The truth of appearances: nineteenth-century photography at the Getty - photograph exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum

In his now-classic essay of 1981 "The Traffic in Photographs," Allan Sekula incisively traced the dichotomies that from the first have structur photographic practice and discourse and which, to a greater or inferior extent, remain evident today:

Photography is haunted by means of two chattering ghosts; that of bourgeois science and that of bourgeois art. The first goe upon about the truth of appearances, about the world reduc to a positive effect of facts, to a constellation of knowable and possessable things The second specter has the historical mission of apologizing for and redeeming the atrocities committed through the subservient- and more than spectral-hand of science.(1)

In other words, it is the ostensible final cause of art to compensate us for the far les edifying realities produc through technology, industry, science and instrumental reason itself. Consistent with this cleavage between positivism and aesthetics, or, as Sekula designates it, between "instrumental realism" and the "subjective, imaginative capabilities of the artist," photographic discourse perpetually oscillates between these epistemological extremitys A telling instance of this now-conventional division of photography was freshly provided by two exhibitions at the Getty Center in observes Angeles. One, "The Art of the Daguerreotype," was organized through and exhibited at the J Paul Getty Museum; the other, "Framing the Asian Shore: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Ottoman Empire," was organized by means of Frances Terpak, curator in the Special Collections division, and exhibited at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) for the History of Art and the Humanities.

That the Getty has not individual but two colossal (and totally separate) collections of photographs, housed in sum of two units different institutions within the Getty compounded and that they reflect sum of two units vastly different approaches to photography's past can, like the exhibitions themselves, also be understood in bourns of Sekula's analysis. In the case of the art museum, and as individual might well expect, the mandate of the collection (at least with honor to exhibition and publishing decisions, if not acquisition policy) is predominantly defined and couched in aesthetic terms(2) Accordingly, the principle by the agency of which 125 daguerreotypes out of a collection of approximately 2000 were fix uponed and displayed was premised upon notions of quality - "The exhibition will view the finest daguerreotypes from the Museum's collection, which is considered individual of the most important in the world."(3) What constitutes the terminuss of this aesthetic culling is nowhere specified, on the other hand this, as we shall diocese is but one mystification in an overall enterprise that may be said to structurally bre them.

As it happens, greatest in quantity of the daguerreotypes in the exhibition and plenteous of its signage is taken from its "associated" publication, The Silver Canvas: Daguerreotype Masterpieces from the J Paul Getty Museum by the agency of Bates Lowry and Isabel Barrett Lowry(4) It thus have the appearances fair to consider The Silver Canvas and "The Art of the Daguerreotype" as a collective undertaking. I will turn back to this joint enterprise and the issue of mystification shortly, on the other hand for now I want solitary to signal that at the Getty Museum, the Photography Department's curatorial and publication activities, below the stewardship of Weston Naef, are entirely consistent with the hoary boundarys of photographic aestheticism. Aping the language of a rather antiquated art-historical vocabulary, this is an aesthetics that traffics enthusiastically in masters, masterpieces, phraseologys and canons, sifting through millions of photographs to strain without the "art," elevating the photographer (or, as he was ofttimes called in the nineteenth hundred the operator) to the honorific of artist.

Across the Getty's plaza, however, the GRI bring togethers according to far more ecumenical criteria. At the Institute, photography is housed in the Special Collections and Visual Resources section (which includes the Photo application of mind Collections - two million investigation photographs documenting art and architecture) and acquisitions are made according to seven categories.(5) In fact, greatest in quantity of the photographs displayed in "Framing the Asian Shore" derive from a not long ago purchased collection of over 6000 items assembled by means of a French collector named Pierre de Gigord, and presumably built up along thematic rather than aesthetic lines. Consequently and in keeping with its functionalist approach to the medium, the GRI's exhibition was les relate toed with photographic aesthetics than with nineteenth-century photography's discursive and ideological uses. similar an approach required that the photographs exhibited be contextualized, and it was a measure of Terpak's curatorial intelligence and indeed the intellectual ambition of the exhibit that the process of photographic contextualization was taken seriously. by dint of "contextualization," I am referring not single to the exhibition's inclusion of maps, historical chronologies and geopolitical information on the other hand to its use of wall body s from various sources (e.g., diplomatic and personal correspondence, travel memoirs, antiquarian and archeological description, literature, etc) and also to its inclusion of of the like kind items as ceramic tiles, an early engraving of a harem, a commercial handbill advertising a Dardanelles panorama, as well as a lithograph. (Before photography, a great deal of Orientalist iconography had been widely circulated in Europe from one side lithographic reproduction.) Although the wall body s were lengthy, they were as fascinating as the chiefly unfamiliar and unpublished photographs. Moreover, exhibition visitors could be seen actually reading them, suggesting that when contextual material is well chosen it greatly enhances the educative aspect of an exhibition and quicks an altogether different relationship to the exhibited existences Perhaps even more important, of the like kind contextual material provided a discursive frame that enabled the viewer to better recognize the plurality of possible readings that a given cluster of photographs provoked at the time of their making.