'Adventures in Photography' and 'Take One' at PMA

The Shipley Miller images, spanning about a century, were produced for journalism and fashion, as well as experimentation, as photographers tested the young medium. As a result, there are many ways to appreciate these photographs, seeing them as historical artifacts, curiosities, and evidence of the evolution of equipment and practitioners.

Taking their cue from master painters, early photographers replicated the style and subject matter of landscapes and portraiture. In Two Figures Before a Town House (c 1845, print c 1860), attributed to Hippolyte Bayard, two barely visible people tend plants in front of a stately home, while Woman and Two Children (1850-55), attributed to Edward Fry, shows a triangular Madonna and child formation, with a woman sitting, a child on either side, looking at a book on a table before them.

Seeing people, places, things as they were

The selections reveal the still-novel ability to record exact images from life, the fascination of which has never dissipated. In the middle of the 19th century, Charles Nègre set out to depict the histories of art and Paris, beginning with sculptures in the Tuileries Gardens. He made just 30 photographs before abandoning the project, making The Tiber, Tuileries Gardens, Paris (1859) a rare print. In the American west, Adam Clark Vroman recorded the vanishing tribal life of the Zuni and Hopi.

Photography offered the average person a chance to lay eyes on people and places they’d perhaps only dreamed of. Those who had never read The Hunchback of Notre Dame or seen a play might still have seen Victor Hugo on his Death Bed (1885) by Nadar, and Sarah Bernhardt in the Role of Mistress Clarckson in l’Éntrangère (c 1876) by Walery, both in Shipley Miller’s cache. Postcards enabled travelers to remember and share trips, as with Lake Tahoe, from the Warm Springs (c 1875-1880) which presents a sunset scene in duplicate, suitable for viewing through a stereopticon.

Show and tell

News photos are well represented, including The Call Building, San Francisco, in Flames Following the 1906 Earthquake, by W. J. Street, remarkable for its detail, from smoke swathing the top of the multi-story building to the clarity of tiny figures standing on the pavement and a sign on a building across the street, “Hale Dental,” which barely made it into the frame. There are photos from Erich Salomon, who used a 35mm camera to record news in Berlin in the 1920s and ‘30s. Salomon, a German Jew, fled to Holland to evade the Nazis, only to be captured in 1940. He died at Auschwitz.

The rise of photojournalism is foreshadowed in prints from a Scot, John Thompson, who shot and interviewed for the short-lived magazine Street Life in London (1876-1877), creating a visual and verbal account of the English working class. The exhibit also includes well-known photographers of the 1940s, such as Horst P. Horst and Margaret Bourke-White.

Beyond documentation

Almost from the beginning, photographers have pushed their equipment beyond documentation to create artistic images through distortion, cropping, and other techniques. The Shipley Miller photos display this tendency in works like Root and Frost, Rochester, New York (1958 negative, 1973 print) by Minor White, a beautiful abstract composition of feathery white frost and deep black root that could as easily be read as a sunflower and pond.

While experimentation is an element of Adventures in Photography, it is central to Take One, which features work such as Blythe Bohnen’s blurry self-portraits, the point of which was not self-portraiture, but to trace geometric shapes with a point of light reflected in her eyes over long exposures. Thus there are Triangular Motion, Small; Pivotal Motion from Nose, Small; and Horozontal Elliptical Motion, Small (all 1974). The shapes are visible when you know what to look for, but they’re hardly noticeable surrounded by the spooky image Bohren’s head and neck made to accomplish the task. I have made many pictures like this, but never by design.

John Divola’s Zuma series (1977-1978 negatives, 1982 prints), 10 of which are on view, are perfectly in focus. Taken at an abandoned house on Malibu’s Zuma Beach, they record the effects of fire, weather, and vandals, the beach and ocean framed by broken windows and burnt timbers, and Divola’s spray-painted “interaction” with the structure: silver, red, white, and black squiggles covering the decomposing interior like wallpaper.

Information please

Take One’s works demand explanation. While it’s possible to understand, at least on a basic level, most of Adventures in Photography with little information (though gallery notes deepen the enjoyment considerably), Take One is mostly incomprehensible without knowing why and how the works were created. Even having those details, I often did not see the point.

For example, there is John Coplans’s ankle-level view of his bare feet: Self-Portrait (Feet, Frontal) (1984). Facing the tips of his toes, we see tufts of hair on the tops and edges of gnarled nails. The nearby explanation says that Coplans made a series of self-portraits from 1984 to his death in 2003, to mark the passage of time and experience on an anonymous body. His face is never seen, and he used himself simply because it was readily available.

Three reactions: One, it’s good to know all of that. Two, I’d prefer another proxy for time marching on. Three, I’m glad only the feet are on view.

Conversely, three beautifully soothing images of water and sky by Robert Adams can be appreciated without knowing why he chose to photograph the confluence of the Columbia River. From the South Jetty, Clatsop County, Oregon (negatives 1991, prints 1993) depicts the farthest western point of Lewis and Clark’s journey; when Adams made the pictures, it was an area endangered by increasing human and industrial activity.

Whether you dive deep into photographic history or merely skim the surface, these exhibits provide an excellent survey of what’s happened up to now. A second exhibit of works from PMA’s contemporary collection, Take Two, will open later this summer. As for where photography goes — as both documentation tool and art form — now that it has become ubiquitous and ever less tactile, remains open to speculation.