Photography Within the Humanities John Morris

qTR 820.5 P49 LIBRARY OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE BEQUEST OF LOUISE PROUTY '02 Photography within the Humanities John Morris Paul Taylor Gjon Mili Robert Frank Frederick Wiseman John Szarkowski W. Eugene Smith Susan Sontag Irving Penn Robert Coles Photography within the Humanities Edited by Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil The Art Department Jewett Arts Center Wellesley College Wellesley, Massachusetts Published by Addison House Publishers Danbury, New Hampshire 1977 During the month of April 1975, the following people spent a day at Wellesley College: April 7 John Morris, former picture editor, N.Y.T. Pictures New York Times, News Service April 9 Paul Schuster Taylor, economist, co-author with Dorothea Lange of An American Exodus April 11 Gjon Mili, Life magazine photographer April 14 Robert Frank, photographer, filmmaker April 15 Frederick Wiseman, documentary filmmaker April 16 John Szarkowski, director, Department of Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York April 18 W. Eugene Smith, photo-essayist April 21 Susan Sontag, critic, filmmaker April 23 Irving Penn, fashion/portrait photographer April 25 Robert Coles, author and research psychiatrist, Harvard University Their visits constituted a series of ten symposia called Photography within the Humanities which inquired into the functions of photography. - Copyright @ 1977 by Wellesley College. Library of Congress Catalogue Card No. 76-051600. ISBN-o-89169-013-1. Type set by Dumar Typesetting, Dayton, Ohio. Printed by Foremost Lithographers, Providence, R.I. Designed by Carl F. Zahn. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the copyright holder, except by a reviewer who may quote brief paragraphs in a review. To the memory of Walker Evans November 3, 1903-April 10, 1975 Acknowledgments The symposia originated in a college art department which has wholeheartedly supported the formal study of the history of photography since 1969 and the teaching of photographic practice since 1973. We wish to thank all our colleagues in the art department at Wellesley for their interest and encouragement. Peter Fergusson was a constant advisor. Ann Gabhart installed the exhibition of 100 photographs chosen by the participants. The task of locating and assembling these images was greatly eased by the efforts of Richard Avedon, Duane Michals, Yoichi Okamoto, Alex Harris, Gjon Mili, Jennifer Ettling of Zipporah Films, Patricia McCabe, Leslie Teicholz, John J. Fletcher of Compix, U.P.I. News Pictures, Robert Sobieszek, International Museum of Photography, Rochester, John Szarkowski, Patricia M. Walker, Department of Photography of the Museum of Modern Art, Therese Heyman, Curator of Photographs, Oakland Museum, Barbara Norfleet, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Davis Pratt, Curator of Photography, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Marge Neikrug, Neikrug Galleries, Inc., Harry Lunn and Maurizia Grosman, Lunn Gallery-Graphics International Ltd., and the Witkin Gallery. Maria Morris, Hannah B. Bruce, Time-Life Picture Agency, Paul Clifford, Wide World Photos, Inc., Frank Wolfe, Lyndon Baines John- son Library and Magnum Photos, Inc. helped to make certain addi- tional pictures available for the source book. For help in the planning stages we would like to thank Kenworth Moffett. For invaluable assistance during the symposia we would also like to thank Carla Mathes Woodward, Peteris Bite, Marjorie A. Dings, Elizabeth P. Richardson, Ruth B. Wilson, Muriel Crampton, William McKenzie Woodward, Rosalyn Gerstein and Carl Sesto. Catharine H. Allen coordinated the whole series. Without her expert organizing skills, it is certain that the events would never have tran- spired so smoothly. With Wellesley students it is possible to accomplish practically anything: they participated in all phases of the events, produced the tapes and transcribed them. Thanks are due Sasha Norkin, Jessine Monaghan, Liz de Tuerk, Rebecca Dragiff , Deborah Keith, Linda Mahoney, and especially Lesley Baier and Lillian Hsu who gave generous and untiring assistance in the final stages of the book's production. Finally, we owe our greatest debt to the speakers and confess sel- fishly that the whole undertaking was the best way we could think of to know them better. EPJandWMAcN Resources for the symposia in 1975, and for the production of the source book in 1976 were awarded in two separate grants by the Northeastern Pooled Common Fund, established by Mr. and Mrs. George de Menil (Lois Pattison, Wellesley College Class of 1960). We gratefully acknowledge the Fund's generous support and the sym- pathetic interest of its founders at every stage of the project. 6 Acknowledgments Introduction We are all possessors of a highly sophisticated form of visual literacy, largely influenced by photographs and more recently by television. Strangely enough, an outstanding characteristic of this visual literacy is our lack of consciousness about how it works. We really have not begun to consider how, why or to what extent photographs move us, teach us or force us to make choices and form judgments. Speci- fically, we do not yet fully understand how the particular physical nature of its picture making system affects the visual appearance of a photograph and thereby alters the information it contains. Photographs offer a version of reality as subject to critical inter- pretation as that offered by any other medium. Contrary to the nine- teenth century conviction, photographs are not equal to the truth; " they bear only partial truths. Photographs "masquerade as 'it-ness,' to quote an apt formulation. They carry information clothed in a cur- ious visual organization. This visual organization or syntax affects our view of the world enormously. For as members of a photographic community, we are receiving thousands of photographic signals daily. Also, much of what we believe to be true about the past one hundred and thirty-seven years has been inculcated through photographs. Until recently, many focused inquiries about photography have been devoted to its relation to the arts. Because photographs are pictures with a special formal organization, it has been natural to link their production to art making. A favorite issue, which still has not died, for example, is whether photography can be an art at all. By now general consensus says that photography seems to be capable of artistic expression when it is practiced by artists. Another view holds that the question is beside the point: the history of photography and the accumulation of photographic images since 1839 has dem- onstrated that photography involved itself in much more than aesthetic claims. It took root in every aspect of life. To begin to understand the medium fully we must examine its role systematically and include it within the study of the humanities. This was the basic idea behind the creation of the series of symposia called Photography within the Humanities held at Wellesley College in the Spring of 1975. While there have been countless con- ferences on photography which re-examined aesthetic and technical questions, never before had there been an attempt to explore photography's function or its far-reaching effects on our experience—on the way we gather information and the quality of that information. Our primary aim in these symposia was to expand our understand- ing of photography beyond the realm of the art museum by asking questions about the medium which would promote a recognition of its connection to other related fields, and having done this, would articulate that connection. The symposia's activities centered around ten individuals who regard photography as a significant part of their work or for whom photography is important enough to engage their critical attention. Our choice of speakers was based on their skill at making, using or thinking about photographic pictures and their ability to speak about it to others. The main objective was to bring about a series of dialogues about photography as a documentary tool by having access to people whose experiences had led them to opinions about the particular kind of success or failure photography has had in its many applications. 7 Introduction Between April 7 and April 25 of 1975, each of the ten participants came to Wellesley College and spent the day. They met with students in informal seminars during the morning and afternoon and gave a public lecture in the evening. Each speaker was asked for a list of ten photographs which would best represent his or her point of view. The 100 photographs, assembled in a major exhibition in the main gallery of the Jewett Arts Center, became a core of images around which discussions might take place. Moreover, they provided the speakers with their only access to the views of the others who had been invited. It seemed important to have the participants appear one at a time. Although shop talk between professionals on a panel is entertaining and even instructive, we were not interested in collisions between celebrities on a stage. Instead we calculated another kind of event, of one experienced and opinionated guest appearing after another, each of whom would bring a different attitude toward his or her work. This left the burden of the cross-fertilization of ideas on the students, who, fresh from the visit of one speaker, were soon as- saulted by the next. Being in possession of the whole picture (none of the speakers stayed to hear the others) gave the students a sense of equal footing with speakers who might have seemed overwhelm- ing. We could not anticipate the extent to which the ten participants would refer to one another. The same story related by an editor and later by an artist was, in the opinion of the students, embarrassing but illuminating. Most of the participants simply spoke about what they do when they work and related their thoughts about their work.

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