Nearby Café Home > Literature & Writing > WordWork



A Professional Autobiography

Acknowledgements and Author's Foreword to Depth of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media and Lens Culture

by A. D. Coleman

For reasons still not entirely clear to me, this book has proved the hardest of all my collections of essays to deliver into the world.

To begin with, it's had several incarnations. I first announced its forthcoming appearance something like fifteen years ago, at a time when it took a quite different, much more expansive form. At that initial stage of its life, it benefitted greatly from the attention, supportiveness, and organizational assistance of Tony Outhwaite of the JCA Literary Agency, then my agent, and subsequently from the enthusiasm and advice of my next agent, Jonathan Silverman of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.

That version of the book, which I now realize was unwieldy and less than cohesive at best, never found a publisher, so I shelved it for several years to get some distance on it and its problems. Close readings and thoughtful commentary by Richard Kirstel and his late wife, Barbara Kirstel, helped me identify many of its structural difficulties. As a result, I split the book in two. Half of the original version eventually evolved into the volume Tarnished Silver: After the Photo Boom, Essays and Lectures 1979-1989.1 The second half -- a set of (mostly) more scholarly essays -- formed the core of this meaner, leaner new model. The University of New Mexico Press accepted that book for publication in 1989; I began drafting several new essays for it, and set to work on what I thought would be minor revisions.

But these are substantial commentaries, demanding much research, considerable gestation time, and extensive rewriting. For whatever the reasons, first one and then another of the essays commenced to give me fits. (Some of the subsequent delay is explained -- or at least rationalized -- in the new opening section of the first essay in this volume, "The Destruction Business.") And life, as is its wont, intruded itself in some major ways to preoccupy me. I learned again the wisdom of the I Ching: "Perseverance furthers."

I finally managed a major chunk of the necessary revision of these essays and the editing of this book during a three-month residency as Museum Scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California during the fall of 1993, and as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in the Department of Photography at Gothenberg University in Sweden during the winter and spring of 1994. The support and unbroken stretches of working time provided by these institutions proved invaluable to this project, and I thank all those involved for making those opportunities available to me. Gradually, then and thereafter, what I saw as the essays’ various problems began to resolve themselves; at long last, in the late summer of 1996, I found a way to tackle the one remaining hurdle, the meditation on criticism that begins this collection. With its completion, I felt finally that the book had reached its desired form.

My thanks go to the editors, curators, and lecture and conference sponsors who variously commissioned, solicited and/or welcomed these essays in their original forms, and to those who published subsequent versions of them as I refined and polished my arguments: Jim Hughes at Camera Arts, Kathleen Kenyon at the Center Quarterly, Thom Harrop and Ana Jones at Darkroom Photography/Camera & Darkroom, Neil Postman at Et cetera: A Journal of General Semantics, Andreas Muller-Pohle at European Photography, Sue Beardmore at The Ffotogallery (Wales), Joachim Schmid at Fotokritik (Germany), Italo Zannier at Fotologia (Italy), Jerome Liebling of Hampshire College (Amherst, MA), David Spurgeon at Impact of Science on Society (France), Jay Black and Ralph D. Barney at the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Henning Hansen at Katalog (Denmark), Richard Kostelanetz, Barry Tanenbaum at Lens' on Campus/Imaging On Campus, Joan Harrison and Judy Collischan van Wagner of the Hillwood Art Gallery of Long Island University (NY), the photography faculty of Loyola College (Baltimore, MD), Gail Fisher-Taylor at Photo-Communique/the Holocene Foundation (Canada), Eli Bornstein at The Structurist (Canada), Sari Thomas of the Conference on Culture and Communication, Temple University (Philadelphia, PA), and Manuel Vilarino of the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). I have indicated in the endnotes and on the Publication Credits page the presentational and publishing history of each essay, both so that readers can see something of the process by which they made their way into and through the world and also to facilitate finding them in other languages, since a number of them have been translated.

My indebtedness extends as well to others who played more specific roles in the making of the book in your hands. Between 1990 and 1995 various people -- photographers Linda Troeller and Jennifer Kotter; the late Vilem Flusser, philosopher and media theorist; and film critic Andrew Sarris -- provided comments on the book as a whole, or on some of its components, that proved enormously helpful.

The fact that it has at long last appeared I attribute primarily to Marjorie Forman, who helped me find my way through the labyrinths of Jungian analysis during this final version’s chrysalis stage; to the artist, curator and historian Colleen Thornton and the artist and curator Kathy Vargas, whose long-term commitments to my work and ideas, incisive critiques of the individual essays, structural suggestions for the volume as a whole and other provocations forced me to reconsider and clarify these pieces even further; and to Elizabeth Hadas and Dana Asbury of the University of New Mexico Press, who demonstrated endless patience with me during the final redaction process. I proffer my deepest gratitude to these fine folks.

So I reiterate my heartfelt appreciation to all of the above; and I assure you that none of them are to blame for any of this book's failures, which, after all this time and effort, can only be my own.

-- A. D. C.

back to top

Author's Foreword

This volume puts into book form an interlaced group of essays I think of as more scholarly than the running commentary on photography and art with which the majority of my readers most commonly associate me. Concerned with issues of theory and history, with those who fall (or are pushed) through the cracks of critical disdain and neglect, with different approaches to praxis and dramatic shifts in the methods and means thereof, with definitions of terms and the function of criticism itself, they were written between 1978 and 1996 and variously, often drastically revised during those years before reaching their present and (I hope) final form.

When I set about my work as a critic of photography and related subjects, in 1968, I thought of myself as anything but a scholar. Having but recently closed the door on the academic context for my own fields of formal study -- English literature and creative writing -- with a vow never to return, I had at that point no expectation of ever again engaging in anything remotely resembling scholarly activity, especially as a working writer.

So much for good intentions.

I did manage to stay away from just about anything approximating the scholarly (excepting occasional lectures and workshops at colleges, universities and art institutes, and some teaching of seminars, mostly in adult-education programs) until mid-1976, when I forced myself to spend several months writing what remains my single most cited essay, "The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition."2 (Before that, my only notable slip into anything akin to written scholarship was my reluctantly accepting the chore of providing the entry on photography for a revised 1975 edition of The New Columbia Encyclopaedia,3 a task into which editor Karen Tweedy-Holmes had to drag me kicking and screaming.)

The essay on the directorial mode was the first to require some footnoting, that defining apparatus of scholarly production. Putting those citations and elaborations in seemed like a tectonic shift at the time. But it also reminded me of how much I'd always enjoyed reading the notes in other people's essays, since often that's where the real action was to be found.4 So I took great pleasure in planting in my own notes thereto a little ticking time bomb whose explosion took place some years thereafter.5

Later that same year I undertook the writing of the first critical survey ever produced of another important mode of photographic activity. The resulting book, The Grotesque in Photography,6 though light on scholarly apparatus (the publishers' choice, not mine), looked and read somewhat like a work of scholarship, and has functioned as a standard reference -- indeed, still the only substantial study of its subject -- since it appeared in 1977. With the publication of those two works, people began to treat me as if I were a scholar, and I began to doubt my right to disclaim that as an accurate definition of at least a share of my inclinations and energies.

Shortly thereafter, in late 1978, I commenced the earliest essay in this book, "Conspicuous by His Absence: Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance of William Mortensen" -- in part because the aforementioned footnote from 1976 and my brief discussion of Mortensen in The Grotesque in Photography seemed to demand it, in part because I'd done the spadework for it back in 1974 and didn't want to see that labor go to waste, and in part because I suspected that if I didn't do it no one else would. Those motives -- especially the first and last -- underlie much of what's in this volume. My perception of problematic gaps in the literature of photography as a whole (as well as within my own body of work), along with my sense of obligation to articulate my operative premises and definitions, serve as the driving forces behind this aspect of my activity.

As this suggests, virtually all of these essays emerged from the process of reconsidering earlier essays and lectures, pursuing issues I'd discovered I had left unresolved therein. At the time I began that essay on Mortensen I'd moved almost entirely away from the reviewing, reportage and writing of other forms of occasional pieces that had dominated my work for the decade 1968-78, a phase of my professional activity synopsized by my first collection of essays.7 This meant that space had opened up in my writing life for longer, more meditated, less assignment-driven essays: ruminations whose length was determined by their own inner logic, rather than by editors' needs or the appetites of the publishing market, and of whose production schedule I was the primary -- sometimes the sole -- determinant. The kind of projects, that is, usually produced by people who are either independently wealthy or else leading the academic life.

As it happened, by the early 1980s, though I hadn't exactly turned into an academic (at least in my own head), I'd taken on an extensive though not full-time teaching commitment at New York University, and had scaled back my writing for magazines considerably. At that juncture I'd also decided that undertaking a formal course of study in mass media and communications would have developmental value for my work. I found a doctoral program that suited me (headed by Neil Postman) at N.Y.U., and enrolled therein. I chose to concentrate my work within that program on an issue that I'd first raised -- in passing, and in a few brief sentences -- in that synopsized history of photography for The New Columbia Encyclopaedia; its barely articulated implications had nagged at me ever since I'd mailed in my typescript. The chronologically second essay contained here, "Lentil Soup: A Meditation on Lens Culture," came out of my research towards that end; addressing the pre-photographic history of the lens as a technology, it's the most widely published and translated of my essays to date.

Several of these texts -- "On Redaction," "The Destruction Business," "Documentary, Photojournalism and Press Photography Now," and the book's brief epilogue, "Items for An Agenda"-- grew out of or were first presented as public lectures or formal papers for symposia, while several others that began as texts for the page turned into such papers: "The Image in Question: Further Notes on the Directorial Mode" and the essay on Edward S. Curtis have both been polished through public performance. Two more of the essays -- "The Image in Question" and "Mutant Media: Photo/Montage/Collage" -- began their lives as commissioned catalogue introductions for survey shows of recent work in their respective modes, directorial imagery and hybrid forms of photographic image-making. In all those cases, the core sections of the first versions turned into building blocks for these further elaborations of the central ideas, which now often bear only a marginal resemblance to their initial appearances.

These essays all link themselves in diverse ways to each other. The last-named pair, for instance, connect to the Mortensen essay, on the one hand, and to "The Vanishing Borderline" -- a rumination on the relationship between photography and computer art -- on the other. Similarly, the Curtis essay profits from consideration alongside the Mortensen piece, since both address the inevitable excesses of ideologically biased historianship and its consequences; yet it also functions as a case study to which the more general ideas propounded in "Documentary, Photojournalism and Press Photography Now" can be applied.
By the same token, "Mutant Media," "Documentary, Photojournalism and Press Photography Now" and "On Redaction" strike me as interrelated in that all concern themselves in good part with the absence of clear definitions for such fundamental terms as photomontage, photocollage, the several forms of informationally oriented photography, and the body of work in this medium. They set out to propose and substantiate such definitions -- for my own use as a working critic, of course, but also for anyone else who finds them convenient and helpful. (Perhaps they can also even serve as articulated reference points for those who would dispute them, giving them something fixed and carefully reasoned to counter with their own alternatives.) Yet my impulse is far from merely lexicographic; those essays also speak to other, larger issues, for the consideration of which I felt some commitment to a precise vocabulary was vital.

Certainly that applies to my own praxis as well. The book opens with the most recent of these essays, a scrutiny of the process of criticism itself, specifying -- as well as I'm able to -- what I think I'm about, what standards I set for myself, what I hope to achieve with my work. And it closes with some advice and encouragement -- for my readers, of course, but for myself, at this stage of my life and work, as well. I trust in the intelligence of my readers sufficiently to feel confident that they will discern the web of correspondences and cross-references among these separate but related constructs.

*

If there's an underlying message to all this, it's that it turned out, to my surprise, that I've come to feel comfortable once again within the academic environment and its primary modes of activity. I relish the opportunity to teach, take great pleasure in the less frequent occasions on which I can switch roles and become a student, enjoy scholarship -- love tracking down ideas and leads, spending hours in the library (no news there, actually -- it had been a favorite haunt since childhood), the process of citation, the careful organization of diverse threads of reasoning, the requirements for buttressed argument. Overall, aside from some of its mechanics (citing sources, maintaining bibliographies and such), it proves not much different from my normal ways of gathering information, checking it, working out ideas and putting them into written form, even if that wasn't always visible in the results.

So I've either adapted to scholarship or adapted it to me. Or, most likely, both. By now I've produced numerous other such texts, on divers subjects; most have been published, though not yet collected into book form (several can be found in Tarnished Silver). I consider its effect on my work absolutely salutory. Just as my professional experience as a working essayist and the resulting imperative of writing an accessible, engaging prose informed my scholarly work, so the rigors of scholarship, and what I'd learned from re-engaging with its disciplines -- and, of course, from the specifics of my researches -- informed the more fluid, provisional writing I began to generate from mid-1988 onward, when I began reviewing and writing a looser criticism and cultural commentary once again.

Nowadays, they simply seem like alternate hats I wear on different days. Indeed, to my satisfaction and amusement, a number of the essays in this book have appeared both in scholarly journals and (minus their footnotes, but otherwise unchanged in style and tone) in general-audience publications aimed at a broad readership -- sometimes simultaneously. Curiously, nowhere in my engagement with serious scholarship did I find a requirement for impenetrability or unclarity of either thought or language; and no editor of the scholarly journals here and abroad in which I've published many of these pieces ever complained about the comparative lack of jargon and trendy locutions, or the absence of most of the fashionable references from my cited sources. As Katha Pollitt noted, in regard to the notorious recent publication of a blatant parody of such obscurantist writing by the unwitting editors of the journal Social Text,

 

the comedy of the [Alan] Sokal incident is that it suggests that even the postmodernists don't really understand one another's writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads. Lacan . . . performativity . . . Judith Butler . . . scandal . . . (en)gendering (w)holeness . . . Lunch!"8

No lily pads here, I'm afraid; only the clearest water I'm able to supply, in which both I and my readers will have to sink or swim. You're on your own for lunch.

*

A few words concerning the shape of this book. As the individual essays achieved their final forms, the question of their arrangement in the book became a challenge. The material neither lends itself to chronological ordering nor falls into thematic clusters. No central issue or diegesis emerged as a linear organizing principle. So I shuffled the deck repeatedly. Eventually, a loose sequence suggested itself to me, which I fine-tuned with the input of several of the book's later readers while it was still in typescript.

Looking at the structure that evolved in that fashion, I see that I've constructed it neither as a collage nor as an argument; rather, it is intended as a set of recurring questions, connected and interweaving. Where did photography come from? What has it meant to us until now? What have we scanted, discarded, left out in considering it, and why? How are we presently perceiving it? Where might we be heading with it at the tail end of this century?

My answers to these questions remain necessarily contingent; so, for that matter, do the questions. It may seem odd to have spent so much effort in sculpting queries and responses that may not endure, or may prove wrong-headed. Perhaps it was. My goal was not just to intersect my own thinking on one or another subject at a given moment, but to sum it up. If I felt that, beyond the pleasures of the texts for myself and my readers, I needed to justify such expenditure of energy, I'd simply say that I wanted to see what my own inquiries and lines of reasoning would look like if they were consciously, patiently built to last -- even knowing that they won't, because nothing does.

-- A. D. Coleman
Staten Island, New York
January 1998

back to top

1 Midmarch Arts Press, 1996.

2 "The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition," Artforum, Vol. XV, no. 1, September 1976, pp. 55-61. Reprinted in A. D. Coleman, Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings, 1968-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; University of New Mexico Press, 1994). For my subsequent thoughts on this subject, see "The Image in Question: Further Notes on the Directorial Mode," elsewhere in this volume.

3 "Photography." New Columbia Encyclopedia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975????), pp. 2138-2139.

4 Philip Rieff's homage to the footnote in his polemic Fellow Teachers (New York: Delta Books, 1975), p. 2, speaks eloquently to its complex function in the life of the mind.

5 See the Postscript to the essay "Conspicuous by His Absence: Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance of William Mortensen," elsewhere in this volume.

6 The Grotesque in Photography (New York: Ridge Press/Summit Books, 1977).

7 Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings, l968-1978
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; Galaxy Books paperback, 1982; second edition, revised and expanded, University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

8 Pollitt, "Pomolotov Cocktail," The Nation, Vol. 262, no. 23 (June 10, 1996), p. 9. For more on this matter, see endnote 24 to the essay "Documentary, Photojournalism and Press Photography Now," elsewhere in this volume.

back to top

From Depth of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media and Lens Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998)

Copyright © 1998 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com