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Photographers of Genius at the Getty

by Weston Naef
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2004
176 pp., illus. 54 b/w, 60 col. Trade, $60.00; paper, $35.00
ISBN: 0-89236-748-2, ISBN: 0-89236-749-0.
Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name.

Reviewed by Julia Peck
University Wales Newport

julia.peck@newport.ac.uk

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, has published Photographers of Genius at the Getty, a celebration of the twentieth birthday of the photography collection. Written by Weston Naef, the book briefly outlines how the collection was established, rationale for the selection of the five hundred and eighty photographers in the collection, and a focused choice of thirty-eight photographers for the book. Each photographer is represented by three images and accompanying text.

The book is beautifully printed and bound, large in format——9.5 x 12 inches and 176 pages in length. Each image is provided with a page of its own and a large white border; and the text typically opens with a quote from the photographer or relevant writer. The book is roughly chronological in layout; it uses images that are visually captivating, playing with the ambiguity of the image’s meaning and content. Naef seems to have an eye for photographs and their mystery; the photographs are at once indefinable yet speak in eloquent ways.

The seductiveness of the book is hard to measure though——the contents of the book are very familiar, and many of these images have been seen before in similar collection publications. Naef periodically seems to be able to succinctly edit sequences of three images, which sum up specific practices by photographers. One of the best examples of this are the three photographs by Cartier Bresson. If there ever were a selection of his images that would establish him as a quirky observer of the world around him, rather than a straight documentary photographer, then this would be it. Heyres, France, 1932, shows a girl jumping on the beach, her coat flying out behind her, followed by the very famous Valencia, Spain, 1933 of a boy next to a wall, his expression and purpose unknown. The last image is Spain, 1933, which Naef prosaically claims to be a man waiting in a station resting on his case, but his gesture and posture argues for a more fraught and ambiguous moment. The human drama proposed through this edit is not reducible to a few simple statements, nor necessarily connected directly to a world event yet they potentially speak about the confusion of existence in the pre-civil war years in Spain.

The delight of Cartier-Bresson’s selection is not sustained though, and in other instances, Naef seems to opt for providing an overview of a long and diverse career in photography that encompasses changes in approach, style, content, and audience. Carleton Watkins seems to be a case in point here, and it surely would have been tempting to have three images of Watkins’ Yosemite work. Instead Naef shows some of the diversity of Watkins’ photographic output but also stops short of fully acknowledging the extent to which Watkins’ work was commercially defined and driven: It would have been interesting to know if Thompson’s Seedless Grapes, 1880 was made for a commission. The image would have lost none of its power for this discussion, and it would have made a more thorough, methodological sense of the work included in Watkins’ section.

The book’s visual and methodological inconsistency seem to come from an assimilation of some of the ideas from critical writings on photography while maintaining the tradition and structure of the art-history model of approach to photography. The whole production, layout, and text of the book emphasizes photography as art rather than a social history of photography. This is no surprise as the title Photographers of Genius makes a very bold and possibly arrogant claim to authorship and originality on the part of the photographers included. Indeed, Naef makes this claim doubly clear in his introduction through the use of Kant’s doctrine of truth and beauty. In the light of critical work undertaken since the 1970s this is problematic, but it does create a context for the inclusion of photographers interested in documentary and social reform (Walker Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Lewis Hine), together with those who sought an aesthetic appreciation of their subject (Edward Weston, Charles Sheeler and Joseph Sudek). The setting seems apt for the emphasis on the early practitioners of photography where both photographers and critics readily used this kind of language to describe the emerging technologies and images, but it is limiting for discussing the hugely popular and commercial aspects of photography emerging in the later 1800s and the huge changes in direction with modernism. It is therefore not surprising that Naef has not used these criteria to examine the more contemporary works in the Getty Collection, and they remain absent from the book.

It’s not just the reproduction of familiar images that makes this book feel like a repetition. Similar overviews have been available from other collections that use the same art historical framework; Beaumont Newhall and the Gernsheims were leaders in this field some seventy years ago. It is not necessarily a surprise that Naef should follow in their footsteps, having worked in the Department of Photography at MOMA, the birthplace of Newhall’s History and where Naef embarked on projects such as The Era of Exploration. However, this familiarity unfortunately provides the book with the feeling that it’s all been seen before; Naef’s primary purpose seems to have been the establishment of a collection that would rival the other great American collections. This seems very forcefully articulated when looking at the front cover image: Edward Weston’s Nude, Santa Monica, 1936. This image featured on an Edward Weston monograph from 1995, in a book that has the same dimensions as this one.

This familiarity does raise questions about the institutional support that makes Naef’s position feasible. His stance is not necessarily surprising considering his training and experience, but the Getty seems to have been an ideal place for the continuation of the art history of photography. The J. Paul Getty Trust supports both the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute. The Institute provides a context for the critical analysis of art, and their studies on photography include the kinds of analysis missing from this volume. It is clear from this that the Getty Trust has established both art historical and more methodologically rigorous sites for the discussion of photography but has also sought to keep them separate.

Having noted this context though, it seems that the Getty, with Naef at the helm, has indeed established a collection that has come of age. The images they hold are as familiar and hallowed as other major collections, and therefore the collection must have the same importance. The list of photographers at the back of the book is long, but it is a pity that so few of the unknown names remain in obscurity. This might have made the celebration look and feel more unique. To a viewer who is new to photography, or at least to the collections of photography, this book is a solid and predictable starting point, and also full of images that capture and surprise the viewer. To a more experienced reader what remains surprising about this album is the ability of the image to be arresting——despite having been exposed so many times before.

It seems, that overall, the book cannot be recommended for its text, methodology, or even for its information, despite the enormous repository of knowledge that Naef has acquired in order to produce this volume. However, there is a lot to be said for a publication that visually redeems itself despite this criticism and I suspect this will be the source of its success.

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Updated 1st July 2004


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