Time to refocus

At the US National Gallery of Art alone,weve seen shows of non-art snapshots by anonymous photographers and of deluxe artistic still lifes by Irving Pennsome from Vogue magazine. Weve seen images by photographic pioneers such as Francis Frith and Eugene Atget as well as by later photographers such as Andre Kertesz,Robert Frank and Nicholas Nixon. The Corcoran Gallery of Art has given us Leibovitz and Richard Avedon on the commercial end of things,and the purely artistic reportage of William Eggleston,who pioneered the non-commercial use of colour film.

Its a willingness to see that photography includes all these different disciplines, says curator Sarah Greenough,in charge of the photography holdings at the National Gallery.

Arts other media dont get received that way. A successful commercial painter such as Tom Jung,who did the ultra-iconic Star Wars poster,doesnt receive art-museum attention.

What makes photography alone such an equal-opportunity art form? From the moment of Louis Daguerres announcement of photographys birth in 1839,people have wondered whether it would turn out to be art or not.

By the 1920s and 30s,when photography began to be accepted as an art form,there was a natural tendency to read art into all the images that had come before,if only because they had pioneered the new medium. This was a moment when all kinds of non-art was being press-ganged into serving as art: ritual objects from Africa were seen and used as European modern art. So were pictures by children. Old ads were being retrofitted into the collages of Max Ernst and a pile of coat hangers could become a ready-made sculpture by Man Ray. What could be easier than to re-see,a non-art photo as a high-art one?

Philip Brookman,photo curator,points out that photography itself has something of the ready-made built into it. Whatever a picture looks like,whether crude and amateurish or refined and artistic,theres always a sense that it simply hands its contents over for our contemplation,the way Man Ray could get us looking at those hangers or Marcel Duchamp could hand a urinal to us as art. Once you put it up on the wall in a museum,its art.

The 1920s marked the moment when a more modern art of photography had started embracing the crispness of commercial and industrial work. Since the same photographers were making art and non-art images,its no wonder the border between them got fuzzy. Commercial photography could be ambitious and experimental in a way that commercial painting has barely ever been. Photography was such a new medium,there was room for invention in every part of it. The fashion and editorial shots of Avedon and Penn made a real contribution to the way all photos look and work.

So the question isnt whether photography is art. The question is whether,looking ahead,well keep seeing it spread as broad. On the commercial side especially,room for innovation may be shutting down. Were seeing repetition instead.

My gripe with Leibovitz is that shes copycatting Avedon. In a recent survey of the most radical of recent fashion shots,most of the pictures could have been taken in 1982 or before. Some of the photojournalism that wins prizes is now more arty than before,but in the most cliched,old-fashioned way. Even the Hubbles deep-space shots are weaker than their predecessors from the early years of astronomical photography: commercial photography has moved away from documenting the world and toward fancifying it. But its not clear that there are new ways left to make a photo fancy,the way there were when Adams or Avedon or even Frank were doing so.

This year,photography is celebrating its 170th birthday. Theres a chance that,in its old age,it is starting to suffer straitened circumstances. Some genius may need to come along and bail it out.