A group of five pictures (two pairs of women, and three pairs of men)appears to be a chronological survey of the possible relationships between individuals of the same sex. It starts out with a 1920 snapshot of two girls playing on the beach, and ends with a pair of young men wearing black leather jackets, iron crosses, and earrings (through the left ear only). These pictures suggest that people are changing and that they are photographing different subjects.
The "Orientation Response"
Diane Arbus is representative of this modern trend. She has photographed new subjects (transvestites, homosexuals and fat nudists), and in this exhibit has a picture. "Identical Twins" that is quite modern in several aspects. It is a print made from only half of a 35-mm negative that has been enlarged and cropped so that it is surrounded on three sides by thick black lines (the unexposed edges of the film). This produces what is called by scientists the "orientation response," and by artists, a pun on the ambiguous relationship between art (the process of creation) and reality. Remember Blow-Up? The Black line is startling and forces this photograph to be viewed as a photograph, not as a scene through a window. The effect of the black line is re-enforced by the use of a wide-angle lens that distorts the twins and makes them ugly.
Distortions
Current issues of Time and News week provide many more examples of pictures taken with a lens that is just wide enough to produce sufficient distortion for the orienting response. A telephoto lens creates distortion of another sort; distance is compressed rather than stretched out. The use of a long lens in Lisette Model's "Street Scene" results in the compression of an incredibly fat woman into a two-dimensional, half-ton, endomorph.
Even Surrealism has come to photographic portraiture. Harry Calahan has four portraits of Elanor. They are taken over a seven year period, so presumably he knows her fairly well. The most astounding picture portrays Eleanor as the Cross, and the Cross as Eleanor. The cross is formed by the vertical line from the top of her buttocks to her knees, and horizontal line across the bottom of both buttocks. It is called simply "Eleanor." But this is the earliest portrait in the series, and successively larger fractions of her anatomy are included in successive pictures. Again, who is to say which is the "best" portrait?
On the other hand, it would be quite easy to say which are the worst. Any art that is gimmicky or pretentious is bad, but in photography it is especially so because of the credibility of photography. We believe that it is a process which gives us a picture of something that existed, as it existed. Tricks and effects that destroy the credibility destroy the art's most valuable asset.
It would be a great shame to miss this exhibit at the Fogg Art Museum, for it is one of the best exhibits of it kind ever assembled. Indeed, one of the most important functions of art is to give insights into nature, particularly human nature; and inasmuch as a large part of that nature is irrational, photography can convey feelings that words, bound by rational structure, cannot. You have to see these pictures to feel them.