The Brooklyn Rail

At first, Photography as a Way of Life appears as a familiar gathering of the modernist photographic canon and tasteful connoisseurship. Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan were towering father figures in the mid-century assent of the photograph to elite ranks of art. Indeed, the immediate pleasure here of their exquisitely calibrated photographic prints, almost haptic in their intimacy, compensates for any presumed predictability. Their shared pictorial vocabulary established a benchmark for progressive thinking about the photo. The language of abstraction—of tactile and formal rigor—and a self-expressive motivation proposed a visual purity in response to the brutal realism of World War II. In the cathedral of photographic liturgy, the three names roll off the tongue in pleasant syllabic harmony. In the conservatories of photographic trust, they are charismatic accomplices.

Soon, the grand sweep of the exhibition becomes clear as it maps a shared strategy among this trio in the formation of a network of institutions, criticism, publishing, museum engagement, and, perhaps most crucially, an educational infrastructure that would embed photography as an academic and cultural participant. As a premise, it is both startling and self-evident and vividly demonstrates the coordination of parts among the Museum of Modern Art, Aperture, the George Eastman Museum, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. Indeed, Photography as a Way of Life is as much about the careers of each photographer and their advancement as they chaperoned the medium. The exhibition does not seem a matter of cunning and opportunism, as it might be perceived, but of passion and commitment.

The curator, Brendan Fay, has performed a stunning act of scholarship. The Princeton exhibition, which will travel through 2028, is accompanied by a monumental publication of clarity, providing a comprehensive archive alongside connect-the-dots anecdotes. With ambition that exceeds the conventional exhibition catalogue, it is a hefty volume vital to all who are interested in the medium.

The show begins with Minor White, whose archive is held by the Princeton University Art Museum. In 1952, White co-founded Aperture magazine (and served as editor until 1975), a foundational event in this narrative of network. From its fledgling start, and in contrast to other photography magazines that, encouraged by the manufacturing industry, emphasized lenses and technology, Aperture was singular in its elegant rally for a modernist photograph and a platform that efficiently abetted conversation about education. Meanwhile, White’s sensibility as an artist was typified by an illusionistic and voluptuous landscape that shuffled geological formation, water, light, and reflection into “a light sensitive mirage.” With esoteric titles like The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Pultneyville, New York (1957), the pictures proposed photography as a metaphysical and spiritual endeavor. It was a position that White championed zealously through manifesto and workshop.

Aaron Siskind was a native New Yorker who began using photography as a tool of social justice and documentary, and held an abiding commitment to the ethos of the activist Photo League. His trajectory to photographic abstraction provided a conspicuous tent pole in aligning photography with the dominant visual language in painting. In its response to photojournalism, it was a radical and controversial gesture that interrogated the photograph’s objectivity and advanced the idea of the photo as an interpretation, a container of language and a flat surface. Along with Callahan, Siskind’s academic position at RISD and inclusion in the pages of Aperture was monumental.

Revered for his inexhaustible experimentation with the medium—which he termed an “adventure”—Harry Callahan is perhaps best known for his photographs of his wife, Eleanor, as a vehicle for exploration and inquiry: a stark mediation of light and dark on the frame and how photographs translate the world into graphic harmony. The work is both opulent and restrained, characterized by a reserved sense of line and calligraphic mark.

To its credit, the exhibition includes a second chapter in the chronicle. By 1970, a new generation of photographers who had studied at RISD, Rochester Institute of Technology and the newly formed Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, in the spirit of the times, departed from the received wisdom of the photograph as a formalist device. From the tutelage of Callahan and Siskind, especially, came an assertion of the photograph not as an object of wistful contemplation but one of cultural rhetoric. It was not a delicate mimetic device but a public construction, a surface and a process. Graduates of this school of thought and practice became a pedagogical diaspora that propagated photographic thinking as we know it today.

Sixty years ago, making a photograph of aesthetic aspiration was a deliberate and frugal affair—a careful parsing of subject and allotted film frames—philosophically and emotionally diametric to our now daily image rapacity. Photography as a Way of Life arrives at an alarming and awkward time in the photograph’s brief history, as all assumptions about the medium are suddenly shorn of certainty, a profound seismic shift that appears to have wrought chaos and dread. Indeed, the carefully wrought foundation that the exhibition celebrates is under duress: educational institutions of photography are imploding, print media is disappearing (we are told); the photograph no longer certifies the actual.

Is it possible that this bygone narrative of empowerment, rather than a quaint relic of veteran accomplishment, offers some line of thinking, some procedure that would unknot the predicament as we hurtle towards a chimerical image? If history is not a repetition but a rhyme, as is said, will some resemblance, some new variation of media, pedagogy, or museum emerge from a future we do not yet understand? Photography as a Way of Life proves it is an endeavor worthy of hope and honor.