The Judgement Seat of Photography

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From a photographic print you can make any number of prints .. to ask for an authentic print makes no sense. ( Walter Benjamin ) .

Alfred Stieglitz - my ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price no higher than that of a popular magazine or daily paper.  To gain that ability there has been no choice but to follow the path that I have chosen.  

Photography would be the very type of Jean Baudrillards, industrial simulacrum, the modern industrial processes produce endless chains of identical objects.  Duplicates, copies that refer back to the original.

The fact that photography's  sheer multiplicity informs much of todays discussion of the medium. 

From a museums point of view the photographic print is much less predictable product than the print from an engraving or etching.  

MoMA department of photography, for over 50 years, has with increasing authority set our horizon of expectation with respect to photography.  Through investing in photography, with what Walter Benjamin called the 'Aura' of traditional art.  Equally important has been the museums considerable effort to reappropriate those very aspects of of photographic reproducibility believed by Benjamin to signal the Auras demise.  

The cultural transformation of photography into a museum art provides an ironic post script to the thesis of Benjamins 1936 essay, and retained in this discussion are the terms .. 'Cult value' and 'Exhibition value'...  Their opposition provides the basis for Benjamins claim that "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the works art".

Cult value was rooted in arts origin in religious and magical ritual.  Exhibition value involved the gradually changing function of the work of art as it gradually became portable and, later, duplicable.  religious mystery was progressively displaced by the mysteries of creative genius, who's meanings could only be interpreted by connoisseurs or art critics.

Benjamin saw the 19th century perfection of technically precise reproduction media with regard to photograph and film.  Because of this duplication it gave way to a previous gap between the aart and the people, but now it was universally available and accessible.
The techniques or reproducibility , Adorno claimed having arisen within the framework of the capitalist
order, were not to be so easily disentangled from their role in the functioning of that order.
Adorno insisted, Both bear the scars of capitalism, both contain the elements of change.
Benjamin, unaware of the utopian aspect of exhibition, he can see the two modes of reception as providing a useful starting point for the consideration of a remarkable process - the way in which photography - the medium believed by Benjamin to have effectively overthrown the 'Judgement Seat' of traditional art - has in turn been subjected to the transfiguring gaze of arts institutional guardian - THE MUSEUM.

MOMA opened in 1929 and photography has been recognised as a modernist practice. Alfre H Barr Jr, recognised photographic activity with the european avant-garde. In 1932 the first photography exhibition was at the museum.
Newhalls exhibition 'Photography' 1839-1937 was cited as a crucial step in the acceptance of photography as a full fledged museum art.
Prior to these first exhibitions the museum, the role of them had been historical or educational / scientific.  The art museum started to become a service of joy rather than knowledge.  It began to serve as a treasure house of 'eternal' monuments of art.
The four exhibitions of 1936-38 with their vast installations, exhaustive documentation, and ambitious catalogue essays - they carried the process one step further.

Referring again to photography 1839 - 1937, we see that Newhalls exhibition is frankly uninterested in the old question of photography's status among the fine arts it signalled MoMA recognition.
Newhalls exhibition ( over 800 items ) .. was grouped as per their technical process ie : daguerreotypy, wet plate, dry plate, x-ray, infrared etc ..  Stiegolitz, on the other hand, who still insisted on their utter
opposition of the fine art and applied photography, not only did he decline to cooperate with Newhall but refused to allow his later photographs to be represented.

Newhall carried on and presented this way, Lewis Mumford raised the question in the New Yorker - What is lacking in the present exhibition is a weighing and an assessment of photography in terms of
pure aesthetic merit.  In Newhalls long essay we find an articulated program for teh isolation and expert judging of  the aesthetic merit of photographs, virtually any photograph regardless of derivation.
Newhall outlined photographys history as a succession of technical innovations, independent of developments in the neighbouring graphic arts or painting - that were to be assessed for their aesthetic consequences.  For Newhall the recognition of significant detail and in the arrangement of large simple masses or a fine range of shimmering tones.

In 1940 Newhall was appointed Curator of Photography - this was the first time the museum had had such a post - and he redirected his interests to photographys creative rather than practical side.

Newhall  went on to imply a comparative system of classification - physical authenticity rather than the technical process.  Newhall called attention to the photographic interpretation of such traditional genres as Landscape, Portraiture and architectural studies. The main claim made for work presented in '60 photographs' was that each print was an individual personal expression.'  
This change couldnt always be applied to older prints as many old photographs were not intended to be art. 
In 1947 Newhall resigned after his exhibition program failed to retrieve photography from its marginal status among the fine arts and to attract what the museum would consider a substantial popular following.  Newhalls insistent championing of photography as fine art drew the open hostility of that section of the photographic press that claimed to speak for the nations millions of amateurs.  
The next 15 years at Moma were marked by Steichens inclination not to give a hoot for photography conceived as an autonomous fine art.  

Bayer called on the modern exhibition to apply all the techniques of the new vision in combination with colour, scale, elevation and typography. All of these serve to a decidedly instrumental end.  
He wrote.. The Modern exhibition.. 
... should not retain its distance from the spectator, it should be brought close to him, penetrate and leave an impression on him, should explain, demonstrate and even persuade and lead him to a planned and direct reaction.  Therefore we may say that exhibition design runs parallel with the psychology of advertising. 

The 'Road to victory' depended on the ingenious installation divised for Steichen by Herbert Bayer, who left Germany in 1938.  Spectators were guided along the twisting path of enormous freestanding enlargements of documentary photographs - some 10 x 40 feet !
This arrangement was calculated to produce visual narrative that combine the most dramatic devices of film and lifestyle photojournalism.   They didn't sit on the wall, they jutted out and up from the floor to assault your vision. The exhibition attracted large crowds.

Photographers complied to signing over to the museum giving them the right to print, crop and even edit images, - the photographer as autonomous artist, the original print as personal expression  was promptly filled at another by the museums emergence as orchestrator of meaning. 
Under Steichen the typical gallery installation resembled nothing so much as an oversized magazine layout, designed to reward rapid scanning rather than leisurely contemplation.
Although it should not be thought the fine art photography of the kind Newhall had sponsored vanished entirely from the MoMA gallery as it did not. 

During photographys first century it was generally understood that what photography did best was to 'describe things'  -  their shapes and textures, situations and relationships.  The highest virtues of such photographs were clarity of statement and density of information. They could read as well as seen - their value was literally and intellectual as well as visceral and visual.

As we study photographs we recognise that although in the conventional sense they may be impersonal, they are also consistently informed by what in a poem we would call a voice. This voice is, in turn, comic, harsh, ironic, delighted even cruel.  But it is always active and distinct - always infact a narrative voice. 

Unfortunately, since photography has never been simply an art medium - since it has operated both within and at the intersections of a variety of institutional disclosures.  

Thus endowed with a privilege origin - in painting - and an inherent nature that is modernist avant la lettre, photography is removed to its own aesthetic realm, free to get on with its own vocation of producing 'millions of profoundly radical pictures'.. the formal isolation and cultural legitimation of the 'great undifferentiated whole' of photography - is the disquieting message handed down from the museums's Judgement seat.