When you encounter a photograph, then consider it, move along, back up to look at it again, weigh it some more and realize that you have done this repeatedly in a room full of images, you have had a good visit to a museum, intense and surprising.
The current exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York offers that experience of stopping, starting, going back, and retracing your steps over and over again. “Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World” is the brightest and best show in town.
A trio of prints “Photometric Tailoring” ostensibly showing a man being fitted for a suit photographically is simultaneously straightforward documentary and surreal; it is banal, funny and Cubist, mesmerizing and odd.
Curators Joel Smith from the Morgan and Lisa Hostetler from the George Eastman Museum, the source of most of the works in the exhibition, tackle the notion of visual literacy and illuminate it.
They manage to blur the line between straight representational and conceptual work, with the vernacular and the artistically intended mixing well.
The plume of smoke in John Baldessari’s “Embed Series: Cigar Dreams” slyly, almost subliminally, spells out in threes, “Seeing” “Is” “Believing”, and John Pfahl’s “Wave Theory I-V” stops and starts time. The often unyielding work of Frederick Sommer, William Larson, Joan Fontcuberta and Robert Cumming blooms in the context of this show. Marion Faller and Hollis Frampton’s “668. Beets assembling, 1975” adjacent to non-iconic images by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey is clever and just right.
Moholgy Nagy’s “Massenpsychose (Mass Psychosis), 1927” is used as the branding image for the show with a wise quote in the wall text: “images course through mass culture at a psychotic pace”. Everything references this collage, from four iterations of Lewis Hine’s “Powerhouse Mechanic” to a Le Figaro newspaper page with variations of a Paul Nadar portrait sitting. We recognize what the color abstractions Jonathan Lewis’ pixilated record album covers reference. We “see” these cultural icons with the barest of information, a grid of color squares.
There are thematic organizing themes like motion, mapping and measuring. These are not didactic but give the show its fluid quality. A wall of photographs with street advertising includes Eugène Atget, John Thomson, Aaron Siskind, Margaret Bourke-White, Andreas Feininger, Ferenc Berko and Alex Webb. It transcends the typological with wit and an eye.
This is a keen survey of the history of photography told with work that is mostly unfamiliar. An 1887 notebook with the first photographic capture of lightning by William N. Jennings is a scientific discovery that fully clears the path 130 years later for Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Lightning Fields” artful captures of electricity. These are not in the show but Fox-Talbot’s discovery of the photosensitive property of silver alloys led to the development of positive-negative photographic imaging, etc. etc. which takes us to today. We move easily through photo history. Fittingly Fox-Talbot china cabinet inventory has pride of place as the introductory work to this great exhibition.
This is Joel Smith’s third major show here since his appointment as the Morgan’s first curator of photography in 2012. His debut “A Collective Invention: Photographs at Play” (2014) and “Hidden Likeness: Photographer Emmet Gowin at the Morgan (2015) were thoughtful, even playful and worthy of repeat visits. With “Sight Reading”, he and his co-curator Hostetler offer a fresh, insightful appreciation of photography and its history without the usual favorites. The future looks smart.
EXHIBITION
Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World
From February 19 to May 30, 2016
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave,
New York NY 10016
United States
http://www.themorgan.org
