“WORDS NOT SPENT TODAY BUY SMALLER IMAGES TOMORROW”: READING PHOTOGRAPHS AND THE EMERGENCE OF POSTWAR PHOTOGRAPHIC CRITICISM IN THE USA

Abstract

This article examines the idea of ‘reading photographs’ as it circulated in postwar American criticism. It looks principally to the work of Henry Holmes Smith and Minor White and the way in which they deployed the idea, as well as the institutional framework of photographic journals in which their writing circulated. The essay examines the role that the concept played in helping establish photo-criticism as an established genre of writing, and explores particular emphases in that writing that proceeded from the claim audiences ‘read photographs’; of these emphases, the most important and germinative ones centered around photographic traditions and their capacity to establish the parameters of the photographic medium itself. From the vantage delineated above, the essay also situates photo-criticism in a larger universe of postwar concern, one that centered on the mutual convertibility of pictorial and linguistic forms: the development of ‘visual literacy’ discourse, protocols for training photographers as these emerged in the 1960s, and broader agendas in the postwar American university system, with all their interest in visual pedagogy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. So many commentators have done so that I cannot possibly name all of them. I am thinking of everyone from Rudolph Arnheim to Bela Balazs, John Berger, Norman Bryson, Michel Foucault, Nelson Goodman, Gyorgy Kepes, Christian Metz, Allan Sekula, and many others.

2. Aside from Sekula, whom I have already mentioned, this idea has compelled a host of commentators on photography, everyone from William Ivins to Roland Barthes.

3. For an example of the 1970s and 80s discussion that specifically treats prewar avant-garde practice via analysis of photography and textuality, see Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” 87–118.

4. Of the other venues in the United States where photography might receive such attention in the years around 1960, because I do not discuss it in this paper, I will here mention Marjorie Mann’s writing in Artforum.

5. White described Aperture in 1958 as ‘mid-stream in a program of articles on the subject of experiencing and reading photographs,’ “To Recapture the Innocence of Vision,” 55. This program stretched back at least to 1953, and extended well into the next decade.

6. For a sense of how distinct Aperture’s approach to the question appears, far from feeding any of the self-consciously radical aspirations that postmodernism claimed, one of the primary destinations for its discussion of ‘reading photographs’ proved none other than the Kodak Corporation. After imbibing this discourse from Aperture, Kodak in fact proceeded to disseminate it around the United States, and based promotional campaigns in American educational institutions on the idea (See Ellenbogen and Jolles, ‘Visual literacy and 1960s Photography.’ One of the most striking facts about the critical discourse I examine in this essay consists in its impermeability to the forms of approach that emerged as part of the postwar expansion of semiotics — the name Barthes never appears. Some connections do exist between the writing around Aperture and the prewar avant-garde practices that journals such as October would privilege. When considering ‘reading photographs,’ for instance, many will think of Moholy-Nagy’s famous quote from Weimar Germany, whereby ‘the illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the camera as well as the pen.’ The critical voices I here discuss do register some awareness of this older approach, and Henry Holmes Smith even worked with Moholy-Nagy at the IIT Institute of Design before the war. But the fact remains that the discourse that developed around Aperture ultimately belongs to a different historical and conceptual world.

7. For a broad introduction to photo-critical writing in the period before the one at issue in this essay, see Eisinger, Trace and Transformation, esp. ch.’s 1–3.

8. Brittain gives a good introduction to the institutional terrain of the photo-press in the mid twentieth century in “Magazines,” 222–27.

9. I am not the first to link these voices in a network. Cohen describes a similar one in “The Critic’s Tale,” 7–8.

10. See “Ambiguity, Accident, Audience,” 52–68, and the review essay “Aperture Magazine Anthology,” 204–206.

11. Cronan “Ambiguity, Accident, Audience,” 60.

12. Cronan “Aperture Magazine Anthology,” 204. In claiming that ‘reading photographs’ centered on intention, I should at least note that Cronan takes his model of intentionality from Walter Benn Michaels, who tries to embed his work in G.E.M. Anscombe’s famous treatment of the matter. According to Benn Michaels, twentieth-century anti-intentionality (exemplified by Duchamp) requires an artificial and unrealistic separation of artistic making and meaning, where attacking intention requires we first imagine it as a fully-developed, antecedent idea that stands before the work. The Anscombian form of intentionality that Michaels puts forth as an alternative to the Duchampian one would treat artistic intention and action as conceptually simultaneous, so that acts of making and meaning entirely saturate one another. Although this matter lies well beyond the present essay’s scope, it is not clear how this approach to artistic intention advances beyond certain modernist accounts of the subject, particularly Panofsky’s distinction between extrinsic (here ‘Duchampian’) and intrinsic (here ‘Anscombian’) forms of meaning. Although Benn Michaels’s account explicitly tries to reject modernist treatments of intention in favor of developing a new one, ‘Anscombian’ intention seems quite felicitous with Panofsky’s Kunstwollen. As I say, however, these questions lie well outside the present essay’s ambit. See Benn Michaels, “I Do What Happens.”

13. Cronan references ‘seeing along with’ in “Ambiguity, Accident, Audience,” 60.

14. Unsigned, “The Age of Photography,”3.

15. Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye,” 60.

16. Ibid., 62.

17. See Deren, “Cinematography.”

18. Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye,” 60 and 61.

19. Art and Anarchy, esp. ch. 2.

20. Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye,” 61.

21. See note 15 above.

22. Art and Objecthood, 164. In making this argument, I do not suggest that Fried’s account of a medium matches up with Greeberg’s.

23. Smith, “Museum Taste and the Taste of Our Time,” 53. Of course, what ‘tradition’ means in Greenberg does not perfectly conform to what it means in Smith. Smith, for example, does not see tradition in opposition to a medium’s character, but rather as its arbiter, and happily incorporates into photography’s tradition the traditions of other arts. In addition, Greenberg’s discussion, because it primarily concerns tradition’s role in bringing off representation in painting, necessarily places its emphases at least somewhat differently than the other voices I examine, on the forms of craft and technique that allow representation to occur. Fully untangling Greenberg on tradition would require another essay.

24. Smith, “Photography Workshop,” NP, and Mayer, “An Uneducated Guess on the Future Role of Photography.” NP.

25. See Ellenbogen and Jolles, “Visual Literacy.”

26. See Unsigned, “The Neglect of Visual Literacy;” Unsigned, “The Age of Photography,” 3; and Unsigned, “Varieties of Responses to Photographs,” 121.

27. See SPE: The Formative Years, and such papers as those Jerome Liebling, Oscar Bailey, and Jerry Uelsmann presented, as well as the report on the conference that Minor White produced.

28. See Adams et al., “The Workshop Idea in Photography,” 152.

29. White, “Criticism,” 27.

30. For fuller discussion of his career, see Bossen, Henry Holmes Smith.

31. For fuller details on Smith’s and White’s relationship, see Cohen, “Critic’s Tale,” 10, as well as Bossen, “Dialogue of Differences.”

32. Smith, “The Photograph and its Readers,” 18.

33. Hicks and Smith, “Photographs and Public,” 11. ‘Conventionally related visual concepts’ comes from Collected Writings, 20, which offers a version of the essay ‘edited from Smith’s original manuscript.’ Since the phrase does not appear in the Aperture version, but still illuminates Smith’s thinking, I include it in brackets.

34. Smith, “A Teaching Photographer,” Collected Writings, 89.

35. Hicks and Smith, “Photographs and Public,” 9.

36. Hicks and Smith, “Photographs and Public,” 8–9.

37. Hicks and Smith, “Photographs and Public,” 12.

38. Hicks and Smith, “Photographs and Public,” 11.

39. Smith, “Museum Taste,” 52; and Hicks and Smith, “Photographs and Public,” 11.

40. Siskind provided a touchstone for critical writing in Aperture. When Aperture wanted to provide concrete examples of how to read photographs, for instance, it provided ‘five readings’ by different commentators of photographs by Siskind. See Chappell et al., “The Experience of Photographs.”

41. For instance, Aperture arranged a 1959 meeting in New York City in connection with the ‘Sense of Abstraction’ show at MoMA. While Aperture names none of the individuals present, given their participation in the show, I assume Nathan Lyons of GEH, Smith, and White attended. The gathering concerned ‘the possibilities and need for some kind of a visual-verbal vocabulary for use when photography is employed as a creative-expressive medium.’ I cannot tell to what this ‘visual-verbal vocabulary’ referred, but ‘one member present said that any kind of a “glossary,” whether defined with words AND pictures or not, was not at all what was wanted … ’ I suspect the objection came from Lyons, and that Smith triggered it, but this remains guesswork. See Unsigned, “Notes and Comments.”

42. Chappell et al., “The Experience of Photographs,” 112.

43. Chappell et al., “The Experience of Photographs,” 117.

44. Unsigned, “A Clean Sweep,” NP.

45. Chappell et al., “The Experience of Photographs,” 117–8.

46. “Image, Obscurity, Interpretation,” 137.

47. Chiarenza, “Stereotypes,” 90.

48. Forth, “Toward a Critical Vocabulary,” NP.

49. Bardo, “Aaron Siskind,” 58.

50. See note 15 above.

51. Smith, “New Figures,” 15.

52. Ibid., 19.

53. Ibid., 23.

54. Ibid., 19.

55. Smith, “New Figures,” 20. Smith discusses the ‘visual standards’ of photography and lens design in the 1961 essay, Smith, “Photography in Our Time,” 69.

56. Smith, “New Figures,” 20. Strikingly, Rosenberg himself wrote a piece on Siskind, one that also found parallels between Siskind and abstract painting. While Rosenberg commented on how Siskind’s photographs ‘reveal possibilities in that tradition [of abstract painting] that have often gone unperceived by painters,’ the short piece does not develop this insight, and perhaps for this reason Smith never discusses it.

57. Smith, “New Figures,” 20.

58. Smith, “New Figures,” 5. We might also remember here Smith’s own invocation of ‘feelings’ in regard to the anticipation of photographic form.

59. Exh. Cat. Photography 63, 7.

60. Smith, “New Figures,” 23.

61. For references to Aperture’s esoterism and elitism, see the 1961 letter Contemporary Photographer sent to the Polaroid Company to secure it as an advertiser (Gilmer, Letter to Polaroid). Under Lee Lockwood, editor-in-chief from 1963–5, ‘the humanist’s magazine of photography’ became an unofficial motto for Contemporary Photographer (see ‘Lockwood Statement of Plan’).

62. See the furious, unsigned letter, sent to ‘Dave’ (JD Wohlleben, the journal’s publisher), likely by Chiarenza on June 3, 1963. The letter notes: ‘If you will recall, Dave, when Pat [Donald Wright Patterson] and I were down in Culpepper you broached the idea of eventually getting Aperture’s readership somehow after White suspended publication, in 1967. When you asked us if something might not be done sooner, we both replied that Minor is [a] sensitive and unordinary guy, that any such discussion was premature at that time & would be until our quality, both editorial and reproductive, was vastly improved, & that at such time I should be the one to speak to him & gently sound him out on the idea. Remember? Well, instead of that, knowing that Minor & I are in close contact, you went ahead on your own without even consulting us and threw in the guy’s face a personal confidence about his finances that I sent you for your own information alone. Furthermore, you had the outright gaul [sic] to propose that Contemp. Photog., which is strictly fledgling publication thus far, be united with Aperture, which has been in existence for over 10 years and has influence and reputation far beyond its number of subscribers, on an equal basis! I hope, on sober reflection, you can now begin to see what Minor’s reaction to such a proposal … must have been … If Minor and I weren’t on such good terms, you could have destroyed a relationship that is very important to us all … ’ (Unsigned letter to Wohlleben).

63. David Vestal, “Shows We’ve Seen,” 30. As already noted, White had taught Chiarenza at RIT.

64. Lee Lockwood, who edited the journal from 1963–5, registered this complaint at a 1963 symposium at the New School (Symposium Address at New School, NP).

65. Lockwood, Address to Photography Teachers, NP.

66. Lockwood, Guggenheim Application, 3.

67. Ibid., 2–3.

68. Lockwood, Address to Photography Teachers, NP.

69. Millard, “Exhibitions in Washington DC.”

70. “The Unseen Photographer,” NP; and Smith, “Models for Critics,” 125.

71. White, “Call for Critics,” 4.

72. Ibid., 5.

73. White, “To Recapture the Innocence of Vision,” 55.

74. This phrase served as the subtitle for Aperture 10:4 (1962), which provided an image/text portfolio of Frederick Sommer’s work.

75. Amateur Photocriticism, 62 and 66. See also his statement to the effect that ‘we are pleased to carry on a conversation with a favorite [photograph], whether by an interchange of visual symbols or verbal ones … ’ in Unsigned, ‘What Is Meant by “Reading” Photographs,’ 49.

76. White, “Masters of Photography,” 33.

77. Ibid., 34.

78. Unsigned, “An Experiment in Reading,” 64.

79. Similarly, Smith opined that “The most appropriate criticism of a photograph is another better photograph on the same idea or subject;” “Improving My Criticism,” 103.

80. Craven, “A Society for Photographic Education,” 73.

81. “Image, Obscurity, Interpretation,” 140.

82. See Unsigned, “Visual Editorial;” Unsigned, “What Is Meant By Reading,” 48, and Arnold et al., “Five Reviews,” 203.

83. Arnheim makes equivalence central to his well-known Visual Thinking; for just one example of discussion of visual pedagogy in the postwar university system, see Report of the Committee on the Visual Arts at Harvard University.

84. For at least the beginnings of a discussion of how these players operated in regard to educational regimes, see Stuart, “The History of Photographic Education in Rochester, New York, 1960–80,” as well as Stuart’s later “Photographic Higher Education in the United States,” 210–15.

85. According to Keith Davis, “In 1964, [photography] courses were twice as likely to be found in departments of journalism as in departments of fine art. The number of fine art photography courses doubled between 1964 and 1968, and doubled again between 1968 and 1971. By contrast, the number of photography courses taught in journalism programs declined in these years,” Davis, An American Century of Photography, 314.

86. See White, “Aperture,” 95–104.

87. Unsigned, “Workshops Around the Country and Around the Year,” NP.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Josh Ellenbogen

Josh Ellenbogen is Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His current research interests center on the institutional history of photography in the postwar United States, scientific imaging, and art historiography. His most important publications consist in Reasoned and Unreasoned Images (Penn State University Press), Idol Anxiety (Stanford University Press), “Camera and Mind” (Representations), “Educated Eyes and Impressed Images” (Art History), “Visual Literacy and 1960s Photography” (Critical Inquiry), and “Forms of Equivalence” (Technology and Culture).