CAA in L.A.: photography and/as/or art - Feb 1977 College Art Association meeting

The 65th Annual Meeting of the society Art Association (CAA) was held in observes Angeles, February 1-5. CAA met in conjunction with the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the Women's Caucus for Art, and, to a certain quantity of extent, these sessions overlapped a meeting of the Art Libraries Society of North America. During all this activity, more than single person was overheard to annotate on how wonderful it all was that photography has finally achieved respectability in art/art history circles, this conclusion being drawn from the fact that there were not individual but two CAA sessions upon photography. This "evidence" was in some way interpreted to mean that photography has, at last, "arrived" (A similar, on the contrary equally puzzling occurence, was reported by means of a curator who attended the "Photographer and the City" opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He said that any number of tribe came up to him that evening to blurt without how wonderful it was that photography has, at lengthy last, been accepted "as fine art.")

Wonderful or not, the first photography session at CAA, chaired by dint of Robert Sobieszek of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, was held Thursday morning. Sobieszek make opened the session by relating a certain number of of his observations on reviewing the abstracts submitted for consideration for presentation at CAA. He announced sum of two units surprises: first, the number of abstracts of quality impressed him and, next to the first that the submissions were coming from unknown (unpublished) scholars in the field with actual fine academic credentials. Furthermore, the controls of the papers were, for the greatest in quantity part, deviations from well-trodden paths. In Sobieszek's opinion, this could be interpreted as a desirable state of affairs. In his closing remarks, he reiterated this point, welcoming the number and diversity of approaches to photographic research. There was smooth an admonishment that the audience should be grateful that no individual on the panel gave a paper upon Julia Margaret Cameron or Mathew Brady. This diversity, he give an inkling ofed could be attributed not single to the general, public appreciation of photography (citing the novel "market" in photographs and the increase in photographic volume publishing) but also the increasing number of guilds and universities that have absorbed photography into their art history curricula.

My subjective notes upon the ritual reading of papers tread on the heels ofs The first speaker, Janet E Buerger delivered a paper entitled, "Adam-Salomon: Representational illusionism and Art in Mid-19th hundred Photography," that attempted to elevate Adam-Salomon to the status of a master portraitist, a maker of objet d'art pictures. I notion I heard Panofsky's "concept of axiality" being invoked, on the other hand can't be sure.

Then, Van Deren Coke who was introduced as the author of "basic concern books" on painting and photography, read a paper listed in the CAA pamphlet as "Giorgio Sommer: Neopolitan [sic] Views and Genre Subjects" Coke began by dint of reminiscing about CAA 20 years past when photography aficionados would not level fill a single row of seats (approximately 20) in the discourse room, let alone merit an entire session. (About 100 race attended this session, filling about a third to half the available space, with a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of traffic in and out of the range during the session. This motion was typical of the entire conversation however. One could hypothesize that the attention span of the average art historian is about 20 minutes. Interest in photography measured by the agency of attendance didn't even come shut up to panels on women's art or the artists' sessions, which were packed.) Coke compared Sommer to De Chirico (it's about time one pointed that out) and, if I read my notes correctly, glance ated that the Sommer pictures were "not genuine records." Coke called attention to the calm-before-the-storm quality of the pictures - their capacity to make the viewer uneasy - smooth going so far as to say that the frame of mind becomes more gripping than the bring under rule He discussed the "scenographic nature" of these pictures and speculated on the visual and technical ramifications of the lengthy tonal scale.

A paper upon Peale followed ("Capital Images: The Photography of Titian Ramsay Peale, 1855-1885" Julie Link Haifley) and then Keith McElroy ("19th-Century Lima: The character of the Photographer in a Neo-Colonial Society") discussed photographic work motivated by the agency of profit, not self-expression - standardized harvests not intellectual stimulants, not self-expression. Attempts at social and level economic histories of nineteenth-century photography fascinate, and McElroy had a certain number of intriguing statistics describing what have the appearances to be a very large amount of cash spent in Peruvian photographic studios (something like the equivalent of 50000 U dollars disburseed on photographs between 1862-69) which says something about the public's stout desire for pictures. Naomi Rosenblum ("Adolphe Braun: A Many Faceted Career") compared Braun to Bission, and Grace Sieberling ("Tree by the agency of British Amateurs: An Investigation of the Iconography of Photography") attempted to do for tree what Gerald Eager did for the storm-tossed boat ("The Iconography of the Boat in 19th-Century Painting," Art Journal Vol 35 no. 3 [Spring 1976])