Letters to the Editor
Artweek Magazine
Oakland, California
July 14, 1979

This past month, the photographic community has been treated to two major overviews of the medium: the Mirrors and Windows exhibit (originated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City) at SFMMA, and Attitudes: Photography in the 1970’s at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. For a photographer-as-artist such as myself, these events have been exhilarating and challenging: for the local photographic critics they appear to have been disasters. Whether from a refusal to act simply as spokespersons for pre-packaged ideas from others, or from a more petty defensiveness at someone else preempting their role as tastemaker, the critics’ response has been overwhelmingly negative.

A case in point is Hal Fischer’s review of Attitudes: Photography in the 1970’s. In that review, Fischer seems to be determined to judge the merit of the exhibit largely on the basis of whether its structure fits his own working approach to criticism, without making any attempt to develop empathy for the form in which the ideas developed in the exhibit were actually presented.

Consistently throughout the review, I find that his qualitative judgments amount only to blaming curator Fred Parker for the very things that Parker intended to do. Worse yet, Fischer’s method of attack seems (at the least) circuitous, playing lip-service to the validity of various facets of the exhibit while at the same time damning them through accompanying adjectives of highly derogatory connotation — and all the while interspersing his photographic criticism with grossly tasteless personal attacks upon the curator himself. I am, however, not writing this from any desire to set off some tempest-in-a-teapot squabble over whether Fischer’s review was fairly grounded in fact: rather, I accept his closing comment that a validating factor in any such exhibit lies in the ability of that exhibit — regardless of its flaws — to generate a dialogue within the artist community. It is within that context that I would like to offer you my views about the exhibit.

In viewing the exhibit myself, I found Parker’s “visual overload” concept, and the many consequences flowing from it, both delightful and stimulating. Doubtless at some point complexity disintegrates into chaos, but the exhibit should present no danger of crossing over this line if the viewer approaches it with a willingness to consider his own critical input as a necessary ingredient to the exhibit. Parker has displayed a large but selective amount of raw material (the photographs themselves) arranged to form an elaborate but flexible matrix of visual ideas (the groupings of the photographs) upon which I, as artist, can draw. The “packed, salon-style presentation” (Fischer’s term) works entirely to the exhibit’s advantage, placing before me in one visual sweep vast numbers of original works by my contemporaries — all on instant recall, amenable to comparison, and yielding surprising insights into the relationship of my own work to that of others who are technically or philosophically near or distant. If this is what Fischer means by “the viewer being thrust into the role of curator”, I am in favor of it.

And exactly because the groupings were intentionally left open to rearrangement and interpretation, I saw no reason to become hung-up over the specific placement of my own prints within the space — such juxtapositions often tell me something new about my work, or at the least offer an enlightening (or sobering!) view of the way others interpret my work. (Fischer in his review notes the philosophical proximity of my work to Caponigro’s; the Attitudes catalog mentions similarities between my work and that of Lew Thomas; another gallery recently offered me a show pairing my work with “the similar work of Lee Friedlander” — verily, curating creates strange bedfellows!) Thus, when Fischer specifically objects to the only grouping of prints in the show, which includes his own work, I can’t help recalling those tales about early American missionaries who saw no difference between Hindus and Moslems, but became prudishly indignant if you suggested that Methodists and Lutherans really shared the same belief system.

As they were hung, works by the “masters” were no more prominently spotlighted (excepting Heinecken’s TV room habitat) than anyone else’s. And given my approach to looking at the photograph first, and then at the label to see who made it, I had some real surprises, discovering exciting work by artists whose names were new to me, and sometimes finding obvious technical/artistic paucity in a “master’s” work. I consider it entirely to Parker’s credit that he not only had the courage to include the work of “unknown graduate students’ (Fischer’s term) on a merit basis, but that he also had the sensitivity and perseverance to locate such fine examples from a sea of available possibilities. If this be “populist philosophy in excess” (Fischer’s term), I am in favor of it.

The catalog for the show is likewise a refreshing escape from the coffee-table book syndrome that gobbles up the budgets for so many exhibitions. A thousand copies of the catalog were printed, each containing six tipped-in (artist provided and signed) pages, a set of twenty color slide transparencies, a small illustration of at least one work from each of the 247 participants, and a complete checklist of works exhibited. And, in a rare gesture of generosity to the artists, which only a “small, regional museum” (Fischer’s term) would be naive enough to make, each participant was given a free copy of this $18 book.

At the entrance to the exhibit is mounted a short statement by curator Fred Parker, offering what seems to be an utterly genuine and appropriate view of his own role in the creative process of organizing the exhibit: “Often, I thought that this exhibition was similar to a family reunion where distant relatives, some who had never met, were being brought together in a great dining hall. As host, I carefully assigned seating for each guest so as to provoke interesting conversations with adjacent partners. If I have been a sensitive host and positioned my guest well, perhaps all of us will benefit by observing the ensuing dialogues”.

Given such attention to detail, and such obvious value accorded the participating artist as individuals, I do not for a moment feel I have been the victim of “denigrating treatment” (Fischer’s term), nor that “the impact of [my] work is diminished” (Fischer’s term) by being 1/257th of a densely packed presentation. Indeed, I feel far more comfortable in a show in which the funding was spent largely on research and conceptual experimentation than I would if the budget had been channeled toward encasing my soon-to-be-older work in a traveling show or a coffee-table picture book. My hope, then, is that this letter will serve to help neutralize the more poisonous references in Hal Fischer’s review, at least to the extent of reassuring a potential viewer from northern California that it really is worth the trip southward to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art to see the Attitudes exhibition.

Sincerely,
Ted Orland
Ben Lomond, California