Photography has faced some of its most drastic changes in the digital age. Even though the medium is well known for the ease in which it can be manipulated and reproduced, the accessibility of Photoshop, the affordability of tiny digital cameras and the ability of the Internet to broadcast pictures to millions of people with minimal effort has altered the face of the genre. It has become harder and harder to tell what is authentic and what has been retouched. At any event - concert, athletic or otherwise - the number of digital cameras snapping candids is dizzying. Cameras are so ubiquitous that even photojournalism, the last true realm of photographers, has ceded to the "amateur journalist." Now it's the fortuitous person with the camera phone in the right place at the right time who gets his or her work flashed across major news stations.
So what about the photographer as artist? The Baltimore Museum of Art has taken some of the most iconic photographs from some of the medium's biggest names (Man Ray, Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roman Vishniac, Marion Post Wolcott and Dorothea Lange) from 1900 to 1960 for a huge four-room display of beautiful work called Looking Through the Lens.
The exhibit opens with two depictions of early Baltimore by John Schaeffer. The first is a huge panorama of the Inner Harbor from Federal Hill from 1903. Even though the skyline is different and many of its now defining characteristics are absent, it's not hard to recognize the booming city rife with smokestacks and signs of industry. The second photo, of North Calvert Street from Lombard, is harder to relate to. It shows the ruins of the city after the devastating fire of 1904 that wiped out 70 blocks and many of the cities oldest buildings. The juxtaposition of the two photos, the booming city and its darkest hour, reflects the tumultuous cycle of booms and busts that have always plagued Baltimore.
Another piece in the same room is a scrapbook of photos and ink drawings. Five unrelated photos are anchored to the page by the ink drawings that start at their edges and create a scene that ties them all together. It's a stunning piece that creates a beautiful narrative thread between the two mediums.
The rooms are loosely divided by themes like modernism and surrealism, though you could see many of the artists pieces in two different categories. A series of dark black and white prints by Paul Strand anchored the modernism section which also included Edward Weston's "Pepper." Some Dadaists also made there way into the modernism category, most notably Aleksander Rodchenko and Vinicio Paladini, with collages that married geometrical shapes and photographs.
Portraits were not confined to one "-ism" but rather dispersed throughout. Max Burchartz's "Lotte's Eye," Edward Steichen's portraits of Greta Garbo and an aging Charlie Chaplin playfully "shooting" his iconic bowler hat with his equally notable cane, and Man Ray's film noir pieces of circus folk and Marcel Duchamp were some of the more memorable ones. A large chunk of the exhibit was dedicated to Man Ray and includes some of his famous pieces like "Tears," which is currently stretched across Charles Street on the BMA banner, and "Le Violon d'Ingres" which is a woman with a violin's f-holes painted or tattooed on her back. Tom McAvoy's shots for Life magazine are a little too candid to be portraits but masterfully capture an inebriated President Franklin Roosevelt at a dinner party. Weegee's "The Critic," which shows two bejeweled society women smiling for the camera as a homeless woman confronts them, could be called a portrait of society and offers some comic relief in a collection that is often laden with disparate themes, as the time period calls for.
The Surrealism section could be characterized by the distinctive overlapping negatives like in Imogen Cunningham's "Mount Hamilton Observatory," but one photo stood out among them as my personal favorite. It was Salvador Dalí's and Horst P. Horst's "Dreams of Venus." A photograph of Horst's paired with Dalí's ink embellishments turned a statuesque photo of a woman into a graceful, cinematic sea creature. It is collaboration at its best.
The end of the exhibit moves from urban shots of America and Europe to rural United States during the depression. Dorothea Lange's heartbreaking shots are paired side-by-side with Marion Post Wolcott's, while Ansel Adams's landscapes hold down their own wall.
The exhibit ends with a salute to American life and a series of still lives. It's a quaint end to an impressive and moving exhibit. Photography is probably the best way to capture the six decades that the collection encompasses because it was a time of unimaginable change and circumstances. Only a picture can capture the truth in a face, a landscape or portrait; after two world wars, a depression and numerous revolutions, the truth was in high demand.
