Shadows Captures Photography's Story

Chasing Shadows

at the Fogg Art Museum

through February 28

After four long years of storage, the Fogg Art Museum's permanent photographic collection reemerges in a survey of 40 great masterworks. Chasing Shadows weaves back and forth through the technological and artistic developments in photographic history. A sojourn in the gallery can be both a pleasant aesthetic experience and a fulfilling historical inspection.

The exhibit is an excellent opportunity for both photography connoisseurs and neophytes to introduce themselves to the wealth of the Harvard Museums' photography collections. The collection includes great works by Ansel Adams, Ben Shahn, Alfred Stieglitz and Man Ray. Curator Deborah M. Kao gives newcomers a lucid presentation of the broad strokes of photographic development.

Separated into three three conceptual themes--"Camera Vision," "Creative Vision" and "Constructed Vision"--the selection traces the upstart medium from a mere mimicry of established media to its emerging self-awareness as its own medium, and finally to its larger integration with the mass culture.

The title, Chasing Shadows, plays on the artistic nature of photography, as well as its historically marginalized position in the world of fine arts, where photography's mechanical nature has traditionally relegated it to the bottom of the artistic hierarchy.

"Camera Vision," the first theme, begins in the mid-19th century with the awkwardness of photography's initial undertakings. The original challenge posed to photography was how a mechanical and scientific medium could function as a forum for creativity. Photographers responded by subverting the mechanical nature of the medium and imitating its paternal ancestor of painting.

Matthew B. Brady's reworked and hand-colored studio pictures are miniature versions of the slick and stern protraits of dead white males that gaze out on the Freshman Union walls. It is disconcerting to see how his studio's efforts make the photographs lose realism to become flatly colored images. In mimicking the 19th century landscape paintings of John Constable, Peter Henry Emerson's delicate landscape photographs ironically achieve the realism those paintings painstakingly sought out.

Man Ray's solarized images are a representation of the first significant shift of photography in the early 20th century. Solarization, where a photograph is re-exposed to light during the developing process, allowed photography to be carried away by the whim of chance and accident. The dramatic shifts of lights and darks force a confrontation with form rather than surface.

The dawn of the machine age brought the camera to a new state of self-awareness. Photographers eschewed the painting-like limitations by experimenting with angles, fragmented imagery and new developing techniques. Chasing Shadows' next conceptual segment, "Creative Vision," demonstrates photography's prerogative to meld realism with creative distortion.

Bernice's Abbott presents a fusion of maturing technology and changing times. "New York at Night" (1933) is a sharp bird's-eye view of illuminated midtown Manhattan from the newly constructed observatory of the Empire State Building. The artist's scrawled signature on the print brings startling authenticity to the photograph, which has become a staple poster image.

In the iconoclastic school of Dadaism, photography parallels the development of fine arts rather than emulating it. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Frederick Sommer bring out visual puns of sexuality and tradition in their early 20th century images. In "Valise d'Adam" (1949) Sommers constructs a metaphorical expulsion of Eve from Adam's flesh: a blond baby doll emerging from a menagerie of fabricated objects in the form of a man.

Sommer's tongue-in-cheek composition signals the evolution from Chasing Shadows' "Creative Vision" into "Constructed Vision." Here, photographic image moves away from passive observation into active commentary of society. The final, contemporary photographs focus less on pure aesthetics than on communicating questions and truths.

It was during this era, as photography became less marginalized and more recognized as a serious academic field, that Harvard developed its own collection.

In 1972, Davis Pratt began assembling a collection for the Fogg Museum whose core now numbers 4,000 works. He remained the sole curator of the Fogg's photography department until his death four years ago. The arrival of assistant curator Kao in July rescued the collection from the shadows of Harvard's archives. The entire collection is available for public study at the Fogg Museum's Agnes Mongan Center along with the museum's extensive collection of prints and drawings five days a week. Kao's Chasing Shadows is the first exhibition of the Fogg's permanent collection since Pratt's death.

He has left her a rich legacy. His early acquisitions include large and striking contemporary photographs--sharp visual messages that convey personal knowledge and doubt. The photographic sculpture by Robert Heinecken, titled "T.V. Dinner" (1973), is made of photosensitized linen. Reconstructed as the ubiquitous meal, it comes complete with strewn cigarette butts.

Edward Ruscha's "Sweets, Meets, Sheets" (1975), presented as a sleek Madison Avenue advertising image, pokes fun at the commercialization of sex in selling products. The vertical composition of Hershey's Kisses, beef flank and packaged bedsheets on a red satin background demeans the conspicuous consumption of flesh, advertising and materialistic goods.

Ruscha's works are emotionally and graphically distant from their demure 19th century predecessors. They are linked by photography's challenge: creating image and form out of light and shadow. Chasing Shadows is well-integrated, leading the viewer easily through broad conceptual themes.

A trip to see this minute portion of Fogg's extensive collection is an enriching experience for anyone, photography lover or not. Chasing Shadows captures its masterworks in a substantive framework of photographic evolution.