The Brooklyn Rail

In the United States, the 1970s were a decade of changes large and small: political stagnation, economic malaise, and profound technological achievement that yielded the launch of the first crewed space station and the establishment of the military computer networks that would give birth to the internet. Coincidentally, the ‘70s hold the first conspicuous reckonings with the full scope of environmental degradation and our changing relationship to images as the first live satellite broadcasts were made, which also changed our very consumption of media. Our expectations of photographs shifted, beyond a recasting of content and their status as a commodity. Photography began to surpass its once treasured role as airtight documents of veracity, an awareness built of the interventional aspects of the medium, the situationally altering presence of the camera and the inescapability of subjectivity—conditions necessary for the medium to comfortably take its place among contemporary artistic practice.

Transformations: American Photographs From the 1970s frames the decade through the nascent market for photographs, marking the heightened awareness of the very materiality of the medium, as well as an evolution in public perception of the technical aspects of photography itself. With the accumulated status of art objects came the acknowledgment that photography need not be inextricably tied to depiction, and a gradual metamorphosis in perception from a craft (if not a thoughtfully practiced one) to a fully realized art form. Transformations provides an approximate timeline for the epochal reappraisal of a medium still coming to terms with market status and conceptual rigor. Philadelphia Museum of Art curatorial fellow Molly Kalkstein explores this evolutionary moment largely through a showcase of significant collection holdings, and if the included works contain potential answers to the questions of the era, there are as many new ones posed, variously exploring women’s liberation, consumer culture, environmental destruction, and the stirrings of a digital future.

Kalkstein begins her narrative of the medium’s shifting status by delving into the newfound appreciation—and buoyant market — for vintage photographs. A surging interest in the luxuriant prints of the modernist masters of photography resulted in a growing collectibility for back issues of Alfred Stieglitz's journal Camera Work, increasingly prized—and prized—apart from their masterfully printed photogravures. A more obscure product of the era, The Chicago Albumen Works, was formed in the interest of keeping obsolete and obscure early photographic processes alive, producing new prints from the large number of glass negative plates in archives, many unseen. The resultant works, such as Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho Territory (Negative 1874, Print 1980) from the era of grand surveys, are remarkable in their time-shifting capacity, answering a demand that at their original time of creation was non-existent. One hundred years after O’Sullivan was working, Robert Adams created documents of the thoroughly altered American West, and with the same clean subtlety afforded in black and white, explored the consequences of sweeping development across Colorado; in Green Mountain, Jefferson County, Colorado (1973 negative, 1981 print), the stark white planes of modular homes appear as a manufactured bulwark against the looming mountain, clustered together in odd density against the vast expanse, like parasites attached to a larger host. Adams’s photographs of the West document the stresses of population increases and laxly planned development, serving as rejoinders to O’Sullivan’s large plate exposures which sought to celebrate the virgin grandeur of the territory, capturing the same light under very different latitudes.

Technologically, the 1970s were to be the decade of color photography, aided by the practical development of more consistent color printing papers, and perhaps symbolically with Polaroid’s 1972 introduction of their SX-70 instant camera with fully integrated film that no longer required the careful handling of earlier peel apart emulsions. The SX-70, while not inexpensive to buy or use, possessed a uniquely slow-to-set emulsion, allowing for the captured images to be physically manipulated on their surfaces, a capacity immediately exploited by many as a unique artist’s tool. Perhaps the most singularly innovative SX-70 manipulations were made by Lucas Samaras, who in a career-spanning body of work produced psychologically performative self-portraits that deconstructed their own means and modes of making—works that play, literally and figuratively, with the assembly of one’s self, that rely upon the peculiar qualities of the Polaroid film, while simultaneously pushing the medium forward into new realms not anticipated during its development.

In Samaras’s images, bodies are exaggerated and spaces become theoretical while faces dissolve amid staged exultations of gelled lighting with the lurid Technicolor palettes of MGM musicals. Part of Samaras’s Photo-Transformation series begun in 1973, Photo-Transformation, September 19, 1976 (1976), is both a self-portrait and a record of a performance with the strobe light sources visible, while his body has been precisely manipulated with a stylus into a nearly futurist dynamic abstraction, his hands remain unaltered with one holding a delicate bouquet. The technical visibility of the SX-70 film was something new, as traditionally photographic surfaces were only interacted with during professional retouching and the bygone days of hand-coloring; Samaras’s interventions with the layers of uncured dyes not only complement the construction of the tableaus photographed but also complete them, displacing the expected confines of the developed image, expanding the process beyond the rote durations of film-based media into rarefied scales of the conceptual.

Through a similar re-centering of photographic practice, John Divola’s “Zuma Beach” series captures the passage of time by recording his interactions with his chosen environments, altering them with spray painted patterns to yield a document of the act of photography. Divola staged photographic interventions in a condemned house on the titular Southern California beach, returning week after week to make new images and collaborate with decay, from spray painting abstract patterns on the walls to photographing them at sunrise and sunset, catching the blazing light reflecting off the ocean views glimpsed out the shattered windows, colliding the created with the captured. The staccato silver marks painted on the walls in Zuma #21 (1977, published 1982), accentuate the two dimensionality of the image, the harsh, flattening light of strobes collapsing photographic space and yielding a seemingly impossible balance between broken windows and the limitless expanse of the Pacific stretching out through them.

Such focused reordering of photographic space could also be seen in the work of Divola’s contemporary and fellow Los Angeles-based artist Sheila Pinkel, who employed the cyanotype, one of the earliest photographic processes (the archetypal blueprint), preparing large sheets of paper and exposing them to light, capturing only the texture of the creased surface. A cyanotype is traditionally made with a negative, used to make a direct contact print. By removing the intermediary, in Folded Paper (c.Around 1974-82), Pinkel’s substrate becomes the image of light itself, an account of both dimension and duration, the creases yielding subtle gradations on shifting blue in the now flattened surface.

A fitting summation to the narrative of progress presented, the lesser known work of the late, Philadelphia-area photographer William Larson illustrates the inevitable reorientation of photography toward an intangible, electronic future, if one glimpsed through the technologies of the time. Larson’s best known works are collages assembled and transmitted via tele-printer—a specialized fax machine designed for, among other uses, photojournalists to file their images remotely. This series, dubbed “Fireflies” after the visible sparking generated by the movement of the printer’s stylus on the carbon paper output, created prints that subverted the output of the device, utilizing it as one might an inkjet printer today.

Untitled (1973), bears the identifying printed scroll of an amniotic fax cover sheet, while below, a woman rendered in the rolling continuous patterns of carbon toner holds a hand extended from outside the frame, as bisecting marks, resembling graph trend lines, cut across her body amid the hovering errata of a medical chart, or perhaps a chemical analysis, the specificity left open to interpretation. In this work, the visual artifacts of telephone line noise and limitations of print quality would seem to resemble the images beamed back from the last of the NASA moon landings, the process—then exotic—of electronically transmitting images over vast distances, created images that while not digital in their composition, are in effect, copies of which no originals exist. Larson’s collages were finished only in the act of transmission, a requirement to receive the final printed image but also an electronic gesture, one reaching far beyond the range of the acoustical signals they originated as. In their opaque content, Larson’s “Fireflies” echo the ever-more sophisticated and little understood relay systems their production was enabled by, presaging a future in which while data is king, its collection is vague, and its sources all too often unaware of potential meaning. Transformations attempts to locate the key moments when the significance of craft in American image production changed, revealing that the route from the defiantly analog to the dematerialized future was not as circuitous as might be imagined. As our relationships with images become progressively more fraught, and our photographs largely surface-less, it is a history well-worth revisiting.