve as a guide to neighborhoods and tourism, but it does introduce a charged recent history. There, too, it is hard to know where to begin.
Lines radiate outward from locations to insets, splayed out along the margins. Textbook illustrations could learn from this. Each inset names an event, along with a brief explanation and a small photograph. The events track the failure of the Arab spring and the military seizure of power, from a government neither fully Islamic nor fully democratic. Still, it takes work to piece together a story, between its gaps and uncertain ending. Those not already familiar with the players may not manage one.
If that sounds disorienting, Conley does call the show "Cairo Oblique." An outsider like him, it suggests, can see things only obliquely. Too much self-taught photographers and too many others with the comfort of distance may not even try. Maybe, too, so can a local, as just another point on the map. Either way, it is not so easy to see the big picture, although photos on the surrounding walls do their best. In this spacetime, the axes of space and time may meet at an oblique angle.
That must be scary for those who have to live through this. They belong to an ancient city still under construction, where nothing runs in straight lines. One can make out the great pyramids, in the haze of pollution or the desert sun, and a mosque as a green glow in midnight shadows, akin to J.-P. Girault de Prangey more than a century before. They lie in the distance, behind roads, fences, rubble, and construction sites. The lower floors of one building fail to maintain straight lines as well, and one cannot know whether that marks them as incomplete or in ruins. People appear only occasionally and in transit, rather than at work or play.
Photos on board may be the least of all this, but they do have the lion's share of the show. A grid of more than seventy fills one wall, most from 2014 and each the size of an ordinary sheet of paper. Larger prints take up the two remaining walls. One at a time, they lack the punch of photojournalism at its best, from Robert Capa, Marc Riboud, and Magnum Photos to Stephen Shore in the Mideast. They have the more mundane drama of a daily newspaper. Conley, who previously turned the Gulf Wars into a stage set, may prefer it that way.
What is no more than an accident or imperfection, right down to the choice of close-ups and distant vistas? Some shots are crisp, some blurred, and then there is the haze. The show makes more of an impact in person than in memory, where the images start to blend together. Still, the effects can be striking, like out-of-focus headlights at night. More to the point, they belong to the oblique and troubling present. Conley is still filling in the map.
A decent photography fair
For the first weekend in April, the Association of International Photography Art Dealers puts on a decent show. It also puts a polite face on photography. If its very name points to photography as an art, so does the 2018 AIPAD Photography Show. It shuns conceptual art and new media. As with the 2022 Photography Show coming up, it has little in the way of photocollage or abstraction. A photogram by Man Ray, with Contemporary Works/Vintage Works, or a burned mirror by Minor White, with Joseph Bellows, looks downright radical.
It takes its time, with ample space for publications—and without packing anywhere near as tightly into pier 94 as the Armory Show in March or Art New York in May. It runs to showpieces, like the Sierra Nevadas for Ansel Adams, and to portraiture. Irving Penn turns up often, bringing Pablo Picasso up close rather than setting Marcel Duchamp in a corner or cigarettes aflame. So does Robert Mapplethorpe, but for intimacy rather than confrontation. It has a private collector's photographs of children, like Instagram avant la lettre. Even Diane Arbus, another fair favorite, plays down the freak show.
It avoids contemporary art's slippery merger of painting and photography. It almost avoids politics and photojournalism, even when Jeanine Michna-Bales with Arnika Dawkins, an Atlanta gallery, sets her darkly suggestive landscapes above quotes from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. It has a central space for "All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party," curated by Photo Center Northwest. Yet the feature runs not to the era of Huey Newton and Gordon Parks, but to the more elusive radicalism of little boys dressed as prisoners for Hank Willis Thomas and picket signs in the present for LaToya Ruby Frazier. It has nearly as many exhibitors from Connecticut as from Europe—and fewer still from developing nations. "Perpetual Revolution" at the International Center of Photography seems far away.
Still, for all its decency, it does put on a show. It lets its galleries display their wares, with barely a single-artist booth in sight beyond William Wegman with Senior & Shopmaker. As one might expect, the biggest dealers hold court by the entrance, like Bryce Wolkowitz and Steven Kasher. Bruce Silverstein centers its walls on Marjan Teeuwen, a Dutch photographer. Her Destroyed House could be a subtle dig at the fashion for large prints of old-world interiors, like those of Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer or Christian Voigt with Unix. Just behind them lie such stalwarts of photography as Howard Greenberg and Robert Mann, with ample familiar names.
It drops its section for "discoveries" from last year and has few dealers from downtown or beyond, not even Danziger, but it is not altogether unwelcoming. Elizabeth Houston from the Lower East Side rests not at all far inside, although even she manages work by Aaron Siskind. It has dealers in early photography. Salt prints of gateways and gardens with Hans P. Kraus, Jr., include Henry Fox-Talbot, who helped invent the process. Even a booth with Elton John as curator is not quite as bad as it sounds. "Time for Reflection" puns on meditation and mirrors, with construction workers in or behind glass for A. Audrey Bodine and a mirror rising above the ocean for Murray Fredericks.
The predictable but ecumenical results make it hard to pick winners. Then again, why bother? One can take it all in stride—or relish the occasional cracks in the veneer of fine art. Sous les Etoiles finds successors to Man Ray in the ghostly skyscrapers of Andreas Gefeller and colored overlays of Georges Rousse. ClampArt still has the unreal New York City of, among others, Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber. One will just have to look elsewhere for gender, culture, and transgression.
Andy Mattern ran at Elizabeth Houston through March 24, 2018, John Cyr there through May 5, and Brian Conley at Pierogi through May 6. The AIPAD Photography Show ran April 5–8. Related reviews look at Conley apart from photography, the 2017 Photography Show, and the 2022 Photography Show.