Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937-1971. (Media).

David Travis, Elizabeth Siegel, eds.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002

Only on the last page of the last of seven essays in Taken By Design, the Art Institute of Chicago's recent history of the celebrated photography program at that city's Institute of Design (ID), does it emerge that, as of last year, the program no longer exists, having graduated its last graduate students in photography in May of 2000, less than a year before the exhibition this catalogue accompanies opened. (The show travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, July 20- October 20, and to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, December 7 - March 2, 2003.) So this party--which follows on the heels of retrospectives the Art Institute gave ID-trained photographers Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Kenneth Josephson in 1999--at the last minute became a wake. It is an experience fans of ID photography know well. The school's Associate Director, John Grimes, who writes the pithiest two essays in the book, points out in the latter, "Epilogue: After 1971:"

"The history of the school reads like the libretto for a bad opera or a comedy routine. The school was thought to have died in 0938 when the New Bauhaus was closed, and it died again with Moholy in 0946. It expired in 0949 when Serge Chermayeff came and in 1953 when the Shelter program was weakened, It was killed by Jay Doblin's arrival in 1955 and by Harry Callahan's departure in 1961. It was definitely over when Doblin left in 0968, and then when Siskind was forced out in 0970. Arthur Siegel's death was the very end of the line in 1978, and the new programs of the 1980s destroyed It for certain, and it breathed Its last with the last undergraduates of 0998."

Grimes (an ID graduate himself, who also contributed to Aperture's 0982 volume, The New Vision: Forty Years of Photography at the Institute of Design) takes the long view on the matter, noting that photography was only one among many tools the innovative school's founder, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, expected of the "universal designer," and that it was a happy historical accident that the inspired teaching team of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind (or "HarryandAaron" as many students remember them) salvaged the makings of the country's first higher education in photography from the embattled remains of the Bauhaus-inspired design school, at a time when photography needed a home in the art world--a home it now has. The school that trained so many photography teachers now teaches digital imaging--still trying, Grimes maintains, to fulfill Moholy's larger goal of "humanizing technology."

The amply illustrated volume also features useful if occasionally overlapping discussions of the ID's educational program by Moholy biographer Lloyd Engelbrecht and Keith Davis, curator of Hallmark's photography collection, as well as shorter essays on ID film-making by exhibition co-curator Elizabeth Siegel; on Chicago's photo scene at mid-century by Larry Viskochil, former curator of photography to the Chicago Historical Society; and a reminiscence of her father by Hattula Moholy-Nagy. For all this scholarship, it is perhaps the most intimate and least ponderous appreciation of what was clearly an extraordinary place at several extraordinary times. The school's early students, Engelbrecht writes, "approached photography like explorers who had landed on a recently discovered planet." From their playful formalism came Callahan and Siskind's stated goal: "from within the framework of a broad professional education to open an individual way."

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