haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

Everyone is a photographer now, but when did photography become for everyone? Was it when an “art photographer” like Walker Evans started collecting postcards—or when he made a penny photographer’s studio an image of America? Was it when the Kodak Instamatic made it easy or when cell phones and social media, like the Brownie more than half a century before them, made it affordable?

Or how about in 1863, when a mother of six received her first camera for Christmas? If the Met was right in 2013, Julia Margaret Cameron became “one of photography’s early masters,” but only by defying a common idea of what counted as halfway decent photography. “Not from the Life,” as she wrote in her notebooks, “but to the Life.” She was speaking of her wish to make photography more vivid than ever before—and her need to do it by mediating reality through fine art. She kept good company. She had the house next door to Alfred Lord Tennyson and photographed the likes of him and his elevated subjects.

As the Morgan Library makes clear more than a decade later, through September 14, she could hardly distinguish the two, no more than family and friends from the Bible or myth. Women for Cameron cast their eyes to the heavens or modestly toward earth. The eyes of men run wild. High Victorian madness or modestly was required, because only the “beauty of the world” suffice. Rather than start from scratch, let me share with you an updated version of my past review of Cameron as a longer review and my latest upload. I work it together with a review also from 2014 of Charles Marville, who became the official photographer of a great city coming to be, with a mission—not to celebrate the new, but to chronicle what was passing away.

With a woman’s face, enlarged on the wall by the exhibition entrance for Cameron, one might wonder if one has caught a glimpse of the photographer herself. It shows a young woman, that much more real and more ethereal thanks to her mute expression and the light that bathes her cheeks, picks out her eyelids, softens the wall behind her, and leaves the rest a shadowy blur. Actually, it is Cameron’s niece posed as “the lovely lady Christabel,” out of the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (“Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark.”) The photographer turned forty-eight the year of her Christmas present, and she was known as the plain sister in a family of beauties.

The temptation to see her there is telling all the same, long before Walker Evans, his postcards, and his penny photographer’s studio. It speaks to a still-new medium’s promise to capture the present moment and to freeze its immediacy forever, as past. It also speaks to Cameron’s wishes, in that unforgettable quote. The Met divides her work into three groups, with portraits of genius, women as subjects from literature and legend made “great through love,” and staged scenes. In practice, the groups are not so easy to tell apart, and the Morgan proceeds by date. Her subjects all belong to much the same world, the world of Victorian poetry and art.

She photographs the Tennyson family at home on the Isle of Wight, right down (the poet complained) to the bags under his eyes, and then illustrates an edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. She portrays John Herschel, the astronomer who coined the term photography, without literary “properties,” but with the same deep highlights and loose hair as for her Christabel, Sappho, or Circe. She presents her husband, a jurist, as King Lear, while framing a seemingly frank female portrait in dark hair and a circular frame, like the Medusa. She turns two young women into an early Renaissance Annunciation, with Perugino’s angel as a badly behaved child. When she photographs Alice Liddell at age twenty, she takes the woman that Lewis Carroll immortalized as a child and returns her to the course of time, but as a goddess. And the imagery, the upturned and downcast eyes, and the light all have their roots in a single movement in English painting, the Pre-Raphaelites.

So do David Wilkie Wynfield’s photographs of William Holman Hunt and George Frederick Watts, the painters, and William Frederick Lake Price’s posed image of Don Quixote in His Study, all also on view at the Met. With Price, a living man has become a character out of Miguel Cervantes who aspired to a myth—and, in turn, the character has become an artist. A dashing young couple as photographed by Oscar Gustav Rejlander would look quite at home half a century later, in the silent movies. What Cameron adds is her own way of bringing living subjects alive and into high relief, through overexposures. She is mediating between the present and literary time by a further adaptation of oil on canvas, in a softer focus and a deeper light.

Cameron’s accounts of technique’s discovery conflict, as a lucky accident or a deliberate effect. Maybe she herself was conflicted about her amateur status and her artistry, much like Alice Austen in America. She did not keep a portrait studio, in the sense of welcoming sitters, but she did have a studio in which to work, and she upgraded to a larger camera in just three years, in 1866. Her “out-of-focus . . . celebrities” won her sales, but also some nasty criticism. They marked her work as somehow both too artsy and just plain sloppy, but the trap was not hers alone. In bridging the conventions of painting and photography, Cameron found herself caught in long-raging battles over both.

The Met restricts itself to some three dozen prints, all from its collection, and the Morgan needs little more for a fuller picture, and anyway Cameron worked for barely a decade. Born in Calcutta, she returned to Ceylon in 1879, when her husband had property—and the window in time is revealing. British painting was trapped between realism and Romantic longings, until Claude Monet and John Singer Sargent brought “the Impressionist line” to England, where Sargent’s portraits ruled. And meanwhile photography, thanks to Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot, could only recently boast of a deep focus even in exposures under ten minutes, in contrast to streets in earlier French daguerreotypes that appear empty, because moving traffic has vanished into long exposures and the light. At a time when reports from the battlefield in Civil War photography were shockingly new, Cameron’s washed-out details must have seemed both a throwback and a deliberate affront. Long before Alfred Stieglitz in America insisted on the products of a black box as fine art, she must have reminded photographers of something they wished to forget—their debts to both.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Is photography an art? Well, if not, what is it? Ask a country known for the spirit of innovation and experiment, the United States.

If not art, photography might be photojournalism as a record of its time, literally making history. It might be the portrait you once kept in your wallet before you had a smart phone, to remind you of what it means to love. It might be social media or a science experiment. Photography has taken pride in making an influencer, even as it struggled to be more than a meme. It has been struggling in much the same way since well before there were digital media to influence. Now “The New Art: American Photography” heads back to its origins, through July 20.

The art of photography was not always new and not often American, but it was always an experiment. The Met draws on a single, mammoth body of work, the William L. Schaeffer collection, which it already calls its own. Selections run from the birth of photography, in 1839, through groundwork for the first New York subway, shortly before 1910. Just outside is a pale, piercing blue that photographers today would hardly recognize. And right at the entrance is an enormous camera. Experimenters had a lot to carry and a lot to learn.

There will be other devices to come, a touch more manageable, in an exhibition divided by competition to define the medium. They differ only in the metal, glass, or paper that offers support and the light-sensitive emulsion that coats the support and makes it work. That includes first daguerreotypes, then ambrotypes and tintypes, which conquered the unreality of reversing right and left. Albumen prints on paper combined portability and a finer resolution soon enough. And that blue is the color of cyanotypes, which anticipate photograms in placing their subjects on photosensitive plates without a lens. If photographers experiments extended the process from direct impressions to street scenes with a subway soon to come, experimenters were ingenious.

Just how much did the experiments differ? Less than you might think, for many a print lost its characteristic color as photographers touched them up with a brush. They were artists after all, just good or bad artists. Alice Austen nurtured the artistry of staged portraits, much as the young model for Alice in Wonderland pouted and posed for Lewis Carroll in England. Yet others scorned Victorian artifice, like Matthew Brady during the American Civil War. War photography offered no escape from dead bodies or marks of the lashes across a slave’s back. Just the facts.

Questions have dogged photography ever since, all the more so today. By the time of Modernism, including abstract photography, photography need no longer make excuses to make art. And Postmodernism’s critique extended to artistry of all sorts, wherever institutions and collectors cast their eye. The beauty of surfaces and mind games were two sides of the same coin. It was about time someone asked what purposes photography serves, no? But did that lead to acceptance or dismissal?

Some, like Carleton Watkins, cultivated the greatness of the American West and the shimmer of its waters. Josiah Johnson Hawes and John Moran insisted on their work as American and as art. Others saw potential in cities and towns. Every shopkeeper, photographers imagined, deserved a personal record. Group portraits could find an audience with families and communities. Other demands were eminently practical. It was just a short step from the first small paper prints to cartes de visite or “cabinet cards” for businessmen and gentlemen.

That still leaves something closer to home—pets, children, and other cuties. The types of photographs truly were social media, long before that had a name. Is it art after all or the antithesis of art? Is it a social or scientific experiment? How about a dog trained to stand with its front paws on the top steps of short platform or ladder? Like a successful posting, it was preaching to the crowd.