A NEW STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
In 1904, Sadakichi Hartmann wrote a "Plea for Straight Photography", in which he argued for a "straightforward depiction of the pictorial beauties of life and nature". Over the next 20 years, a new style of photography emerged, championed by a group of influential photographers -- most notably Alfred Steiglitz and Paul Strand in New York, and Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and other members of the f/64 group in California -- which came to be known as "straight photography". In contrast to pictorialism, its 19th century predecessor, which imitated painting and relied on tricks to disguise the photographic origin of an image, straight photography celebrated the beauty of tone and detail that is found only in photographs.
Steiglitz's struggle is long over. Few people question photography's legitimacy as an art form, and Steiglitz and his colleagues, who worked so hard to promote it, are now themselves well represented in the collections of major museums. And yet, despite photography's successes, it still shows signs of insecurity and an envy of the more established arts. Is the recent fashion for massive canvases a new development or a throwback to the spirit of 19th pictorialism?
What are the peculiar qualities of photographs? What makes a photograph uniquely compelling, so that we have no desire to make it look less 'photographic' and more like a painting, a drawing or an etching? First, of course, is the simple fact (although not always simply sensed) that the photograph is produced by the action of light reflected from objects that actually existed at some time in the past. This fact does not, of course, make a photograph "true", but it amplifies its power enormously. Paradoxically, the objectivity of photographs hightens their surreal quality too, by making the unusual more remarkable than if it were entirely the product of imagination. If a photograph is manipulated so heavily that the link between the image and reality is completely severed, so that the authenticity of the reflected light can no longer be perceived, the power of the photograph is lost.
Does this mean that a straight photograph must be unmanipulated? Not at all. Quite extensive manipulation can be necessary to achieve the image that matches the reality, at least in the eye of the photographer. In many of his depictions of Yosemite, Ansel Adams saw a near-black sky in his "previsualization", and the resulting images seem no less real to us for it.
A second unique quality of photographs is their intimacy. You can hold a photo in your hand, and bring it close to your eyes. Perhaps this quality is a historical accident that resulted from technical limitations: a contact print can be no larger than the negative. But it surely gave photographs a distinctiveness that other art forms lack. How many of Kertesz's contemporaries who were not photographers were producing art works in 2x3 inches?
The pleasure of small photographs, however, may be the happy outcome not of a technical limitation, but of a technical advance. I would imagine that few owners of small etchings by Rembrandt take them regularly in their bare hands. Reproducibility is one of the joys of photography, because it makes the photograph a less intimidating and irreplaceable object. Efforts by photographers and gallerists to engineer scarcity by limiting editions might make sense from a marketing perspective, but it diminishes the value of the photograph in terms of the aggregate pleasure it can bring.
The third unique quality of photographs is their ability to capture subtlety of tone. The advocates of straight photography were not Luddites, and they used the best technology they could find. Steiglitz extolled the virtues of platinum printing as a "modern process", and saw no reason to make salt or albumen prints just because they were more authentic. Today, digital printing offers even better density range and deeper blacks than traditional darkroom prints, and exquisite control over toning. Interestingly, the new processes seem to offer some of the qualities that have been lost; inkjet printing with carbon pigment inks on cotton rag paper has more in common with a 19th century carbon print or even a platinum/palladium print than a silver gelatin print.
The advocates of straight photography, while producing very different kinds of work, nevertheless shared some important values that might provide inspiration for us today. They recognized that photography cannot be art if it merely documents. A picture may represent an event or location in the past, but it only becomes art when the feeling it conveys transcends its time and place. Hopper's paintings evoke strong responses in most viewers, Mark Strand explains, not because they are social documents depicting a lost America, or "allegories of unhappiness", but because they "transcend the appearance of actuality and locate the viewer in a virtual space where the influence and availability of feelings predominate". Likewise, the power of the photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange has little to do with their documentary value.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, straight photography recognizes the power of photography to enrich and enlighten us. Berenice Abbott said: "Living photography builds up, does not tear down. It proclaims the dignity of man. Living photography is positive in its approach; it sings a song of life". Photography shouldn't be limited to romantic views; there is room for both Robert Adams and Ansel Adams. And, as Stephen Shore has demonstrated so elegantly, there is beauty even in a suburban motel. But is it really necessary, as Sontag has observed, for one of photography's "most vigorous enterprises" to be "concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate -- but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve"? To have "evinced an inveterate fondness for trash, eyesores, rejects, peeling surfaces, odd stuff, kitsch"?
Julia Margaret Cameron said "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied". For many of us, the longing continues and is never fully satisfied; and this is perhaps the lure of photography.