Our last day in New England coincided with the opening day of this exhibit at
the Portland Museum of Art. We had time to
pack, drive to Portland for the museum, and on to Boston for our latish flight.
For anyone interested in the history of photography in the US in the early
20th. century, I think it's an interesting
and useful exhibit. I enjoyed it, but it didn't seem to me to be worth any
great expenditure of effort to get there.
Fortunately, it nicely filled the middle of an often rainy day.
The intent of the exhibit is fairly narrow. As a result, it does a pretty good
job of illustrating its focus on the
transition in the early 20th. century from the pictorialist tradition of the
latter 19th. century to a more literal,
realist approach.
Pictorialism is illustrated with a number of prints. To keep the comparison
meaningful, they are from photographers in
the same area where Group f/64 developed. I believe they are all contact
prints, predominantly 8x10", but with several
smaller.
Group f/64 is represented by a group of prints by its members. I believe they
are all 8x10 contact prints.
In one of its more interesting aspects, several photographers are represented
by one or more print(s) from before and
one or more after they adopted the new style.
What the exhibit is not is a place to see prints of famous images. I don't know
the pictorialists well, but I think it's
mostly less than major works. And yes, there are several Ansel Adams prints,
but again, early, relatively minor work. I
only recognized one or two. The only obviously famous print is Edward Weston's
nautilus shell.
What I took away from the exhibit is that good art is an expression of the
artist's vision, not the technique or school
to which the artist belongs. Some of the pictorialist prints engaged me, some
were mildly interesting, some did nothing
for me. The same was true of the f/64 images.
It seems to me that the dialog (rather than competition) between literalism and
impressionism, art and craft, focus on
the result as art object and focus on image as representation of subject, goes
on today, both here and all around us.
That's good, in my book.
Critical Art Moose
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