Word: shows
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...subspecies of celebrity is made up of those instant young show-biz successes who so often make the covers of the magazines at the check-out counters. The editors, aiming at young spenders, obviously know their market. But if punk-rock music doesn't interest you, a punk-rock star's life won't either-being totally occupied with self and titillating, if at all, only for the offhand candor about living arrangements and drug experiences. A historian, an architect, a playwright, a woman Cabinet member, a Nobel scientist-all of these have lived longer, reflected more...
...photography in America has moved into the public eye, rather as painting did in the 1960s, and no American institution has done more to create this state of affairs than the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, through its photography director, John Szarkowski. MOMA's main summer show is entitled "Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960." It is a sampling of 200 works by 100 American photographers, curated and introduced by Szarkowski in his usual eloquent, aphoristic and pugnacious style. It is, inevitably, a grab bag, but one with coherent strands in it, and likely to hold...
...most striking thing illustrated by the show is how far behind photography?meaning the photographs Szarkowski designates as "serious"?has left its old role as witness to public events. Not one picture in the exhibition, except for an exquisitely formal-looking image of a fire in Minneapolis by Irwin B. Klein, looks in any way like a news photo. This must seem strange at first, since the past 20 years have been the most photographed in history. Everything that happened, one might suppose, happened before a camera; there has never been anything like the sheer bulk of visual documentation...
...growing realization among photographers that the camera's testimony about news was "opaque and superficial." He roundly states that "good photographers had long since known?whether or not they admitted it to their editors?that most issues of importance cannot be photographed." So one of the messages of the show is clear: in the judgment of MOMA?the first American museum to treat photography systematically as an art and perhaps the most powerful taste-forming museum in the country?the documentary or "concerned" tradition, which ran from Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine through figures like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Margaret Bourke...
...issues of importance" are no longer available to the camera, if all photography can make of big events is a scribble of light that promises more information than it delivers, what can photography do? What are its proper subjects? The argument of Szarkowski's show is that photography has undergone changes similar to those that overtook painting and sculpture. "The general movement of American photography," Szarcowski writes, "has been from public to private concerns." Photography has become more and more aware of its own history and limits as a medium: a debate about these is built into...