There's no question that Jack's short comments and opinions on this or that book or show had some impact on the photographers mentioned, and -- especially with the clout of the Times behind them -- carried some weight in the field; serious, extended critical commentary on photography in mass-audience publications was just about unheard of, and, until I started my work at the Voice, Jack's column was the only game in town. Those little snippets do provide some useful trace of events that otherwise might have gone entirely unnoticed. But they didn't constitute a contribution to the critical literature then, and they don't now; that's probably why no one (including Jack himself) ever gathered them together in book form. Jack would never have billed himself as the paper's photography critic, whereas that was the only possible job description for Gene Thornton (my colleague in the Times slot, more on which anon) and myself. Jack's perception of himself is neatly summed up in the title of the little journal he started up after he left the Times: The Photo Reporter.¹⁷

This is not to demean Jack himself, his work, or his memory. He did what he did very well. I like to think I do also. Our activities and concerns differed greatly. Back when he was alive, if I wanted to know what some upper-echelon power shift at Kodak meant, Jack would be the first person I'd call. But I wouldn't have dreamt for a moment of putting Jack on a panel with John Russell, Hilton Kramer and Peter Schjeldahl -- the main art critics for the Times during the '60s -- to discuss current critical theory in photography, photography's impact on contemporary art, Marshall McLuhan's ideas about photography and mass media, or any other such subject.¹⁸ He didn't belong in that company, and wouldn't have felt at ease there.

Aside from Jack's column, the only other regular writing on photography of that period appeared in the camera magazines -- then as now industry-driven and industry-financed, devoted principally to an amateur/hobbyist readership, but providing some editorial space for interviews and profiles, portfolios of halfway-decent reproductions of images, articles on one or another aspect of photo history, and considered if not learned commentary on various aspects of photography. It came without footnotes, bibliographies, thorough fact-checking and other scholarly apparatus, and its production depended more on its authors' whims and tastes (and their publishers') than on any attempt at a systematic overview of the literature and identification of the gaps therein. Still, it has a not inconsiderable value today as elementary chronicling and raw research, and is often the only extant trace of its subjects from that period; we should be grateful for its very existence, and the effort that went into its making, without discounting our frustration at its lacunae and shortcomings.

People like David Vestal, Margery Mann and Ralph Hattersley (all three of them accomplished photographers and respected teachers), Harvey Zucker (a historian and collector of antique photographica who'd recuperated the daguerreotype process, made dags himself, and wrote about early tools and techniques and what we now call "alternative processes"),¹⁹ and numerous others generated lively, informed reportage, frequently useful tutorial texts, accessible and unpedantic history, and what we might call proto-theory and proto-criticism for a wide if specialized audience, one with a hands-on involvement in photography. Even if unaware of the fact, all of us writing about photography today stand on their shoulders and profit from their example.

One limitation of that writing's usefulness was that it appeared where it did, in publications such as Popular Photography and Modern Photography, read exclusively by amateur and professional photographers; I never met anyone (aside from myself) who didn't make photographs but bought those magazines. Another, a corollary of the first, was that these writers -- to whom I'd add Jack Deschin, who certainly felt himself one of their company and also published regularly in those periodicals -- had become so habituated to addressing that readership, with its limited range of interests and reference points, that they rarely engaged with the larger field of ideas in contemporary art, or wrote in a language and style aimed at the medium's already sizeable general audience.²⁰

Which is where I came in.

My introduction to photography as a subject worthy of serious consideration took place during a brief hiatus between my completing graduate studies in late 1966 and my launching myself into full-time free-lancing in mid-1968.

During that interim phase, I worked an an assistant editor at Da Capo Press, a division of Plenum Publishing Corporation, a scientific-technical publishing house founded by my parents, Earl and Frances Coleman. Da Capo had started as a reprint project specializing in works on music, had then branched out into the other arts, and was beginning to generate original titles as well. Alan J. Marks, the editor under whom I worked there, was a knowledgeable collector of rare books and prints, and had begun to turn his attention -- and the press's -- to photography. Through Da Capo and Alan, I came to know and love William M. Ivins's classic Prints and Visual Communication, of which Da Capo produced the first reprint edition; got to watch aspects of the production of the second edition of Paul Strand's The Mexican Portfolio, co-published by Da Capo and the Aperture Foundation, and the creation of a facsimile edition of Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature, with a new introduction by Beaumont Newhall; familiarized myself with aperture magazine and the ideas of Minor White and others; and met a number of photographers working in different ways -- including Benedict J. Fernandez, whose first monograph was then in the press's pipeline.

One day in 1967, Alan walked into the office with a Paul Caponigro print he'd just purchased -- a wonderful rendering of "Untitled, West Hartford, Connecticut," a 1959 study of the vertical face of a rock quarry. He plunked it down on a shelf in front of me, with a simple admonition: "Look at that. It's a miracle of seeing."²¹

I learned some crucial lessons about my own habits of looking and the nature of photographic seeing from that picture of Caponigro's. Long attention to that image, and that print, introduced me to the transformative potential of camera vision -- its ability to help me look at things "not only for what they are, but for what else they might be," as Minor White said. It taught me, too, just how literalized and habitual my own perceptual tendencies had become, how important it was to be aware of my seeing, to achieve some critical distance from it. Over a few week's time I came to understand what Alan meant and what Caponigro had achieved. In some ways, that's where these efforts of mine found their initial spark.

That encounter led to other engagements -- both during office hours and on my own -- with the photographic print as an object and the photographic image as an interpretative artifact. The research I did for the press on its photographic projects during that year, my office dialogues on the subject with Alan, and the faltering first conversations I had with photographers during that time (as well as the discussions on which I was privileged to eavesdrop in the office), constituted a significant aspect of my introduction to the medium. The urge to learn more made itself felt, but was immediately frustrated, at least along the traditional channels of my educational experience: In 1967 there was no history of photography course being taught anywhere in the metropolitan New York area -- not even a course in art history that addressed photography at length. Courses in art criticism remain rare today; a course in photography criticism was unheard of at that time.²² Short of interning at MoMA or the GEH, autodidacticism was the only choice.

So I began ferreting out photography shows, books and periodicals -- making use of Deschin's column, the listings and reviews in Pop Photo and Modern Photography; familiarizing myself with the collections at MoMA, the Met, and the New York Public Library (where you could still call up from the stacks a complete set of Camera Work in the main reading room); and haunting the city's many used-book stores to build a reference library for myself. (The stretch bounded by Broadway and Fourth Avenue between 13th and 8th Street was very heaven, though on the wane, and still full of treasures; now only Strand Books remains.) As the above account suggests, tracking this stuff down was a challenge; at the same time, the scene was still compact enough that, once one found one's way in, it proved manageable, and -- unlike the situation today -- in no way daunting.

Because writing has always served as one of my primary means for coming to terms with my experience, the hankering to write about photography soon began to manifest itself. Michael Hoffman of aperture , who headed that journal's New York office, was the first to encourage me to start putting my thoughts down on paper. The two earliest pieces of writing on photography I ever produced, in 1967, were a review of a new book-length collaboration between Arthur Rothstein and William Saroyan and another of Wright Morris's just-published God's Country and My People.²³

Who was I writing for? Myself, to start with; as Thoreau once put it, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?" In all the media with which I'd engaged up till then -- branches of contemporary literature and music, primarily -- as either a creator or an involved, informed audience member, the active presence of a thriving critical dialogue was a given, the imperative of establishing a critical tradition (in Kenner's sense of the term) understood by all concerned. So it was perplexing to engage with a medium in which the absence of such a dialogue seemed troubling to so few.

Not that this void went entirely unnoticed. Minor White, for one, issued periodic calls for critics of photography in the pages of aperture, and I took him seriously. The thought of making some small contribution toward the development of such a "continuum of understanding" appealed to me. Not only did that critical tradition not then exist, however, but hardly any predecessors even exemplified its possibilities. The closest thing I had to a role model at the time was James Agee. Certainly I admired his few writings about photography, his well-known appreciations of Walker Evans and Helen Levitt (though I found them a bit overwrought and mystical). But his extensive critical commentary on a parallel medium, film, written from the perspective of a lay member of the general audience, achieved exactly the mix of accessibility, provocation and insight toward which I set out to work my way.

Coincidentally, in 1967 I'd begun freelancing for the weekly Village Voice, primarily as a third-string theater critic -- not a slot I'd trained for or sought out, simply a job that needed doing for which I had some appropriate background. Though I didn't know it, the Voice had run a few pieces on photography from time to time, mostly by George Wright (including a piece on Moholy-Nagy in the very first issue of October 26, 1955). Nothing on the subject was appearing in those pages at the time, however.

With great trepidation, as well as what in retrospect seems like enormous temerity, in the early spring of 1968 I broached the idea of initiating a regular column on photography to my Voice editor, Diane Fisher. It seemed a reasonable proposal. This upstart paper, still comparatively new and controversial, billed itself as a "writer's newspaper"; novelist Norman Mailer had been one of its founders. It prided itself on serving as a hotbed of first-person cultural reportage (what was then being called "personal journalism" or "the new journalism") and critical writing -- some of it accessible, some of it esoteric, all of it stylistically distinctive -- about many marginal, cutting-edge art forms: jazz, rock, various other alternative musics, experimental film and video, avant-garde dance, off-off-Broadway theater, happenings and "performance art," new painting and sculpture and mixed-media hybrids. Many of these had audiences about as minute as the crowd of two dozen or so I'd discovered in regular attendance at photo openings and the occasional photo lecture. Why not add photography to that roster?

Having none, I never offered Diane any credentials to support my bid for this role, aside from my obvious interest in the project; and she never asked me for any.²⁴ She did request a written proposal, to run past the paper's upper editorial echelons for discussion, suggestions, and possible approval. I drafted it around the time my son Edward was born, in May of '68. She promised to get back to me shortly with a yes or no. A few weeks later I opened the new issue of the Voice to find my proposal published as I'd written it, with no advance notice to me or time to prepare myself for this new venture. Sink or swim. I decided to swim.