PHOTOGRAPHY AND FASCINATION

by Max Kozloff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1979

It may not be accidental that the best writing on photography--John Szarkowski, Susan Sontag--is very brief; the longer the commentary, the less it seems to say. In the present collection, the title piece devotes over 50 pages to expanding on the voyeuristic nature of the photograph--comparing it to the novel, the tape recorder, and wiretapping--and its countervailing ""fascination"": ""the regard for the photograph as talismanic object, invested with symbolic integrity of its own."" Make what you will of that, it won't get you closer to a single photo. Nor for the most part will the other pieces, whether on groups of photographs or individual photographers or photographic phenomena. Kozloff, an art critic and a former editor of Artforum, appears to be in a double bind; he's hung up on photographs as photography and as ideology. In ""Photos within Photographs,"" for instance, he discusses Dorothea Lange's photo of an old, framed picture of a Nisei baseball team next to an American flag (part of her series on the WW II internment of Japanese-Americans); in this, he says, ""the artist's politics collides with family life, turning what was innocently private into the public sphere of irony and disillusion""--as if similar ironic images were not based on other chance juxtapositions, regardless of the media involved. And as if photography was somehow still an interloper. One speculates because there is so little here of substance. To discuss Lartigue and Cartier-Bresson, Kozloff compares them, then rightly disowns the ""somewhat heavy-handed"" comparison, then--by comparison with both--disparages Robert Frank and Bill Brandt. But then nothing is clearly and plainly put: apropos of Danny Lyons' Texas prison photos, Kozloff asks rhetorically, ""Should a human life be entombed by a system that is more anti-social in its aggregate than the average infractions of its members?"" Two sections, on Moholy-Nagy and ""The Coming Age of Color,"" rise above the murky norm with pertinent observations and even some information. But mostly these pieces have the effect of making all photography obscure.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Addison House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION