Exhibition Review: On Photographs
Ilse Bing, Circus Acrobat on Black Ball, New York, 1936-7, Vintage gelatin silver print 8.75 x 11.625 inches/Frame V-H 19 x 23 inches
By Micaela Bahn
On Photographs, an online exhibition at the Robert Klein Gallery, is the consequence of a dare. Critically acclaimed writer and curator David Campany was an undergraduate student when he had the opportunity to talk to Susan Sontag about her seminal book, On Photography. He asked Sontag why her collection of essays excluded accompanying photographs, to which the writer replied, “My book is more about photography as a phenomenon, social and artistic. Perhaps one day you will write a book titled On Photographs.” Over 40 years later, Campany published a book by just that name, as an answer to a challenge from one of the most influential essayists of the last century.
Campany currently serves as the Managing Director of Programs at the International Center for photography and has published over a dozen books. On Photographs is his most recent work, and a large measure of its success lies in how the visuals add to Sontag’s discourse. Campany’s carefully-curated images embody and extrapolate on the immaterial phenomenon that Sontag sought to define: the meaning of photography and its career in human history. The 20 photographs selected for the Robert Klein Gallery have the audacious challenge of employing the specific in order to investigate the broader allure of photography as a medium.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Madrid, Spain, 1933, Gelatin silver print, 11.75 x 17.75 inches/ 16 x 20 inches
The exhibition presents a striking survey of images from eminent 20th-century photographers; it proceeds neither by genre or year, but by Campany’s precise sensibility. Image by image, we come to appreciate his consideration of context and photographic meaning. A common thread throughout the collection is how the photograph expresses both the inquisitive and acquisitive character of human consciousness. Take Henri Cartier-Bresson’s, “Madrid, Spain, 1932.”
Viewers’ eyes trace over the tight angularity of windows on a building and down into the exuberant chaos that unravels in the street below. On the one hand, the image presents an innocent record of a street scene, the “incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened,” as Sontag puts it. On the other hand, the photographer’s selective framing and focus on form and line creates an interpretation of the moment that straddles art and truth. The photographer collects that elusive element in the form of a small object: the photograph.
Ralph Gibson, M.J. in Little Mirror (37A), 1980, Vintage gelatin silver print, Image 12.5 x 8.5 inches/Sheet 14 x 11 inches
In Ralph Gibson’s, “M.J. In Little Mirror, 1980,” the photographer alters and enlarges the scale of the world and simultaneously shrinks it to a single moment: a beach, soft and out of focus, and a circular mirror held up to reveal a woman’s lips. You can almost see each individual grain of the velvety ink, yet the fragment of the figure is unmistakably sharp. The photograph focuses the eye on an act of looking that calls attention to our own practice as a viewer.
Mark Cohen, Headless Horseman, 1967, Gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches
Mark Cohen’s visual signature can be seen in, “Headless Horseman, 1968.” The dynamic image positions viewers uncomfortably close to the foregrounded figure, which gives them the same “headless” appearance as the rider in the background. While these formal elements imbue the photograph with a sense of disjunction, there is also a valuable element of the image that escapes description.
David Campany writes, “It is in the nature of images, all images, to misbehave and exceed meaning in ways that are anarchic, elusive, enigmatic and ambiguous.” That nature has created fresh visual codes, instructed us in where to train our eyes, and had us question the power relations inherent to looking. The exhibition at the Robert Klein Gallery allows viewers to linger on some of the images that throughout history have created reverberations across America’s visual culture.
You can visit the online viewing room for On Photographs here and purchase the Campany’s book through MIT Press.
