I started looking seriously at and writing about photographs in 1967; my first essay on the subject was published on June 20th, 1968,⁵ almost exactly three decades from the moment at which I write this. In retrospect, I see that -- fortuitously and not by plan (at least not my own) or foresight, mostly by sheer coincidence -- I stepped into the field of photography at the very end of the calm before the storm.

My point of entry was New York City, where I'd grown up and -- after a brief west coast interlude -- was once again based. Because I came to the situation young (I was twenty-four in '67) and from outside the medium (a writer, not a photographer), I'd missed some of what now seem obvious harbingers in New York of what was soon to come. Helen Gee's Limelight had already been there and gone; this coffee house, between 1954 and 1961, functioned not only as the city's first photo-specific gallery but also as a central meeting place for photographers, curators, picture editors and others involved with or interested in the medium.⁶ I'd known of its existence, in a vague way; yet while I'd popped in and out of it during my aspiring-Beat Greenwich Village adolescence I must confess I'd never once looked at the pictures on the walls. Roy DeCarava had long since closed his short-lived, pioneering little gallery,⁷ which also preceded by a decade my interest in the medium. And, more recently, the Association of Heliographers had imploded in early 1966, taking with it their germinal midtown gallery space.⁸ I'd been away from New York, doing graduate work in literature and creative writing in northern California, during that group's brief heyday, but probably wouldn't have encountered them even if I'd stayed put. Before 1967 I wasn't paying much mind to photography, and after that I was.

So what did I find when I started attending to photographs in 1967?

The public perception of photography as a creative medium just then had been largely shaped -- not only in the U.S. but internationally -- by Edward Steichen's blockbuster survey, The Family of Man (1955), still traveling world-wide at that juncture, its catalogue version already esconced as the most popular photography book of all time. Leaving aside the complex debate over that exhibition's flaws and virtues (except to point out that it was hugely controversial within the field at the time of its birth and thereafter), let us simply note that it placed its emphasis on stylistically traditional, extroverted, denotative and subject-dominated imagery, for the most part setting aside experimental tendencies, the medium's relation to abstraction and the photographer's inner life. That there were photographers of other, indeed opposite inclinations -- and that some of the very images in that show had been drastically recontextualized from their bodies of work -- remained a relatively well-kept secret.

In New York -- even at that time the acknowledged photography center of the world -- only one institution, the Museum of Modern Art, exhibited photographs continuously and maintained on public display an elementary survey of the medium's history.The Modern also had a department devoted to the medium, as did the Brooklyn Museum (the latter's department, in fact, was founded shortly before the Modern's, and had accumulated a notable collection, but did not make such active use of its holdings as did MoMA's.) John Szarkowski, a dark-horse candidate for the job, headed the well-established and world-famous MoMA department, having taken over for Steichen in 1963; he'd already mounted several key shows that began to define his curatorial aesthetic, perhaps most notably "The Photographer's Eye" of 1966, a formalist rationale for camera vision that, especially in its book form, would influence a generation or two of photographers.

The next year, 1967, Szarkowski put up the "New Documents" show that first brought serious attention to Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus; in many ways, those two exhibits set the course of photography for the next ten years.⁹ Due to the international clout of the Modern in all media, to Szarkowski's own growing power in the field, and in no small part to the enduring impact of The Family of Man , at that point -- and for at least the next decade -- the MoMA Department of Photography was the medium's 800-pound gorilla: as I put it in an essay written years later, "The directorship of that department is unquestionably the single most influential sponsorial position in contemporary creative photography."¹⁰

The Metropolitan Museum of Art had its magnificent Alfred Stieglitz collection, and assorted other important materials, including a good bit of essential 19th-century work -- much of it gathered foresightfully by William M. Ivins, who'd been the Met's first curator of prints from 1916-46 -- and other significant bits and pieces that had trickled in erratically. But that material lay there neglected, available to researchers yet all but buried. The late John McKendry, then the Met's curator of prints and drawings (and the man who, with evident delight, first introduced me to a young leather boy named Robert Mapplethorpe), had little interest in the medium, and mounted only the most haphazard and desultory exhibits thereof -- largely, it seemed to me after a few years of writing about this situation, as a result of my public goading.¹¹

In those days neither the Guggenheim Museum nor the Whitney ever mounted anything photographic, or collected photographic work of any kind -- regrettable decisions, surely, since they'll now pay millions for material with which to build their recently initiated collections, material they could have had for mere thousands of dollars as recently as 1980. Some of the city's other museums (such as the Museum of the City of New York) had photography collections, a few of them even somewhat thematic or otherwise rationalized. But they mounted photography shows only sporadically, if at all. Most of them generated their own infrequent exhibits; few photo exhibitions then traveled -- there was no established "circuit" for such shows -- and few of those that did go on the road made it to this city. The now-defunct Riverside Museum had a working relationship with Cornell Capa, and mounted some valuable surveys of "concerned photography," but the International Center of Photography was not yet a visible gleam in Capa's eye.

No commercial gallery devoted itself exclusively or even primarily to photography; hardly any art galleries included photographers in their stables, and very few showed any photography at all -- save for a handful specializing in avant-garde art, in which "conceptual" artists were beginning to show photo-documentation of their works and ideas (not to be considered as or in relation to photography, they insisted almost universally). The era of not-for-profit venues and/or "artists' spaces" had just begun, fueled in part by National Endowment for the Arts and (in this state) New York State Council On the Arts funding; photo-specific showcases of both sorts would emerge within the next few years, but none were yet extant.

The best and most sought-after regular showcase for photography outside MoMA's small gallery for rotating shows was Norbert Kleber's Underground Gallery, at 51 East 10th Street -- right in the heart of the East Village. This run-down, newly hip, ethnically diverse neighborhood had considerable art-world history (from the Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art years) and much '50s and '60s jazz action (at the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place and elsewhere) to its credit, and a goodly amount of literary history as well, most notably the poetry and theater events at St. Mark's in the Bouwerie Church and a coffee house called Les Deux MŽgots -- both of them, coincidentally, also on 10th Street -- where experimental poets like Jackson MacLow read.¹² In fact, it was New York's center for what was beginning to be called "the counter-culture." The Fillmore East and other rock venues were up and running there; off-off-Broadway theater -- Sam Shepard et al -- was virtually birthed in its basements; the East Village Other and Al Goldstein's Screw were edited and published nearby, along with various other underground papers; the Fugs, Tuli Kupferberg's and Ed Sanders's radical rock group, headquartered there (Sanders's Peace Eye Book Store was located there as well). Alternative lifestyles and experimental media were thriving in those buildings and storefronts and parks and streets. Certainly the area had the right Big Apple karma as the seedbed for a revolution in the arts, one that would include photography as a matter of course.

Kleber worked out of (and, as I recall, perhaps mistakenly, even lived in) a brownstone apartment you entered by walking through the building's front gate, under the stoop, and down a few steps -- hence his gallery's name. Norbert made his living renting high-end photo equipment to professional photographers for commercial shoots out of the apartment's back end, but he'd turned the long, low-ceilinged front room of his apartment into a clean, spare, handsome display space, complete with white walls and track lights.¹³ One could hang several dozen prints there, in a single row around the walls, and give them room to breathe. It wasn't exactly the hushed chapel of Stieglitz's "291" or "An American Place," nor did it have quite the pristine spaciousness of that archetypal venue Brian O'Doherty dubbed "the white cube,"¹⁴ a style of art environment already widely available to artists in other media, but it came close: the work received serious, respectful treatment on the walls, and there were press releases, announcement cards, perhaps even an occasional poster, and wine-and-cheese openings.¹⁵

Aside from that, there were various less amenable and desirable options, mainly the anterooms of many of the city's camera stores, commercial labs and custom-processing houses, some of which regularly mounted exhibitions: Portogallo, Modernage, Willoughby's, The Darkroom. Then came the public libraries with glass-covered wall-mounted display cases and/or vitrines; a few college and university or community-center "galleries" (commonly the entrance area, or some long, hard-to-locate hallway); bank and other institutional lobbies; and the occasional restaurant or coffee-house that put photos on the walls behind the tables (usually unviewable in ambient light during normal business hours) or, more rarely, following the Limelight model, set aside a better-designed and more functional viewing space for them.

And outside New York? Up in Boston there was the Carl Siembab Gallery, and out in San Francisco Helen Johnston's Focus Gallery -- neither one significantly profitable, both labors of love, then known to me only by report. The George Eastman House (not yet the International Museum of Photography) mounted exhibits, maintained a major collection, and published a small journal, at that point the only English-language periodical devoted to the medium's history and conservation; but the GEH was remote, located in Rochester, in upstate New York, and had little direct impact on the New York City scene. Beaumont Newhall had retreated there after his departure from the MoMA department -- a transition forced by the museum's appointment of Edward Steichen over him as the head of that department in 1947, an event that had proven schismatic in the small, tight world of creative photography, and whose consequent atmosphere of betrayal and allegiance still festered in the local and national scenes.¹⁶

Fact was, however, that -- Steichen's machinations aside -- Newhall, as evidenced by his subsequent activities, had little interest in post-World War II photography (aside from tracking the later work of Group f.64's members), and was probably ill-suited to head either a department or a museum obligated to address the full spectrum of post-war photographic picture-making; the final edition of his History, published in 1982, treats the '60's and '70s summarily and unenthusiastically. Whatever attention to younger and/or more experimental practitioners Eastman House manifested during his tenure, and whatever influence on the then-current field of ideas it exercised, came less from his inclinations than from the survey exhibitions and (even more important, because they circulated much more widely) the accompanying catalogues that Nathan Lyons organized for that institution: Toward A Social Landscape, The Persistence of Vision, Vision and Expression, Photography in the Twentieth Century. These, along with the germinal anthology Lyons edited during that same period, Photographers on Photography, constituted a goodly chunk of the in-print literature of photography at that juncture, and provided more than an inkling that the medium's current practitioners represented a far greater diversity of approaches to praxis than was commonly understood.

Speaking of that literature: The plethora of serious books on photography that overwhelms all of us in the field today stands in starkest contrast to what one could find in bookstores or order from publishers circa 1967. Newhall's perennially in-print History -- the "revised and enlarged" 1964 edition -- was firmly entrenched as the standard narrative of the medium's origins, evolution and acculturation, though Helmut and Alison Gernsheim's more Eurocentric version of that history was findable (between editions, at that particular moment; the first came out in 1955, the second in 1969). Peter Pollack's idiosyncratic tome,The Picture History of Photography of 1958, was out of print too (its second edition would also appear in '69). Available from Dover Press, a New York reprint house, were Robert Taft's 1942 Photography and the American Scene and Heinrich Schwarz's superb critical biography of David Octavius Hill -- the first such for the field. That was about it for the history of photography in English.

New monographs trickled out erratically, most of them thematic and/or subject-dominated. Grossman, now long gone, was a major player in photography publishing back then, oriented mainly toward photojournalism, documentary and "concerned photography." Though the Aperture Foundation had managed to publish a few fine, small monographs -- on Stieglitz and Weston -- that operation hadn't yet entered book publishing in a major way. Publicity for such books in all cases was minimal, just your basic press release; I actually can't recall attending a launching party or book-signing event for a photo project until the early 1970s.

As the public face of the photo scene, just about all of this fell through the cracks of art criticism, and even art journalism, at the time. Photography's critical tradition, as I noted in my opening paragraphs, had barely begun. No such professional as a photography critic existed; it was a function that I invented, pretty much out of whole cloth, when I premiered my Village Voice column, "Latent Image," in mid-1968. The journal aperture, then well-established and under the editorship of Minor White, was one of the medium's few "little" magazines, a dependable vehicle (though at best a small-circulation, putatively quarterly one that actually came out much less frequently) for serious, intelligent writing on photography, some of which entered the territory of the critical. Contemporary Photographer, a short-lived alternative to it, also contained some notable commentary. Occasionally, Infinity, the journal of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, included thoughtful prose. From time to time, the Saturday Review of Literature ran a knowledgeable essay. But here in Photo Central, New York City, the closest thing to regular critical discourse was Jacob Deschin's column in the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times.

To Part 2