The photography scene in Columbus.

Looking back at the great deal of quality work that has been presented throughout the 1996-97 exhibition season, it seems that Columbus, Ohio is keeping pace with the national exhibition record of photography. But is Columbus's photography surge merely a residual effect of a larger artistic trend, or is the city making a legitimate contribution and thus helping to define its own national identity?

The place in Columbus where one turns to begin to answer such a question is the Wexner Center for the Arts, which has, since its opening in 1989, set the pace for the city's contemporary art scene. The major show in fall 1996 was "Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945," which included the work of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman, to name but a few. "Viewing Olmsted: Photographs by Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander, and Geoffrey James" -- the Canadian Centre for Architecture's seven-year project designed to record and interpret the work of pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted -- was on view this spring. Perhaps of greatest local significance this winter was " Evidence: Photography and Site," organized by Wexner Center curators Mark Robbins and Sarah Rogers, that featured the work of nine internationally recognized photo artists, including Lorna Simpson, Lynne Cohen, Uta Barth and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The Columbus Museum of Art -- which partakes in a healthy sort of cross-town rivalry with the Wexner Center -- has been an important hub of photographic activity this season as well. In the fall, k reopened its significantly expanded Richard M. Ross Photography Studies Center, made possible by a gift (of both funds and photographs) from the family of the much-admired Columbus businessman, arts patron and photographer for whom it is named. The museum has shown two of this year's other most notable, locally-organized shows: " Dialogues with the Land: Photography of Michael Smith and Paula Chamlee" and "Recent Work by Fourteen Ohio Photographers" (including the work of Don Harvey, Masumi Hayashi, Deborah Orloff and others). In the last six months, the museum has also initiated its "Friends of Photography" program, which is designed according to Deputy Director Denny Griffith, "to focus the attention of the gallery-going public on the medium."

So what is at the root of Columbus's outpouring of photographic exhibitions? The Ohio Arts Council has been essential. During the 1996-97 season the " Evidence" exhibition received nearly $14,000 from the OAC alone. The smaller alternative gallery, ACME Art Company, received over $8000 from the OAC for a year's worth of programming, much of which focused on alternative photographic practices of local and emerging artists such as John Philip Sousa, Gaylen Stewart and Yasha Persson. It is more difficult to determine the exact amount allocated specifically to photography in the case of the Columbus Museum, since it is the only Columbus organization to receive "major institutional support," or one lump sum for all of its ongoing programs. But insofar as the OAC clinically considers the Mm of work being presented in allotting funds, and to the extent that the museum showed a series of major photography exhibitions, k is safe to say that photography was well-backed there as well. Additionally, the OAC continues to support photographers through its "Individual Artists Fellowship Program which awards fellowships of $5000 and $10,000 to selected artists. In fact, a separate category has always been maintained for photography (as distinct from the visual arts category) since this program's inception. All of this, as Susan DePasquale (Visual Arts Coordinator for the OAC) points out, is indicative of the state's strong track record for supporting photography in recent years, which she traces back to the notorious Robert Mapplethorpe show at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center in 1989. She also cites the state's relative abundance of large cities (e.g. Cleveland, Cincinnati, Akron, Toledo and Dayton) as another reason for Ohio being something of a hotbed for photography.

Columbus's own photography history began at The Ohio State University (OSU), which offered the nation's first for-credit photography course in 1877. Though originally part of the College of Engineering, the photography program became a subset of the Art Department in 1985 -- effective perhaps of a greater change in the perception of photography as d came to be understood as an artistic practice, apart from a merely technical one. Despite the fact that OSU's own photography program is presently in the midst of a rebuilding process, the University continues to make an impact on the city's photography scene. The aforementioned Wexner Center is itself University affiliated. OSU's influence has also been evident at the Columbus Museum where Tony Mendoza, Associate Professor of Art, presented work and lectured in conjunction with "Recent Work by Fourteen Ohio Photographers," and Jean Fergus-Jean, Assistant Professor of Art, organized "Dialogues with the Land: Photography of Michael Smith and Paula Chamlee" and the Ross Center's inaugural exhibition, "An Ohio Portfolio by Dick Arentz: A New Commission."

From a commercial perspective, Columbus's most notable happening of the seasoned was the autumn opening of the Mauritz Gallery, the city's first and only gallery exclusively dedicated to photography. Owner Todd Mauritz remarked that his business is doing well. And it is telling that such a gallery should open and prosper only now -- especially insofar as this gallery has concentrated primarily on the more established (and thereby more expensive) work of photographers such as Doug and Mike Starn, Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber and Robert Stivers. Drawing upon his past experience in local gallery management, Mauritz characterized his burgeoning, local photography-buying audience as "more sophisticated' than that which he encountered when dealing in other media. Surely this audience has been bolstered by newly developing suburban communities of million dollar homes (such as those northeast of downtown in New Albany or the Highland Lakes in Westerville), which have provided an infusion of new wealth into the greater Columbus community.

Nonetheless, the quality of work presented Columbus this season still seems to have come as something of a surprise, even to those involved with the art community. All of those consulted in preparing to write this article felt that this season's wealth of photography shows in the city is reflective of a larger national trend. Yet while most of those queried were outwardly positive, many passively assented to the general notion that Columbus was trying (finally) to catch up with the rest of the art world. In fact such is often the attitude that people around Columbus seem to adopt with regard to many local cultural phenomena.

It is useful to evaluate this attitude in terms of Columbus's hottest political debate of the spring. This debate concerns Issue 1: a proposed half-percent sales tax increase to subsidize the building of a downtown arena complex. Proponents of this levy call Primarily upon the putatively self-evident argument that "Columbus is the largest city in the country without an arena in its downtown" and an arena "will help create a vital downtown core to take Columbus into the next century" (as proffered in the first line of a widely-dispersed brochure funded by a self-named group of "Citizens for Downtown's Future"). What this argument is telling of, and indeed hinges on, is Columbus's self-perceived lack of a collective identity. That is, pass or fad, what the drafters of this argument took to be its efficacy is grounded not only in the fact that a significant (if not boisterous) segment of the local population feels the need to define Columbus in relation to other cities rather than on its own terms, but also to a greater extent in the popular assumption that Columbus is as of yet unable to identify what constitutes its own "core."

But doesn't the fact that Columbus has alreay become "the largest city in the country without an arena" say something positive about this city in and of itself? And to that end, shouldn't this fact be a point of pride for a city, especially in light of its having no major professional sports team to which it could arbitrarily attach its affections and secure some false identity? From this perspective, the significant stir caused by Issue 1 -- which evidences the persuasiveness of its supporting arguments on the local front -- can be seen to illustrate just how endemic Columbus's identity crisis really is. So in terms of artistic production, this often plays out as a sort of inferiority complex with regard to the national or international art world, which is most immediately detectable in the tempered cynicism of many of those on the local art scene.

However, in terms of the quality of photography shows presented this season, such a negative self-image is hardly fair. Based on the strength and quality of work that has been shown this season, it seems more correct to conclude that Columbus's photographic activity is less a by-product than a constitutive element of the larger present trend. That is, it does seem true that photography, having been the most widespread medium roughly since the late 1970s, is not as new a phenomenon as this season's watershed of shows in Columbus may lead one to believe. Yet it is equally he that qualifying Columbus's current photographic surge as (literally) following or (merely) derivative of national trends -- analogous to the way in which arena levy backers have attempted to recoup the city's putative lack of identity for political gain -- is too dismissive. For in doing so one fails to acknowledge that Columbus is actually contributing to the very definition and perpetuabon of these larger contemporary artistic trends by supporting and organizing such shows. For here, as elsewhere, it seems that Columbus is too ready, especially on the popular front, to concede its own success. Perhaps any local downplaying of the 1996-97 photography season can best be said to resuft not from any true second-handedness, but rather from Columbus's projection upon itself of its own collectively constructed subjectivity.