CALLAHAN'S CHILDREN: Recent Retrospectives of Photographers from the Institute of Design.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of Two Cities 

The Art Institute of Chicago 

Chicago, Illinois

May 8-September 12, 1999

Museum of Fine Arts 

Houston, Texas 

October 17, 1999-January 2, 2000

Kenneth Josephson: A Retrospective

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

September 25, 1999-January 16, 2000

The Whitney Museum of American Art 

New York, New York

February 22-May 27, 2001

Ray K. Metzker: Landscapes

Philadelphia Museum of Art 

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

November 18, 2000-February 11, 2001

Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of Two Cities

Colin Westerbeck, with contributions by Arata Isozaki and Fuminori Yokoe

Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago (distributed by University of Washington Press), 1999

144 pp./$29.95 (sb)

Kenneth Josephson: A Retrospective

Sylvia Wolf, with an essay by Andy Grundberg and a chronology and interview by Stephanie Lipscomb

Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago (distributed by D.A.P.), 1999

200 pp./$35.00 (sb)

City Stills

Ray K. Metzker, with an introduction by Lawrence G. Miller

Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 1999

96 pp./$39.95 (hb)

Ray K. Metzker: Landscapes

Evan H. Turner

New York: Aperture, 2000

160 pp./$50.00 (hb)

Traditions of photography can form for the serious student a strangling noose, a hobbling crutch, a ladder to freedom.

Arthur Siegel [1]

In 1961 Aperture dedicated an issue to photography by five recent and current graduate students of Chicago's Institute of Design (I.D.): Joseph Jachna, Kenneth Josephson, Ray Metzker, Joseph Sterling and Charles Swedlund. All received the Master of Science in Photography degree from I.D. between 1959 and 1962, making them among the first photographers in the country to hold such a degree. [2] In 1950 the I.D. became the first American art school to offer a graduate program in photography, granting its first advanced degrees in 1952. So it is not surprising that Aperture's editor Minor White--himself a photography professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where Josephson had been an undergraduate--opens the issue by welcoming the new initiates. He congratulates their hometown on doing the same: "Yearly a few arrive at the threshold of camera work. But only in Chicago does the city art museum acknowledge 'arrival' with a public exhibition." [3]

Hugh Edwards, who became the Art Institute of Chicago's first Curator of Photography in 1959, also championed the work of these young photographers--a favor he extended to many young photographers who came to prominence at the time. [4] Between 1959 and 1963 he gave Metzker, Jachna and Swedlund solo exhibitions. Edwards helped Josephson get his teaching job at the School of the Art Institute in 1960 and gave him a solo exhibition in 1971. [5] The Art Institute would provide Josephson a home for the remainder of his creative life, With its school and museum under one roof, the institution embodied in its very architecture the new professionalism in the arts.

Times have certainly changed. Today it takes more than an advanced degree and a portfolio for a photographer to get a museum show, and museum shows of photography are no longer rare. Like most museums, the Art Institute of Chicago prefers established artists to new ones. Now--thanks to the pioneering efforts of Edwards, White and the I.D., among others--there is an academic tradition of art photography for museums to uphold. At the time, what Edwards did was like exhibiting graffiti in a museum today--bringing Stephen Dedalus's proverbial "shout in the street" indoors. But, as a result of his work, few of the photographers Edwards championed resemble street artists at the end of their careers. Photography's history is full of such tales of domestication.

Now the first generation of I.D. photography graduates are retiring from their teaching jobs and having retrospectives--many of them at the Art Institute, fittingly enough. In 1999 the museum hung major retrospectives of Yasuhiro Ishimoto (who received the Bachelor of Science degree from I.D. in 1952, but returned to the school informally between 1958 and 1961) and Kenneth Josephson. (The Ishimoto show traveled to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Josephson's retrospective follows its curator Sylvia Wolf to New York's Whitney Museum this coming winter.) Also in 1999, German publisher Prestel issued a volume of Ray Metzker's City Stills, featuring early work from his Chicago years alongside later installments of his expressionist street photography. Aperture is about to publish a volume of the experimental landscape photographs Metzker has been making since 1985 as the catalog of an exhibition opening in November at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and tentatively scheduled to travel. The Art Institute plans a c omprehensive survey of I.D. photographers for 2002 entitled "Taken By Design: Photography from the Institute of Design, 1937-1971." It will include work by the school's founder, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (whose plan was to reinvent the Bauhaus, where he taught until the Nazis closed the celebrated German design school) and its best known photography teachers Harry Callahan, Gyorgy Kepes, Arthur Siegel and Aaron Siskind, along with graduates Barbara Crane, Nathan Lerner, Richard Nickel, Art Sinsabaugh and others, in addition to those mentioned above. Edwards's successor David Travis will curate the show. A Sinsabaugh retrospective is being prepared by the Indiana University Art Museum, which owns his archive of slender Midwestern panoramas. Scheduled for 2004, it will in all likelihood stop at the Art Institute too. [6]

Writing on the I.D. legacy in 1982, Charles Traub--a graduate of the school himself--ventured that "hardly a university exists in the United States that does not have a photography teacher who studied there or was a student of one of its students." [7] This puts the matter quite bluntly: the I.D. legacy, though not one of household names, is academic education in photography. Callahan--clearly Ishimoto's, Josephson's and Metzker's most influential teacher--was proudly untrained as a photographer, yet he initiated the I.D.'s graduate program in photography a year after he became head of its newly independent Photography Department in 1949. For Moholy-Nagy, photography was but one of the tools of "the universal designer"--not a professionalized sphere of study or an independent art. Ironically, his rhetoric would lay the groundwork for education in photography as a self-conscious modernist art. Callahan left the I.D. in 1961 to found a photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which h is friend Siskind joined a decade later. The unschooled Callahan trained a generation of photography teachers and--for lack of a better term--academic artists.

The I.D. graduates now being given retrospectives were the first generation of art school photographers. Trained at one school, they have taught at many others: Ishimoto at Kuwasawa Design School and the Tokyo College of Photography (1962-66), then at Tokyo Zokei University (1966-71); Josephson at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1960-97), with brief stints at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu (1967), Philadelphia's Tyler School of Art (1975) and the University of California at Los Angeles (1981-82); Metzker at the Philadelphia College of Art--now the University of the Arts (1962-79), with brief stints at the University of New Mexico (1970-72), RISD (1977), Columbia College Chicago (1981-83) and George Washington University (1987). [8] Unlike their teachers, who came to the I.D. as mavericks, these photographers have seldom been outside the academy. [9] An art market for photography developed during their careers, institutionalizing the distinction between commercial and art photography Moholy-Na gy tried to eradicate. Their careers span a watershed in the professionalization of photography, as the "outsider" art was brought indoors. This transition itself is a recurrent subject of Josephson's conceptual art.

Although there is no single I.D. "style" (today the school trains only documentary photographers), certain trends emerge when these careers are reviewed side by side. [10] They range from common subject matter to shared habits of thought. Chicago itself is a recurrent subject, particularly in the early work of Ishimoto, Josephson and Metzker, as it had been for their mentor Callahan. As Colin Westerbeck observes in the catalog essay for the Ishimoto retrospective he curated, "Dramatic lighting abounds in a vision of Chicago to which I.D. photographers ranging from Ishimoto in the early fifties to Ken Josephson in the early sixties contributed." [11] The city's downtown "loop," ringed by elevated train tracks, often looks like a film noir set in their high-contrast early photographs--all black and white, like, that remarkably segregated city. Anonymous figures emerge from deep shadow, often the striped shadows of the tracks. In Metzker's early street scenes from City Stills (1999) pedestrians look like paper cutouts, characters in the puppet theater of Lerner's light box, designed for the I.D. Light Workshop, as the school's photography course was originally called. Josephson's retrospective begins with similar street scenes, in which figures outlined by highlights stand out against deep recesses of shadow. They could be actors from Ishimoto's 1969 book Chicago, Chicago (revised in 1983), a suggestive companion piece to Robert Frank's The Americans (1953), which Edwards was among the first to exhibit. All three photographers play variations on Callahan's jazzy studies of urban anomie. It is not the only theme they have in common.

The great point of contact among I.D. photographers, the point that would long define art school education in photography, is their habit of considering the series, not the individual image, the basic unit of thought. It is an extension of their training in an artists, collective, and of that educational process itself. Traub credits Callahan's habit of working in series (multiple exposures, family portraits, street scenes) with inspiring the I.D. graduate thesis project, which became the school's rite of passage. [12] (The portfolios Aperture featured in 1961 were drawn from student theses. Josephson's retrospective begins with his--on multiple exposure, again in homage to Callahan.) Traub asserts, "The culminating element of student study--the thesis--was perhaps the I.D.'s most enduring contribution to the development of modern photography. One guiding principle that all important contemporary 1.D. photographers have in common is the need to develop an idea into a mature statement as a body of work." Impl icit in this assessment is the allergy I.D. training instilled to accepting traditional tropes of representation, a sense that the single well-made photograph is not enough. Traub elaborates, "They recognized that the contemporary photographer-artist could no longer work as if subject matter determined the medium." [13] Subject matter still matters to Ishimoto, Josephson and Metzker, but to varying degrees each candidly acknowledges the artifice of the project of realistic representation in which they are engaged. That candid acknowledgement defines modernism in Clement Greenberg's influential terms.

The assignment of self-designed thesis projects has become so widespread in contemporary art education it hardly seems remarkable today. But yoking individual artistic concerns to shared formal ones allowed the team of Callahan and Siskind to revise (some would say, undo) Moholy-Nagy's radical educational program. Moholy-Nagy rejected the idea of artistic genius--with the possible exception of his own. He saw his school as a design laboratory and workshop, a place for collective creation. According to his model, no one image, and no one artist, could fully solve graphic problems alone. Moholy-Nagy was interested in serial production, but in typically mechanistic terms. "There is no more surprising, yet in its naturalness and organic sequence, simpler form than the photographic series," he wrote. "This is the logical culmination of photography. Here the separate picture loses its identity as such and becomes a detail of assembly." [14] So might the individual photographer lose his or her identity in the new a rt of the machine, which takes the assembly line as its aesthetic principle and its model of thought, not unlike the chemist's laboratory. When problems are paramount, personality is secondary. Only Moholy-Nagy's rhetoric survived him, but graduates of his school still operate as a loose collective, addressing common concerns although they work alone.

Callahan credited Ansel Adams with introducing him to the series concept with an uncharacteristic 1940 series of photographs of waves rolling onto a California beach, but the celebrated photographers of Adams's generation worked primarily in single images, even when they were assembled in groups. [15] Adams's portfolios, like Edward Weston's books, (California and the West [1940], and Leaves of Grass [1942]), group related photographs, each of which is to be viewed alone. Developing Alfred Stieglitz's idea of the "equivalent," White grouped photographs he deemed poetically linked to illustrate his mystical concerns, and countless documentary photographers from the 1930s on assembled narrative series in magazines and books. But the idea of a series guided strictly by formal constraints and concerns, of each photograph suggesting the next and setting problems for it to solve, is traceable to Callahan and developed to varying degrees by his students. It might be argued that this is an academic model of creativi ty, according to which ideas are constantly refined by criticism--from teachers and colleagues, and from one's own next picture. No single expression is deemed complete, but all are provisional, each awaiting the next. I.D. graduates passed on this working method to their students in turn, but photographic education has changed as it has become widespread, and as modernism has fallen out of favor. I.D. photographers have been part of this change, but where they once seemed radicals, they now look more like traditionalists, insisting upon photography's inherent characteristics as a medium, even as they test its limits. One would expect no less of academicians.

In 1996, the year of Callahan's retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, the Chicago non-profit Gallery 312 (established by I.D. graduate Lewis Kostiner and his wife Anne Neri Kostiner) exhibited new work by the five I.D. photographers featured in Aperture 35 years earlier in the show and catalog Together Again. [6] Ishimoto was added to the group this time, as if to redress an earlier oversight. His abstract color multiple exposures of the early '90s, in which fragments of landscape imagery appear among layers of color as unnaturally bright as darkroom filters and pointillist half-tone dots, stole the show, to which all but Sterling contributed work on landscape themes.

Over the next few years Ishimoto's work, which has not been widely exhibited in this country (despite notable early appearances at both the Art Institute of Chicago and New York's Museum of Modern Art [17]), made several more appearances in Chicago. Between 1996 and 1999 he was featured in three museum group shows and in a solo and a duo gallery show. But perhaps the most significant prelude to his retrospective was the Art Institute's 1998 exhibition of photographs from Ishimoto's recent portrait of Ise, Japan's most sacred Shinto shrine. The site could only be photographed with imperial permission as it was being rebuilt in 1993, as it is every 20 years. (Ishimoto's requests had been denied twice before, in 1953 and 1973.) Apart from the few images reproduced in the catalog of this retrospective, the series is unlikely to be seen elsewhere in America, since it only appeared in a sumptuous limited edition in Japan. [18]

Ishimoto's elegant large format black and white studies of Ise will remind Japanese viewers at least of the series that established his reputation in his ancestral homeland, documenting Kyoto's seventeenth-century princely retreat, Katsura Villa. Ishimoto's book on Katsura, Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture, to which Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and Japanese architect Kenzo Tange contributed essays; was first published in 1960; the photographs had been made in 1954. [19] Before his camera Katsura became a lesson in Japanese modernism, reminiscent of the architectural work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, another Bauhaus master who taught at the I.D. when Ishimoto was a student there and who helped shape Callahan's spare sense of design. As Westerbeck writes in his catalog essay, Ishimoto took to heart Moholy-Nagy's idea, expressed in his 1947 treatise Vision in Motion, that modern design could free traditional societies from parochialism and breed a cosmopolitan International Style--a welcome lesson in postwar Japan.

Ishimoto was born an American to Japanese parents in San Francisco, but was raised in Japan. At eighteen he returned to the United States to complete his education, but despite his American citizenship, he was confined for four years in a World War II internment camp for Japanese-Americans. After the war he went to Chicago to study architecture at Northwestern University, but ended up studying photography at the I.D. Though he has assiduously avoided any negative comment on his internment, it is hard not to recall Ishimoto's wartime experience when faced with his cryptic, tender-hearted studies of the disempowered. It was a position he knew too well. His early Chicago photographs display a keen sympathy with both African Americans and children, whom he tends to portray at eye level, placing him face to face with society's most powerless and playful. Apart from his student years and his return to Chicago (on a grant from Minolta) in the late 1950s, Ishimoto has spent his adult life in Japan, where he was name d a "Person of Cultural Merit" in 1997. He became a Japanese citizen the year Chicago, Chicago was published, 1969.

"Really I grew up in Chicago," Ishimoto says, but one must turn to his photographs to find out what he means. [20] "Though he has lived and worked far more years in Japan, [his Chicago work] is the key to his entire career," Westerbeck asserts. [21] The retrospective he arranged is dedicated to this proposition. (An earlier retrospective of Ishimoto's work was held at Tokyo's Seibu Museum of Art in 1989-90; his work has since been exhibited at Tokyo's National Museum of Modern art in 1996 and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 1998.) As the title of this American retrospective--"A Tale of Two Cities"--attests, this show pairs Ishimoto's early Chicago work with photographs he has since made in Japan, many of them in Tokyo. Of the 101 photographs reproduced in the catalog, 50 were made in each country. The odd one out is a self-portrait, surprisingly similar to a harrowing close-up self-portrait by Irving Penn ("Irving Penn, Photograph of Self, New York, 1993") featured in the last major show West erbeck curated at the Art Institute, "Irving Penn: A Career in Photography," in 1997 commemorating another aging photographer's gift to the museum to secure his reputation for posterity.

Because of Ishimoto's early involvement with the museum, the Art Institute already had a sizeable collection of his prints when he recently donated 200 more, selected by Westerbeck. This makes the museum the primary U.S. repository for Ishimoto's photography. Given that few of Ishimoto's photographs are well-known in this country, it seems odd that many of his best-known images are not in this exhibition. Also absent, except for brief quotations, are many of the projects that have occupied him in Japan. His 1977 volume of color photographs of Kyoto Bhuddist mandalas is represented by only one image; [22] the series of in-camera color abstractions he made between 1973 and 1993 as covers for the Japanese magazine Approach by only two. Other series, like his study of Islam, are missing entirely. [23] Instead of these studies of the contemporary forms of traditional religions, "A Tale of Two Cities" favors the black and white street photography with which Ishimoto began--street photography being a favorite subje ct of Westerbeck's. [24] One cannot help thinking that we have been given an Ishimoto American audiences are likely to understand. It is a defensible, if somewhat idiosyncratic choice, which makes the curator as active an editor of the photographer's many evocative series as he himself has been himself over the years.

With its uncanny pairings of scenes from Chicago and Tokyo, some of them made decades apart, the catalog sketches two parallel lines, two lives, that in tandem have shaped the photographer's art. The point is well taken, but often the pairings seem linked by no more than chance similarities of design. A black boy in Chicago holds a slab of concrete in his lap like a plaything, or a building block (Chicago, 1949/50); on the facing page a line of helmeted demonstrators with banners march down a Tokyo street strewn with similar concrete blocks (Tokyo, 1966/69). Had Ishimoto paired these two images himself, viewers might assume a narrative about social violence. As it is, the analogy seems accidental. Is one to believe the photographer recalled the first image while making the second? On the next page an open doorway in Chicago reveals only a screen (Chicago, 1949); alongside it is a small room with a barred window at Katsura (Katsura Villa, 1954), whose shifting walls are screens in the barest architectural sen se. Are viewers to conclude the rooms of Ishimoto's life adjoin and block access in this same way? There is much in his work--and in this display--that remains oblique.

More fruitful is Westerbeck's effort to suggest the composition of traditional Japanese haiku poetry as a model for Ishimoto's suggestive brand of street photography. In his discussion, Moholy-Nagy's title, Vision in Motion, becomes a mantra for both the street photographer and the haiku poet. Part of the reason Ishimoto's subject is elusive is that he is interested in flux itself--the passage of time, as embodied in the decay of natural and made objects and in the movement of urban crowds. "The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city lures the flaneur like a phantasmagoria," Walter Benjamin writes. [25] Multiply-exposed street scenes like Tokyo (1956) put a human face on Callahan's celebrated Chicago multiple exposures, while many of Ishimoto's recent studies of ice, clouds and decomposing leaves recall the transcendental late Stieglitz as much as they do Callahan's easy grace. Even when he takes politics as his subject, as in much of his early Chicago work (as it appears in Chicago, Chicago), Ish imoto's view seems to be that of an angel walking among the people. "I have sympathy for all people," he demurs, when asked about the centrality of African American subjects in the Chicago pictures he made at the outset of the civil rights movement. [26]

His portraits of children, many of them masked, remain among his most riveting. Like Helen Levitt, Ishimoto understands the street as a theater. What he witnesses there is play. But his masked young actors also resemble the macabre tragedians of Ralph Eugene Meatyard--this is serious play. In a memorable photograph from the first edition of Chicago, Chicago, but left out of this show, a child--or is it a small man?--wearing a drooping mask that is the face of middle age holds up his fists, ready to box. Behind him is a 1950's car, the teeth of its chrome grill bared. The photographer does not strike back--or has he just landed his blow? Even sympathy can be aggressive, it seems. Another memorable photograph from Chicago, Chicago, also missing here, shows a middle-aged man floating on his back in Lake Michigan, his arms outstretched like a crucifix, smoking a cigar. Ishimoto finds ageless symbols

in uncanny places.

Traditional/modern; Japanese/American; disadvantaged/powerful; young/old--Ishimoto relates to all these shifting terms. The photographer is not interested in making distinctions between them, only in charting affinities. Often it seems he aspires to the child's eye view (featured in at least a dozen images in the catalog). In his preface to the English edition of Hana (1989), his recent volume of still lifes of flowers, he refers to "my childlike habit of endless questioning." [27] A book of flower pictures hardly seems an adventurous subject for an established photographer, but in Ishimoto's hands it becomes yet another commentary on a traditional Japanese art--flower arranging--as transformed by his time-based modern art. Nature mort: bloom and decay, in art and in nature, are the photographer's subjects in this deceptively simple volume, at once a child's and an old man's. Serially demolished and rebuilt, his Chicago and Tokyo are still lifes too, particularly when seen side by side.

Whereas Ishimoto approaches the production of a series as a street photographer or a haiku poet, making intuitive jumps between the lines, which Westerbeck in turn mimics, in Josephson's more contemporary work, serial production becomes a conceptualist conceit. Accordingly, in Josepson's retrospective it is not the curator but the photographer who declares the boundaries of each series and gives it a name. Josephson considers all his series to be ongoing whether he is working on them or not. Occasionally he adds a new one, but the rest remain as current, fellow members of the family of his works. The witty series for which he became known in the 1960s and '70s remain his most recognizable: "Images within Images," "Marks and Evidence," "History of Photography" and "Archaeology." These show Josephson serially questioning the assumptions of photographic representation, inquiring whether photographs are faithful representations of the world. He looks high and low, gently ridiculing the old masters of twentieth-c entury art photography in his "History of Photography" series with such installments as Thinking of E.W., Chicago, 1976, in which a nude model holds a phallic eggplant over his or her crotch, suggesting genitalia rather more plainly than Weston's endlessly sensual vegetables and seashells. Another of Weston's classic subjects, the nude woman on a sand dune, is spoofed in Josephson's Michigan, 1970, in which a black and white Polaroid of a nude seen from the rear, as androgynously boyish as Charms Weston, is tucked into the sand dune Josephson is photographing. Josephson's remark about an earlier photograph in which a Polaroid also features--Chicago, 1964, where the small black and white photograph of a tree is mounted upside down on the tree, the picture inverted again within the picture, and so on, in infinite regression--applies to all these early pieces. He was interested in "treating the photograph as an object," he says. Catalog essayist Andy Grundberg argues that in doing so, Josephson took a timely ste p Out of the ghetto of art photography into the broader art world, where his peers were sculptors and conceptual artists. [28]

Josephson's classic series are full of hand-held measuring devices, sizing the experiences he records in a mockery of tourism or pseudoscientific inquiry, mimicking the use of photography as the ultimate measuring device of the "reality" to which it does and does not compare. His series of "Nudes," "Assemblages" and "Polaroids SX-70s" suggest that such preoccupation with the physicality of the photograph, and the poking and prodding from which it results, is inherently a lewd affair--that the bodies of knowledge that researchers seek are always the human body in disguise. Josephson's sculptural assemblages are among his bluntest demonstrations of photographic physicality. In the rather obvious Sally Skirt, 1973, a black and white Polaroid of a woman's crotch is rephotographed on top of the skirt she is wearing as if the crotch shot were a manifestation of the photographer's X-ray vision; the rephotograph is then mounted on top of the skirt itself in a frame. More humorous and more troubling is Sally's Clothe s, 1973, which is barely photographic but which attempts to show how photographs of a certain sort work. A plastic tube the shape of an enlarged 120 film canister is stuffed with the very clothes we see strewn at a naked woman's feet in a photograph that is attached like a table of contents. Vessels are recurrent subjects for Josephson: they help him call attention to the way photographs carry information.

All the series mentioned above were also featured in Josephson's 1983 mid-career retrospective at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, which concluded with seemingly unrelated street photographs he made in India in 1975. (The results of a return trip in 1983 are also exhibited here.) [29] This show would be merely a repeat performance of a well-known repertoire if it were not for several previously unexhibited bodies of work that curator Sylvia Wolf uncovered while preparing it. Two related series are uncharacteristically made in the studio--a hilarious early group of studies of brown paper bags, acting parts as if they were Muppets, and an equally deadpan recent series of studies of books, mostly telephone books. These last bring to mind Abelardo Morell's recent book studies, which, like so much of his work, aspire to a child's point of view. Herein lies the charm and intimacy of so many of Josephson's "experiments," as he calls them: they too assume a childish naivete that, despite considerable sophistica tion, amounts to a running metacommentary on the habit of photographing.

Nowhere is this intimacy more apparent than in the pictures of Josephson's children Wolf includes in this show, of which some are familiar, but many more unknown. His eldest son Matthew, tragically killed in a car accident in 1980, features most prominently in these family pictures from the mid-'60s. Like his father, Matthew seems intent on showing us everything a photograph can be. Photographs are elegant containers for experience and emotion--and for Matthew, gazing up from the cardboard box into which he has folded himself (Matthew, 1966). Photographs also provide news and information; to illustrate this point, the little boy rolls himself in the funny papers (Matthew, Chicago, 1965). Like Ben Shahn's New York City street photographs of the '30s, in which boys stand on corners discussing the news, funny papers in their hands, this turns the photograph into a cartoon. Of course, photographs are about looking, though as Josephson repeatedly reminds us, they are also screens that come between us and what we see. On this point Matthew has much to say. One of his first "pictures" is framed by the caned back of a rocking chair through which he stares intently (Matthew, 1965); years later, almost a teenager, he meets his father's gaze from outside the screen door that comes between them (Matthew, 1974). Here the mechanics of photography mimic the dynamics of growth and separation. Josephson's most famous picture of his eldest son is the one in which they "photograph" each other, Matthew's face covered by an upside-down Polaroid of himself in which his face is visible (Matthew, 1965). Clearly this is a joke on the way objects are inverted on the camera's ground glass. The camera in turn conceals the photographer's face, and in this simple fact lies the poignant suggestion that something must come between photographer and loved one in order for this moment to be preserved.

Compared to these tender-hearted yet sophisticated family portraits, Josephson's nudes seem lonesome and often trite-- records of a recently divorced man's sexual encounters. Whereas the objects that come between the photographer and his children in their games only seem to bring them closer, Josephson's experiments with nude female models, most of them obviously girlfriends, only appear to solidify his isolation. We never glimpse his partner's point of view in these nudes--instead they show the photographer obsessively (if comically) measuring, prodding and stuffing his sex partners into boxes, a serialist who can only boast he does no "real" harm. Josephson's friend Robert Heinecken also had a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago at the same time that Josephson's was at the Art Institute. [30] There is a level of prurience in each photographer's work that; however ironic, has not aged well. Their work stands in stark contrast to Callahan's nudes of his wife Eleanor that also address i ssues of intimacy, but with a much gentler sense of irony about the banality of most family photographs: here she is in bed, in the lake, in the woods, with a car, with a child, superimposed over other thoughts and exposures. Josephson's assault on the politics of the nude is wry in the extreme, taking contour measurements of breasts and penciling in cellulite on thighs, but it is also a good excuse to show some skin. The photographer's sense of humor saves him from accusations of misogyny--unlike Heinecken, who apparently needs to present himself as a misogynist in order to make his point that our sexual categories are screwed up.

The retrospective ends with another new addition to Josephson's oeuvre, the landscapes he has been making since the late 1980s, mostly in Europe. Taking his familiar preoccupations on holiday, he plants or discovers signs of human intervention with nature, resulting in pictures rather like those John Pfahl made in the 1980s. Josephson spray-paints leaves white in the forest, as if they were lit by a shaft of sun (Wisconsin, 1980), or he points out the way a straight line becomes crooked as its shadow falls across the uneven furrows of a plowed field (France, 1995). This last might be his joke on that illustrious Frenchman Rene Descartes, whose Meditations on First Philosophy (1642) were interrupted by the troubling realization that a straight stick, when seen half-submerged in water, no longer looks straight. You can not trust your eyes, Descartes concluded, reinforcing a long tradition of distrust of the body for his heirs. Most recently Josephson has been in Italy, photographing the way fruit trees are wrapped in nets to gather their crops (Italy, 1997). The photographs seem similarly wrapped or muffled, less than fully present. As Wolf remarks, once Josephson's conceptual bent became standard in a postmodern art world, he returned to conspicuously traditional subject matter. These landscapes endeavor to treat their realistic subjects metaphorically, but Josephson's apparent naivete about the landscape traditions he is assuming still seems undirected. By his own admission, he is a traveler in this new work, not a native yet.

"What That we gain from his work is no less than the ability to see beyond the apparent reality of photographic description into the realm of photographic representation," Andy Grundberg writes of Kenneth Josephson's achievement. He might also be writing of Ray Metzker's. In his recent, mature work, Metzker assumes the lessons Josephson has so playfully established and inhabits a symbolic realm of distilled expressions.

The wavering line of Josephson's France, 1995, recurs like a mantra in the recent collection of Metzker's City Stills, until its meaning seems anything but clear, at once exclamation point and lightning bolt. Philadelphia, 1963 shows a wavy white line painted on a black street with a distant pair of legs hobbling past. Traffic direction takes on a whole new meaning, faced with this equivocal checkmark. On its own, this photograph would recall those White made of construction workers and cryptic arrows on asphalt--telegraphic messages from the beyond. But a few pages later it is followed by two installments from Metzker's transitional series, "Pictus Interruptus," in which he is weaning himself of readily identifiable subject matter. In Pictus Interruptus: Spring Tingle, 1980 and Pictus Interruptus: New York City, 1978, that same jagged line recurs like a code, first in white, then in black. The pictures in "Pictus Interruptus" are interrupted by cards Metzker holds in front of his camera, partially filling t he frame and allowing shadows like this line to fall in the foreground. The result is a fundamentally frustrating experience, in which viewers must resolve puzzling figure-ground relationships between out-of-focus foreground shadows like this line and the street scenes in the background that are the pictures' putative subjects--in this case, a fragment of pavement seen from on high and the top of a tall building. Josephson employs a similar tool in some of his first landscapes, holding a sheet of white paper behind a decaying leaf to reveal a pattern of holes through which light passes like a photographic negative (Chicago, 1980). But whereas Josephson shows his hand holding the paper, as if it were the punch line to his joke, Metzker throws his audience into his disorienting visual fields as if they were musical experiences, and this very disorientation their desired effect.

Josephson's recent landscapes pale beside those Metzker has been making since 1985, which inhabit a largely unmapped world on the other side of this jagged line. Best known for his gridded "Composites" of the 1960s, in which sequences of related imagery (often whole rolls of film) are printed on single mural-sized sheets as if all the frames of a movie had been shown at once, Metzker has long pursued as his subject the space between pictures. Several "Composites" appear in City Stills, but that volume culminates with selections from his 1980s series, "City Whispers," in which Philadelphia pedestrians, and the shadows that envelop them, begin to function as overt metaphors. Metzker's photographs are no longer about description, but about revelation, about discovering "the extraordinary in the ordinary," as he has said. [31] Perhaps because the street is such a familiar subject of black and white photography, his newfound romanticism is less apparent in "City Whispers" than in the surprising departure that fol lowed, which left street photography firmly behind.

Metzker's turn to landscape themes began, not coincidentally, on a 1985 trip to Italy with photographer Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, a fellow teacher at Columbia College Chicago (and previous student of Josephson's at the School of the Art Institute) whom he has since married. Thorne-Thomsen's pinhole photography, which came to prominence in the 1980s, is profoundly intuitive and often Jungian in inspiration; it may well have played a role in redirecting Metzker's work. Apart from Lawrence Miller Gallery's 1988 booklet Earthly Delights, which features one of the nine series in Aperture's new volume, these landscapes have not been published before, though they have been exhibited at Lawrence Miller and other locations, including the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991. These are not easy photographs to describe. If they have a subject, more often than not, it is getting lost in the woods. First and foremost, they are vicarious experiences of place, though even the places are seldom named with precision. "I was intereste d in making something more generalized than local," Metzker tells Evan Turner, curator of the Philadelphia Museum show. [32] Any place is his subject; in fact he is at his best far from home, passing through a place, taking its measure. Recent installments from Utah, where he and Thorne-Thomsen have bought a summer home, are disappointingly ordinary compared to the near abstraction of his earlier efforts in Tuscany, or in Michigan and Virginia, all sites he visited on vacations of one sort or another.

"[Metzker] has discovered in nature's inherent disorder a metaphor for the struggle for balance," Tom Goodman writes in his preface to Earthly Delights. [33] One way to ,achieve that balance, however momentarily, is through a photograph. Metzker calls the square format he uses for this ongoing series "a perfect frame for chaos." [34] He tells Turner that whereas Callahan strove for simplicity, complexity has been his goal. Yet, precisely because of the conceptual distance between his work and that of his teacher, Metzker can announce: "I'm looking for a metaphoric element in these people-less landscapes;" or, "I'm looking for the equivalent in nature of what is going on in my sense of my life." [35] That his places are unpeopled, in today's arena of politicized landscape photography, is in itself anachronistic, however abrupt the photographs. His final remark would seem a clear homage to Stieglitz, who coined the term "equivalent" to describe his photographic metaphors, if Metzker did not take to heart Josep hson's lessons about the artifice of camera imagery. In context, this seems an almost ironic remark. Metzker is only too aware of the space between photographs and feelings, between expression and intuition. It is this space that his often unidentified, blurred and rudely cropped landscape photographs represent. Shallow depth of field traps the eye in layers of information, in and out of focus. One possibility that fleetingly emerges is that of a postmodern romanticism.

In these seductively strange photographs Metzker has relocated Moholy-Nagy's visual laboratory outdoors. The sights are generic; it is the relationships between them that matters, relationships of light (which predominates in the high key prints) and dark, of figure and ground, eye and world. These relationships play out the photographer's own invisible relationship to his world. In the right hands, abstraction is among the most personal of arts. In what can hardly help but seem another irony, it is Claude Monet, a fellow serialist, whom Metzker credits with inspiring these photographs, at once classical and contemporary. From the French painter he adopts the idea that it is an impression, not a description, that he is after. Describing the working method that, often as not, takes him into the underbrush--whether in Tuscany, Virginia, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Provence, Turkey or Utah--Metzker says what any I.D. trained photographer might: "Pictures are the consequence of working through ideas. I don't go out to make pictures, but to take up a position, a considered need, an inescapable thirst to draw out a thread and to shape it," [36] His plan remains the same, regardless of the subject: "Just keep working--go out and walk right into it, start taking the measurements." [37] Like Lee Friedlander's recent photographs of the Sonora (The Desert Seen, 1996), which owe a considerable debt to Metzker, these are landscapes in the first person. They approach the world as if it were a photographer's studio, and the photographer's studio as if it were the world.

Schoolmates, like siblings, must go their separate ways. Still, early training establishes certain limits and shows the effects of kinship in time. One subject these three distinct bodies of work have in common is tradition, and its relationship to an ever-changing modernity. The traditions of greatest concern to Ishimoto are cultural. His work suggests that the medium of photography can allow traditional Japan, among other ancient cultures, to be seen through the same lens and set of design skills as modern urban America. Josephson takes the codification of ways of photographic "seeing," especially those of the art photography to which he is heir, as his ironic subject, implicitly broadening them in them process. In the end, intimacy, not irony, is his subject, though irony may be his legacy. From inside the modernist photographic traditions he honors and subverts, Metzker aspires to that final impossible intimacy, a oneness with his subjects, ending up in a tangle of branches instead that is somehow indicat ive of his struggle. For all three, the habit and practice of photographing, of learning the world through a camera, is an implicit subject of their inquisitive arts. The I.D. tradition under which they came of age insists that photography should be about something, in addition to being about itself. In the street, in the studio, in the woods, these three photographers and schoolmates share a playful sincerity, and an ability to spoof the photographic tradition they are among the first to live out in the new professional arena. For them, an education which has since been largely standardized and now, in the digital era, supplanted, represented a fresh start.

The digital revolution briefly turned back the clock to a moment when photography stood outside the institutions that authorize its practice, reminding us how briefly the school and the museum have been running the show. There are benefits to both arrangements, and these transitional photographers had the best of both worlds. Moholy-Nagy would have been delighted by the possibilities of computer imagery and Internet distribution, through which technology bears Out photography's radical potential once again. The ways in which the new technology are being integrated into a reconfigured visual culture, taught by art schools, hosted by galleries--whether or not there is anything in the traditional sense to sell--replay at the speed of hypertext the transition the first generation of I.D. photographers lived out.

STEPHEN LONGMIRE is a photographer and writer living in Washington, D.C. where he teaches the history of photography at Georgetown University.

NOTES

(1.) Arthur Siegel, "Photography Is," in Aperture Vol.9, no.2 (1961), n.p.

(2.) Aperture's survey was almost exhaustive. Only thee other students received the Master's Degree in Photography from I.D. between 1958 and 1964: Vernon Cheek, Robert Hilvers and George Nan, all in 1961.

(3.) Minor White, "Editorial," in Aperture Vol. 9, no.2 (1961), p.46.

(4.) See Danny Lyon's account of his friendship with the curator in his recent memoir Knave of Hearts, (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 1999).

(5.) Sterling--the only one of the five who did not graduate until 1962--was included in a group show of emerging photographers at the Art Institute in 1961.

(6.) Other recent exhibitions in Chicago have also showcased the I.D. legacy. In 1996 the Museum of Contemporary Photography mounted "When Aaron Met Harry: Chicago Photography, 1946-1971," publishing a brochure with Stephen Daiter's historical essay, "When Aaron Met Harry: The Institute of Design's First Twenty-Five Years of Photography." Also see note 14 below.

(7.) Charles Traub and John Grimes, "A Visionary Founder: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy," in The New Vision: Forty Years of Photography at the Institute of Design (New York: Aperture, 1982), p.7.

(8.) The list goes on. Considering only the principal academic appointments of I.D. photographers mentioned above: Crane joined Josephson on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1967 until her retirement in 1993; Jachna, who began teaching at I.D., has taught since 1969 at the University of Illinois, Chicago (U.I.C.); Lerner taught at the I.D. in the 1940s, and later taught art at U.I.C. from 1967-72; Sinsabaugh, who also taught at I.D., went on to teach at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana from 1959 until his death in 1983; Sterling, whose primary work has been as a commercial photographer, taught at Columbia College Chicago from 1964 to 1966 and then for two years at the I.D.; Swedlund has taught at Southern Illinois University since 1971.

(9.) Kepes followed Moholy-Nagy from the Bauhaus; Callahan and Siegel both came from Detroit, where Siegel had been a commercial photographer, which he remained throughout his working life, and Callahan worked in General Motors' photography studio (as Josephson, also from Detroit, would later do); Siskind came from New York, where he had been active in the Photo League, doing documentary projects.

(10.) For a brief discussion of similarities among I.D. photographers, see Andy Grundberg, "Chicago, Moholy and After," in Art in America Vol. 64, no.5 (September/October 1976), p.37.

(11.) Colin Westerbeck, "The Ten Foot Square Hut," in Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of Two Cities (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/University of Washington Press, 1999), p.45.

(12.) Charles Traub, "Photographic Education Comes of Age," Traub and Grimes, p.45.

(13.) Ibid., p.63.

(14.) Quoted in Traub and Grimes, p.65.

(15.) Sarah Greenough, "The Art of Seeing," Harry Callahan (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), p.39: "Ansel's wave sequence influenced me the most. I later forgot all about that sequence and started doing series myself-I thought I was doing something original."

(16.) Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Joseph D. Jachna, Kenneth Josephson, Ray K. Metzker, Joseph Sterling and Charles Swedlund, with an essay by David Travis, Together Again: Featuring New Work by Students of Harry Callahan 1948-1961, Institute of Design (Chicago: Gallery 312, 1996). Copies are available from the gallery ([e-mail]). The Callahan retrospective reached Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art a year later, in 1997.

(17.) As mentioned above, Ishimoto had a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960. MoMA curator Edward Steichen (to whom Callahan had introduced him) included Ishimoto in his celebrated 1955 exhibition, "The Family of Man," and ins thee-person show in 1961.

(18.) Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Arata Isozaki and Eizo Inagaki, Ise Shrine (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995). In addition to the Gallery 312 show, Ishimoto's work was exhibited at Stuart Baum Gallery in 1997 and (alongside his I.D. colleague Marvin Newman) at Stephen Daiter Gallery in 1999. Ishimoto was included in group shows at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996 ("Art in Chicago: 1945-1995") and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in 1996 ("When Aaron Met Harry: Chicago Photography 1946-1971") and 1997 ("The City: Harbor of Humanity").

(19.) Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Walter Gropius and Kenzo Tange, Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press/Zokei Co., 1960). (A new Japanese edition was published by Chuokoron in 1971 and reissued by Iwanami Shoten in 1983.)

(20.) Telephone interview with the author, July 1997.

(21.) Correspondence with the author, July 10, 2000.

(22.) Yasuhiro Ishimoto, The Mandalas of the Two Worlds at the Kyoo Gokokuji in Kyoto (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1977).

(23.) Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Islam: Space and Design (Tokyo: Shinshindo, 1980).

(24.) See Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz. Bystander: A History of Street Photography (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994).

(25.) Walter Benjamin, "Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris," in "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" in Reflections: essays, aphorisms, auto biographical writings (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 156.

(26.) Telephone interview with the author, July 1997.

(27.) Yasuhiro Ishimoto, "Photographing Flowers," in Hana (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989), n.p.

(28.) Quoted in Andy Grundberg, "Kenneth Josephson: The Photograph and the Mobius Strip," in Kenneth Josephson: A Retrospective (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/D.A.P., 1999), p.26.

(29.) Lynne Warren with Carl Chiarenza, Kenneth Josephson (Chicago: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1983).

(30.) For a comparison of these two exhibitions and careers see Claire Wolf Krantz, "Stolen, Captured: Robert Heinecken, Kenneth Josephson," in The New Art Examiner, Vol. 27, no.5 (February 2000), pp.32-37.

(31.) Quoted in curator Evan H. Turner's catalog essay, "Voyage of Discovery," in Ray K. Metzker, Landscapes (New York: Aperture, 2000), p. 138.

(32.) Ibid.

(33.) Tom Goodman, in Ray K. Metzker, Earthly Delights (New York: Laurence Miller Gallery, 1988), n.p.

(34.) Metzker, Landscapes, p. 135.

(35.) Ibid., pp. 111, 113.

(36.) Ibid., p. 117.

(37.) Ibid.