Any photographer who has ever worked in a darkroom knows that very few b&w prints can be made without some form of manipulation, even if only burning and dodging. In putting together the current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, the curators were therefore faced with the problem of which photos to include. Unfortunately, their final selection represents a random assortment of images with no underlying unity other than that they were all "falsified" in some fashion.
It is somewhat unsettling to see a souvenir Civil War photo of General Grant placed in close proximity to Steichen's famous portrait of Rodin. Though technically both may be composites, the one is kitsch while the other is art. And this disconcerting placement continues throughout the exhibit. Photographs that really have nothing to do with one another are casually hung side by side. The inference is that a masterpiece such as Steichen's The Pond -- Moonrise is no more than a piece of trickery if only because the photographer chose to add hand coloring to his work.
This is a shame because the exhibit had an opportunity to confront one of the great hoaxes of the twentieth century -- Ansel Adams' insistence that only the straight photography of the f64 School could be considered legitimate. This intolerant position not only negates the great work done by such pictorialists as William Mortensen but more importantly damages photography itself by limiting its scope.
In the absence of any coherent argument, it would have been better for the museum to have limited itself to exhibiting the work of one photographer, such as Mortensen, the great surrealist Dora Maar, or else Jerry Uelsmann (who brilliantly uses montage to create otherworldy images that can most appropriately be described as dreamscapes), all of whom are represented here totally out of context. In its present form, the exhibit is a huge disappointment.
The exhibit continues through January 27, 2013.
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