Counterparts: Form and Emotion in Photographs, now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is based on a curious reading of Stieglitz's theory of "equivalents" and is intended to establish symmetrical relationships in pairs of images from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's master collection. These equivalent relationships are posited as purely visual; curator Weston Naef writes: "Art stated perfectly in visual language resists restatement in words." He proposes to "examine the underlying ideas, interpret the language of the photographs and provide a valuable lesson in photographic literacy."
This is a promising idea. Familiar photographs seen in a new context might well yield new readings. In Counterparts, however, photographic literacy does not depend on a systematic distillation of tangible evidence in the photographs, but on a process of understanding photographs which is "largely intuitive" and which will "guide us to recognize such emotions as sympathy and empathy." Therefore, the notion of photographic language offered in Counterparts is flawed; a language consisting only of formal elements which cannot be apprehended through reason is a mute and minor language. It is hardly a language at all, in fact, but rather a collection of empty signs, since any language -- even a purely visual language -- must by definition be a system for communication. Naef is explicit about the noncommunicative intention of the exhibit, quoting critic Meyer Shapiro: "What makes paintings and sculptures so interesting in our time is their high degree of non-communication." The proposed structure of Counterparts is thus defined as photographic complements to be received as a visual gestalt.
Unfortunately, Naef is unable to "resist restatement in words." Each group of photographs is grounded by a lengthy philosophical or literary quotation intended to "aid imagination" and to guide the viewer unerringly to a formalist assessment of the images. While the photographic counterparts are sometimes quite striking, the accompanying texts are often oblique, irrelevant or misleading. Photographs by Alfred Stieglitz (Margaret Prosser Sorting Blueberries, Lake George) and Harry Callahan (Eleanor) contrast a plain woman in a flowered housedress with a luminous, direct and sexually available nude. Naef discusses the prints -- which suggest different ways of approaching women -- in formal terms: equal levels of composition and design, properties of form, cool detachment and low relief.
AndrŽ Kertesz and Robert Doisneau focus on entertainments in a Paris street (Fte forain, Paris) and in a stylish gallery window (Un regard oblique). The words here address problems of photographic simultaneity, of being present in the event. They do not remark on the telling differences between the working people who gaze at an itinerant acrobat and the wealthy couple contemplating objets d'art for purchase, or speculate about the meaning of those differences in the years of World War II.
The rituals of sexual commerce are observed by Margaret Bourke-White (Saturday Night, Fort Peck, Montana) and Brassa• (La "Presentation" Chez Suzy, quartier Saint-Germain-des-Pres). These pictures speak volumes about the paradigms for sexual exchange in the American Midwest and in Paris, circa 1930: the Yanks dance, drink boisterously and hope; the Parisian casually inspects the female fare at Chez Suzy. Naef accurately reflects American sexual hypocrisy in writing about photographing in "a real bordello," but certainly Bourke-White would have been somewhat more conspicuous in a whorehouse than Brassa•!
Brassa• and Weegee provide another excellent cultural study, in portraits of criminals. Brassa•'s romance with the beauty of evil is apparent in his Deux voyous de la bande du Grand Albert which focuses on two young toughs; Weegee's Untitled (slain gangster), a sleazily realistic documentation of the bloody corpse and gun spread out on a city sidewalk, is typical of his (and our) crime-scene voyeurism. Here the curator's analysis of photographic methodology and motivation is illuminating.
In counterparts where the photographs are less obviously related, the words used frequently contradict what is actually seen in the images. Portraits by John Coplans (Irving) and Wendy Snyder MacNeil (Adrian Sesto) are discussed in terms of the "glory of the person represented" and the "element of glory deep in the background." What the photographs show are mundane physical fragments -- a face with stubble and blackheads, or a small, lined and rather dirty hand. Obviously, the viewer might well wonder how little information is needed for a portrait here, but glory is not an issue. Straight landscapes by William Clift (La Mesita from Cerro Seguro) and Stephen Shore (Yosemite National Park) are shown alongside a manipulated landscape fragment by Gerald Incandela (Cypress and Wall). Naef writes that each "has photographed aura . . . which must always be a generalization," but what can actually be seen in the photographs is quite specific: detailed physical facts and very different means of recording them. In coupling George Seeley's 1909 gum bichromate (Golden October) to Sheila Metzner's contemporary Fresson nostalgia piece (Audrey -- Vase & Fireplace), Naef asks, "Must contemporary art be avant-garde to be taken seriously?" The question reveals the concern of the exhibit to be not so much a dialectic among the images as a certification of the collection as genuine art -- "art as photography, photography as art" -- and a triumph of form over content.
Considered primarily as art-or-not-art, the most significant of these pairings lose their potency. In Edouard Boubat's Letta, Bretagne and in Brassa•'s Fille de joie au billard russe, form and emotion are genuine concerns. Boubat apprehends his ethereal lover almost in passing; she wears a disingenuous voile blouse over a black brassiere; she seems distracted and does not look in the photographer's direction. Brassa• confronts a coyly brazen professional woman across a pool table; the plaid cotton shirt girding her ample bosom does not conceal the aggressive thrust of that bust, nor is there any mistake about the eye contact with which she confronts the camera. The text meanders obscurely among theories of right brain/left brain, reason/intuition, conscious/unconscious; the photographs come to the point: sex/love.
Metaphoric speculations intended to guide us toward formal and emotional interpretations can result in serious misrepresentation of photographic content. It is appropriate, if ultimately unanswerable, to ask how we can know if "love not affection, tenderness not sympathy, or genuine emotion not artifice" is pictured in Brassa•'s Couple d'amoreux dans un petite cafŽ; to impose that question on Doris Ullman's young black man and woman in South Carolina is not relevant at all. Naef "assumes" this is a married couple, content in "living by the Golden Rule," but they are not wearing any wedding rings. Their expression -- which the text describes as "expressionless" -- is grave. Since Ullman recorded them after a Baptist revival meeting, it is unlikely that conjugal passion is the subject under scrutiny. August Sander's portraits are enlisted as evidence of the "passion of the collector" in photographic motivation, and of the principal photographic pleasure in "recognizing patterns, organizations, and formal sequences." Sander's work was a meticulous sociological study of the entire German people. The Nazis took it seriously enough to prohibit and destroy the work, not because it was a passionate collection, but because it presented an ideologically unacceptable social statement.
In attempting to paint Counterparts with a broad formalist brush, Naef has neutered much of the work the exhibit contains. Ironically, it is the verbal language which the introduction found unnecessary which narrows potential equivalences. Left uncaptioned, Counterparts presents a fairly strong argument for what photographs can say about each other. In visual language alone, Naef claims that understanding is intuitive, and that taste may be used as a synonym for intuition. But taste is never intuitive; it is the product of cultural programming which remains unrecognized and unacknowledged. The photographs in the exhibit, engaged in dialogs as they are here, are a much more eloquent source of meaning if we do not limit our experience of them to formal analysis or emotional projection.
The following illustrations appeared with this review:
Brassa•, "Deux voyous de la bande du Grand Albert, quartier Italie," negative c. 1932, gelatin silver print c. 1975, 11 1/16" x 8 3/4".
Margaret Bourke-White, "Saturday Night, Fort Peck, Montana," 1936, gelatin silver print, 14 7/16" x 19 3/8".
Brassa•, "La 'Presentation' Chez Suzy, quartier Saint-Germain-des-Pres," negative c. 1932, gelatin silver print c. 1975, 11 7/8" x 8 7/8".
Weegee, "Untitled (slain gangster)," 1940-45, gelatin silver print, 13 3/8" x 10 9/16".
