From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 08/18/02-04:22:54 AM Z
Judy Seigel wrote:
>
>
> These shows have both been discussed at length in the Times by folks with,
> needless to say & of course, their own imperfections, but guaranteed more
> knowledgeable & reliable photo wise than M. Perl, whom I would not trust
> to tell me the Pope is Catholic.
When I saw this comment on Friday, I was in the middle of reading the
newest Perl article and also happened to have at my elbow the Richard B.
Woodward article from the Times on the show at the Jewish Museum, so I
thought it would be instructive for me to read them together and compare
and contrast. I wish I'd written down everything I thought about it at
the time, but I didn't have any urge to respond to the comment then and
didn't realize that I would want to later. After reading this morning's
mail, I do think some response would be appropriate, but since I don't
have time to go back and re-read both articles and reconstruct my
analysis in detail, (I'm sure you're all glad for that) I'll stick to a
general impression.
The comparison between the two articles isn't a fair comparison in a
way, because Woodward's article is long and Perl's remarks on the
subject are confined to three paragraphs; however, in those three short
paragraphs Perl says more, in my opinion, than Woodward says in
twenty-five or so long ones. They both say the same thing essentially,
that Kozloff's catalogue theory proposing a Jewish photographic
sensibility is problematic. However, Woodward shilly-shallies all around
the topic and gives the theory much more credence than it deserves.
Maybe he was assigned the topic and told that he had to cover 40 column
inches with it, in which case all the maybe, maybe not, weaseling and
waffling can be excused, although even under those circumstances I would
like to have an idea, by the time I finish a commentary, what the
commentator actually thinks, and I don't. The useful comments are buried
in the maybes and whatevers, and even though he says at one point that
"looking for evidence of a photographic 'visual' style in one ethnic
group or nationality verges on folly" and at another, "Many
photographers who were not Jewish belonged in [this] pantheon and many
who were did not" which is the crux of the issue and shows that the
theory is not only problematic but useless, and yet still at the end of
the article he starts a sentence by saying, "whether or not Mr.
Kozloff's thesis of a 'Jewish sensibility' proves correct..." as though
it hadn't already been proved incorrect by his earlier observation.
Perl, on the other hand, goes right to the heart of the matter. He says
the pictures have been shoved into a "pasteboard theory" that is too
"flyweight to justify much discussion" as a serious theory, and I think
he is absolutely right about that.
Katharine Thayer
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