From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 02/10/01-06:40:50 PM Z
On Sat, 10 Feb 2001 CMPatti@aol.com wrote:
> I don't know Sara Boxer's work, so I can't comment on how much she
> knows about photography, but criticizing her for failing to speculate
> that the older Abbott print was "fuzzy" because it was printed in soft
> focus (maybe) misses her point. The purpose of the example was to
> show how the exibit failed to answer obvious questions it raised.
> She didn't "speculate" that it got fuzzy in fading--she wasn't, in
> fact, trying to explain the reason for the difference between the two
> prints. Instead, she was obviously posing the type of question that a
> viewer might ask but which was not answered by the exibit.
Boxer wrote: "Although much is made of how much better Barnes looks soft,
fuzzy and brown, there is no clear explanation of why the prints turned
out so different. Both are gelatin silver prints. Does the brown softness
come from aging as it does in Carleton Watkins's albumen silver prints?
>From different papers? Who knows?"
That seems to me to fit almost any definition of *speculation.* Yes, there
is some rhetorical interrogation, but still speculation. And the most
LIKELY explanation is still conspicuous by its absence.
I confess, though, it wouldn't occur to me to make an issue of any of it
if not for Boxer's history of misinterpretation & sweeping unearned
generalization. She does better I daresay where she's on more familiar
ground, and I have certainly enjoyed several of her articles, but what set
me off originally was her harangue of pictorialists for being ..... would
you believe, PICTORIALISTS !! She elaborated a sneering dismissal with no
exceptions for such as, for instance, White or Kasebier, declaring in just
about those words that they should vanish and make way for -- ta dah!!!!
MODERNISM !!
In fact, come to think of it, I quoted her in the P-F #5 "Dumbquote File"
(page 47). She'd written [NY Times, Nov 29,'9] what I called "a hymn of
irritation with the Pictorialists for 'smearing prints with gum bichromate
and graphite...getting caught up in the soft, dreamy excesses of
Pictorialism before shaking themselves off and moving on to Modernist
photography.'"
She also called Clarence White one of the "gushiest of the Pictorialists."
In my book, I wrote, that "disqualifies a person for writing about
anything profounder than souffles.... [Boxer] seems oblivious of
masterworks of Pictorialism, of what many of our avant-garde photographers
are doing today, and the fact that the 'necessary progression' of styles
has been consigned to the dustbin of history."
For whatever it's worth, I note that Boxer's rant against pictorialism was
4 years ago. Today she seems to like the "pictorialist" soft focus Djuna
Barnes better, or not to protest the Met's apparent wall label to that
effect. Needless to say, it's impossible to judge from the fuzzy
thumbnail-size newsprint repro, but *as shown* the "sharper" Djuna looked
better to this eye.
Whichever, she is surely right about the Met's photography wall labels.
In several shows of last few years that I've seen they were a shame and a
disgrace.
Judy
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