Thoughts on viewing a photographic exhibit at the Everson Museum of Art

First off, so you know where I am coming from, I have been a professional photojournalist for more than 40 years. That means I’ve gotten my hands wet with chemicals, mixed my own chemistry, got really sick from licking a ferrocyanide brush, and placed the Hand of God between many an enlarger lens and print-to-be. I’ve had six years of college education in photography and journalism, and another ten years or so apprenticeship under some of the world’s greatest unknown photographers.

My photography has always been nuts and bolts. Four to six assignments a day, and at times many more, spot news when it happens and all with a deadline looming overhead. Call it photography’s version of meatball surgery. So although I had six years of learning, working, and honing the niceties of the craft (operative term), my profession called for a lot of short circuits to deliver a photograph to the daily doorstep. Fact: some negatives lasted no longer than the first printing. They were processed so fast that the first exposure to enlarger light killed them.

All this is a long way of saying I know a little bit about photography.

My slice of photography is recording the moment. It is not the “moment” that high cotton photojournalists describe and write books about. My moments are that 1/125th of a second of someone’s life and the 30-second exposure of a snippet of a city’s life. At Syracuse, my fellow neophyte shooters would discuss their “style.” We would talk of the masters—Cartier-Bresson, Weston, Eisenstadt, Stieglitz, Smith, Lange, Capa, Feininger, Adams (Ansel, not Eddie), Cunningham, Penn, and the then young guns such as Mark, Erwitt, Winogrand, Warhol, and many others. After six years, I left school with no style in hand. I was a loss. So I went to work. It was only after about five years I discovered I did indeed have a style, but it wasn’t quite a style. It was a philosophy.

I came to have a deep rooted faith in the camera as a tool to provide the single most important, accurate, and—if you will—perfect record of a specific instant in time. Regretfully—very regretfully—I now have to include the phrase “in the hands of an ethical person” to this belief. When that shutter clicks (or used to) everything within the four walls of the (then) film frame were captured for all eternity (if the black-and-white film was properly processed). As a photographer, I was an instant historian. Over time I came to see that in everybody’s photography, not just those of us who were paid for having the fun and excitement of that process. Indeed, as a columnist, my mantra was for everyone to dig out their shoebox archives—for that was the storage medium of choice for negatives and prints—and preserve and share them with family members to identify as fully as possible names, locations, and situations. With the passing of each generation, those very salient pieces of information so critical to the significance of the image are lost forever.

The bottom line of all this is photography is an art and a craft. It is very much akin to baking. A negative needed to be exposed to a specific amount of light for optimum image capture. It then needed to be processed at a critical temperature for an exact amount of time to have that image properly developed. It further required critical steps for “fixing” the image against further light exposure and its permanent preservation. Similarly, the print required the same critical steps. Any deviation from time and temperature resulted in a less than optimum image, which is readily apparent to one who has walked the walk.

So this distills to an image that looks like what the photographer saw.

This brings me to an exhibit I saw this past weekend at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. This is not to be seen as a condemnation of the Everson or the artist. Just an observation on my failing to understand the artist’s communication.

This is the display. It is an amalgam of numerous photographs, approximately 150, on an approximately 62 1/2-feet long, by about 18- to 20-feet tall wall. Each of the prints was about 5×7 inches.

As individual images, there was no craftsmanship displayed. The image quality was poor, at best. There was no evidence of individual treatment. Most of those that I could see—for it was absolutely impossible to view those that were mounted more than eight feet or so above the floor—were snapshots; i.e., they had no discernible composition or point of focus. Subject matter was all over the map: a wine rack, a shop front, a pair of nude men, footprints in sand, dirt. There were groupings of two, three, or more images, again with no seeming relationship.

The artist also appeared to have little care for his/her presentation as image borders were not completely trimmed (see red box).

Art is a tremendously important and effective means of communication. That process, however, to be successful, has five basic elements: the sender, the message, the medium for transmission of the message, a recipient, and feedback from the recipient to the sender. The lack of any one means communication has not occurred.

This is a failed communication. What is the message? We can identify the sender (artist), medium (photographs pasted on a wall), recipient (museum visitors). Feedback is also easily determined—what the hell am I looking at? And why am I looking at it?