THE FLEA MARKET MUSEUM.

Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection

Curated by Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York, New York

June 6-August 27, 2000

Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Collection of Thomas Walther

Sante Fe, NM: Twin Palms Press, 2000

212 pp./$50.00(hb)

In picking through a mildewed box of old photographs at a flea market one can experience the curious pleasures of a licit voyeurism. Here flights of the imagination collide with flights of memory. A momentary feeling of transport comes as another's past is almost greedily taken in and shuffled together with one's own history and desires. Pleasures of this kind await the audience of "Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection." Taken between 1910 and 1960, many of the untitled and anonymous images are contact prints and, as such, small enough to fit in the hand. One has to edge up and almost look into them rather than stand back, which provides the exhibition with a notable intimacy.

Perhaps it is because it is in photography's nature to seem to say more than it actually can say that viewers will almost instinctually expand upon an image's meager narrative offerings. What at first appears as the photograph's capacity to tell a story often becomes a matter of collusion. John Berger has said of a photograph's content that "what is shown invokes what is not shown." It is this invocation, this calling forth, that signals the event of photography for the viewer. If in leaning into the images of "Other Pictures" the feeling of intimacy becomes a feeling of having seen them before, it is almost certainly mistaken. One thing is sure--you have not seen them at the Metropolitan.

It would be fair to think of "Other Pictures" as a landmark exhibition for the Met, where the designation "anonymous" is reserved for many works but rarely those of the modern West. The principle of the masterpiece, born in the Renaissance and since transformed into a figure of cultural religiosity, is without question one of the Met's conceptual foundation stones. Even if inadvertently, "Other Pictures" unsettles certain of these foundations. Glass-encased scrapbooks at the center of the exhibition space remind us of the origin of these photographs and their long, curious journey to the museum. The photos are often so suggestive and yet so elusive that the fiction writer in each of us emerges almost by reflex as an agent of explanation. Perhaps because the images have no "master" there is a comfort in allowing and enjoying our own projected offerings. After all, these images are presented as snapshots.

Prior to this, the snapshot has entered the museum only as the "snapshot style" of certain modern masters of photography. The snapshot itself, associated with amateurism and accidents, has remained outside the museum's door. With "Other Pictures" this changes. The sense of motion in one blurred image of two animated men in dark suits and hats pulls us into the men's play; in another, a zeppelin lifts a sailor into the sky as he foolishly holds onto its riggings, an unintended lcarus. These photographs are radical in composition and inventive in how they break the rules, yet they cannot be understood with regard to the intentions of their makers. We know too little. And in this we find our license.

If this is a landmark exhibition, it doe not draw attention to itself as such. As the catalog essay attests, the curators have not attempted to squeeze out of this show a critique of the museum and its reliance on the category of the masterpiece. Neither have they presented a sustained argument regarding the slippery category of "art photography" and its historical construction. In assessing what seems to be the exhibition's capacity to stay out of its own way, it is easy to appreciate its humility. For those who choose to look upon these images as they might an old box of photographs found in the back of a closet, nothing on the part of the exhibition's packaging suggests they do otherwise.

Part of the appeal of "Other Pictures" has to do with the fact that it can be approached both as a collection of forgotten flea market artifacts and as art historical documents. A double-exposed image of a train coming through a bedroom reminds one of both Jerry Uelsmann's photographs and Rene Magritte's surrealism, while farther down the wall a photograph of a man in a glowing suit might recall a happy uncle on his way to a wedding 50 years ago. For many, these two ways of looking will merge into one. It is easy to imagine that such different ways of seeing marked the collector's experience in gathering these images in the first place. Even amidst the quotidian disarray of the flea market, his trained eye clearly did not give up its aesthetic interests. One might say that such an act on the part of the collector mirrors the bringing of "art into life" that an early twentieth-century avant-garde hoped to effect in their artistic production.

Accordingly, it is not surprising to note that the collector responsible for bringing these anonymous pictures to the Met, Thomas Walther, specializes in that same early twentieth-century avant-garde photography, particularly the work of photographers associated with the "new vision." Little surprise also that the anonymous photographs of "Other Pictures" often echo new vision styles. As co-curator Mia Fineman's catalog essay suggests, in looking at these images one begins to feel that certain photographers "haunt these pictures like a pack of jealous ghosts ... There are Eugene Atgets, Alexander Rodchenkos, Man Rays, Robert Franks, Eugene Meatyards, Diane Arbuses, and Gerhard Richters--all anonymous, all manques." Borrowing Fineman's terms, there are decidedly more "Rodchenkos" than there are "Arbuses." These "manques" seem to bear traces of aggressive experimentation with cropping and point-of-view, with darkroom tricks of solarization and negative printing and with making abstractions of the forms born to the machine age. That is to say, they seem to bear traces of the work Walther collects that does have names affixed.

If attaching artists' names to the anonymous photographs of "Other Pictures" is not simply a game of stylistic attribution but also an act betraying the understandable curatorial need to explain in some way the presence of these pictures in a museum such as the Met, the matter is not addressed self-critically by the exhibition. One can appreciate both that curators must choose how to frame their show and that this stylistic-affinity approach is an obvious choice. However, while acknowledging the richness of the photographs and the carefully cultivated intimacy of the exhibit, one also feels that "Other Pictures" is haunted by a sense of missed opportunity.

At the conclusion of the catalog essay Fineman writes that "each of these pictures, in its own irreducible and untranslatable way, teaches us what art can be." In the body of the essay, however, Fineman is vague and hesitant regarding this question of "what art can be." Suggestive, sometimes swooning, language clouds the issue. She suggests that the "errors" presented in "Other Pictures" are flashes of a "genius" that is "something that happens to people": "And while not every bungled snapshot is a minor miracle, some seem to tap into a sort of free-floating visual intelligence that runs through the bedrock of the everyday like a vein of gold." Elsewhere she makes a different case for these photographs and their relation to art: "the photographic naifs who made them were not always as naive as we might like to believe--most amateur photographers are neither noble nor savage, and they tend to absorb the styles and traditions of mainstream art photography like sponges, through conscious mimicry or unconscious osmosis."

The essay avoids discussing the manner in which we declare something art or not. Perhaps a fatigue with "theory" and theory's insistence on recognizing that the category "art" is historically constructed causes the curators to bypass questions that remain timely, important even. Without losing its intimate character, without scaring off those who might choose simply to enjoy the photographs as they might a box of dusty antique store finds, "Other Pictures" could have taken up some of the critical questions that it so interestingly and obviously generates. Powerful as images and potent as cultural artifacts, these photographs would stand up to a critical investigation that might make a more conspicuous effort to explain the making of both "art photography" and the curious line that divides the "manques" from the masterworks. These photographs would lose none of their mystery if space were given to questioning why these moments of genius must also be described as errors. When not produced by a master is art si mply an accident, the miss that hits? Pushing on some of these questions would not threaten "Other Pictures" so much as it would lend a resonance to it.

WARREN ZANES is finishing his doctoral work in the University of Rochester's program in Visual and Cultural Studies.