All eyes on Boston

Let us now praise local people

by Clif Garboden

"PHOTOGRAPHY IN BOSTON: 1955-1985"

At the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln, through January 21.

Large anthology retrospectives can be overwhelming. They can also be exhausting, encyclopedic, unfocused, pedantic, self-serving, or frivolous. Despite its ambition -- 30 years/60 photographers/231 framed prints -- "Photography in Boston: 1955-1985," at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, avoided all those sins. Even more remarkably, the show accomplishes

far more than its title promises. Yes, this exhibit documents the evolution of the Boston photography scene through its prime years and celebrates many of those artists and innovations that are especially New England's. (Title aside, the show includes contributors from Boston, Cambridge, Worcester, Western Mass, and Providence, Rhode Island.) But it also functions as a tribute to all of photography -- showcasing the medium's many facets, applications, and purposes to prove that photography offers not just many ways of documenting the world but many ways of experiencing and interpreting it. The time frame is apt; it was during those three decades that photography, in all its diverse formats, gained wide acceptance in galleries and with collectors and critics -- and already, work from that period had taken on the glow of a Golden Age.

Boston has a rich photographic legacy, to say the least, and DeCordova senior curator Rachel Rosenfeld Lafo, who worked on the "Photography in Boston" project for five years, obviously had to make some difficult choices editing down to the all-star team whose works are on display. There's no question that a lot of deserving photographers (probably hundreds, now that I think about it) have a right to feel left out, but whatever/whoever was excluded, Lafo can't be faulted for what was included. And the idea of showing more than one print from each exhibitor gives the sprawling show a sense of purpose and direction that would have been virtually impossible to pull off with 231 single shots by as many photographers.

Having worked as a photographer and photography reviewer in Boston during the late '60s and 1970s, I was familiar with at least 75 percent of the pictures in the show. I knew and/or worked with many of the photographers who made it past Lafo's final cut and reviewed some of their work when everyone was younger. So for me, "Photograph in Boston" was a kind of reunion with old friends behind glass. But you don't have to have had any connection with the Boston photo scene to appreciate this show. There's nothing narrow, in-crowdish, or self-defining here. Neither is the collection dragged into pigeonholes by nostalgia or period pieces. Some photos are loosely tied to their eras by style or genre, but few are dated by their subjects (cars, clothing, or historic events). The prints selected (perhaps purposefully) have that timeless quality of fine art that critics always promised photography would someday acquire.

Perhaps the exhibit's organizational strong suit is its refusal to invent a "Boston school" of photography or to mount the photos in chronological order. Instead, it groups prints by conceptual affinity: technology-based photography; personal photography as per Minor White et al.; street photography; cultural documentation/commentary; portraiture; biography/autobiography; Polaroid stuff; and experimental work.

The first gallery you enter is a claustrophobic sampler room, with a mix of prints from several of the show's genres. They share the distinction of having been exhibited at the Carl Siembab Gallery, which opened on Newbury Street in 1955 and became a major player in the championing of photography as a fine art. The room is heavy on what more-recent photographers waggishly call "chunk of nature" shots -- (usually) recognizable subjects abstracted by tight or inventive composition into suggested landscapes or unrelated forms -- by such pioneers as Carl Chiarenza, Nicholas Dean, and Paul Caponigro. But Gallery One also contains a masterfully composed Steven Trefonides street shot, Washington Street, 1974; an untitled impressionistic blurred-light-and-shadow scene -- romantic and somehow foreboding -- from the early '60s by John Brook; and a sampling of Marie Cosindas's mid-'60s dye-transfer portraits from Polaroid originals. Although the Siembab Gallery deserves credit as a seminal force in New England photography, this mixed-genre gallery is the show's only organizational false step -- a disorienting start to an otherwise fluid presentation.

Things start making sense immediately in Gallery Two. (To create enough wall space for this show, the DeCordova has divided its capacious third-floor main galleries into a maze of smaller rooms -- and still the exhibit extends to the fourth floor.) The theme here is science and technology, and the highlights include Harold Edgerton's famous stop-action strobe shots (Milk Drop Coronet on Red Tin, Bullet through Balloons), which are familiar to everyone as postcards but get presented here in impressive gargantuan format, and Bradford Washburn's majestic aerial mountain panoramas -- both examples of art created for the sake of science. Opposite, photograms (prints created by exposing objects directly onto photographic paper) by Gregory Kepes and others represent art created by science for the sake of art.

If there is any one photo style associated with Boston, it's the application of strict straight-photography technique to produce prints that make metaphorical connections between reality and spirituality, as championed by Minor White, who in 1965 established the now-defunct Creative Photography Lab at MIT. Gallery Three is devoted to White and his contemporaries, who photographed everything from nature to cityscapes as a means of personal expression. As opposed to his more famous oblique abstractions (his signature Ritual Branch, 1958 is absent), the White prints included are strong on atmosphere (staring at his Dock in Snow, Vermont, 1971, you can actually feel the weather). Likewise, Paul Caponigro's Branches, 1966 is the only bare-branches photograph the world needs; it has everything -- depth, atmosphere, intimated animation, allusion to place -- but is totally recognizable. The room also features samples from Rhode Island School of Design teachers and trendsetters Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. (They had to be included -- direct Boston connection or not.)

In Gallery Four, the show forsakes photographers who used the medium to look inward in favor of documentarians and photojournalists who used photography to capture an other-directed emotional experience. Art combined with (sometimes understated, sometimes blatant) commentary abounds. Eugene Richards's First Communion, Dorchester, 1976 -- which shows a stoic girl in her communion dress, veil and all, surrounded by several boys on bicycles who appear to be mocking her -- is a good example of the kind of ideal-versus-actual ironic juxtaposition that's repeated elsewhere in this genre set. Bill Ravanesi's full-color diptych Coca-Cola, 1980/Coca-Cola, 1982 -- which contrasts a shot of an entire urban neighborhood posed along the side of their apartment building (painted with a three-story ad for Coke) with a later shot of the building empty and half demolished -- takes a conceptual approach to the same theme.

Jerry Berndt's no-prisoners photos of Boston's Long Island homeless shelter, Lou Jones's street photos taken in Haiti, and other examples of traditional social realism are powerful and important, but stark documentary treatment of the disenfranchised is something we expect. The clout of this genre hits hardest with Barbara Norfleet's ostensibly non-critical insider shots of the rich and privileged of Hamilton and Beacon Hill -- all the more disturbing because the subjects are too real to be dismissed as caricatures.

These pictures spill over into Gallery Five, where the theme shifts to cultural documentary -- the quaint and peculiar (eccentrics, roadside attractions, idiosyncratic homespun decor) rendered surreal by the very fact that it was photographed. You can read elements of cultural slumming and affectionate condescension into this sort of work, but it's irresistible, and in the end, you come away respecting the sincerity and genuineness of the subjects. If anything, over-the-top portraits like Jim Stone's Ada MacGregor and Her Squash: Lacrosse, Wisconsin, 1984 and Retired Upholsterer Who Covered His House with Beer Cans . . . 1983 turn their subjects into admittedly comic heroes of American individuality.

Gallery Six offers portraiture, starting off with one of Elsa Dorfman's familiar 1973 self-portraits and her informal studies of Allen Ginsberg and Morris Litsky. And there are a few funky color portraits by Nan Goldin. But it's in this gallery that the exhibit raises the question of whether there really is some unifying stylistic approach that characterizes Boston photography. Hung between Dorfman's work and Goldin's, large-format portraits by Shellburne Thurber and David Armstrong seem inexplicably out of place -- there's a gloss to their lighting and æsthetics that yells, "I belong in New York!" If there is a justification (beyond regional chauvinism) to exhibiting photographers exclusively from the Boston orbit, it could be that their work shares an element of seams-showing Yankee pragmatism that boils down to being less commercial. It's tempting to speculate that most of the photographers shown here were indeed subject to a common environmental influence -- an approach to photography based in the field or in the lab, not in the fashion studio. Just a thought.

Upstairs in Gallery Seven (a hallway) the theme is biography and autobiography. Vaughn Sills's Untitled (Mother and Self), 1984-1986 is an unfamiliar standout, and Karl Baden's photographic fun with his own head adds a cutting-edge approach neglected in many of the other galleries. Examples of Melissa Shook's subtle series of sequential/aging portraits are classics, and in case anyone missed the point, this set ends with Nicholas Nixon's pair of group portraits of The Brown Sisters taken a decade apart.

Gallery Eight is devoted to Polaroid, which provided major funding for "Photography in Boston." Starting in the late '60s, Polaroid funded photographers and photo projects through the Polaroid Artist Support Program, partly to support the arts and partly to prompt the integration of instant photography (then considered a snapshot medium) into the fine arts. It was a laudable effort that produced some remarkable work. (Confession: this reviewer worked for Polaroid on the fringes of this initiative.) Alas, with the exception of Dorfman's success at turning 20x24 instant photography into a high-concept approach to portraiture, the strongest surviving works of the Artist Support Program are good pictures that are indistinguishable from photos made using conventional technology (e.g., Starr Ockenga's peculiar untitled baby portraits, Jim Stone's 950 Hats, Don's Bar: Memphis, Nebraska, 1983 [in Gallery Five], and Marie Cosindas's rich color portraits). Nevertheless, the restrictions and the potential of Polaroid products, from the quirky SX-70 format to the exquisite black-and-white instant-negative film, provoked a lot of visual and technical experimentation -- Rosamond Purcell's double-negative constructions Mermaid #1, 1970 and Man Behind the House, late 1970s, for example.

Experimentation is where "Photography in Boston" leaves off, in Gallery Nine. The category seems almost gratuitous given the accomplished experimentation shown with the science works and the Polaroids. And much of what's here could have been folded into other categories -- selections from David Akiba's xeroxed and manipulated "Faces" series into portraits; Jane Tuckerman's infrared shots of Benares, India, into documentary. Still, it's as good a climax as any to what might be the most stimulating photo show we've seen in years.

"Photography in Boston" is the first of three scheduled regional retrospectives at the DeCordova -- "Painting in Boston," and "Sculpture in Boston" are still in the planning stages. Those may yet present challenges that defeat the museum's staff, but this freshman effort, at least, is an astounding success. It's difficult to imagine that an exhibit that tries to do justice to such a broad theme could be so enjoyable or provoke so many deep thoughts.

The thread that binds this mammoth selection of photographs may be regional, but the show's import is universal. Whereas other museums seem bent on festooning photography shows with gimmicks and forced notions, the DeCordova, now in its 50th year of operation and an active supporter of photography for most of that time, has given us nothing less than an old-school curatorial masterpiece. "Photography in Boston" speaks for itself, and that's high praise.

The DeCordova is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call (781) 259-8355.