Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 14. Painting / portrait |
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An American Lens. Scenes from Alfred Stieglitz's New York Secession by Jay Bochner |
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Author: Jan Baetens Jay Bochner, An American Lens. Scenes from Alfred Stieglitz’s New York Secession |
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An American Lens is an original, elegantly written, profound, and most of all truly generous contribution to a renewed thinking on Steiglitz and American Modern (the term Secession being in a certain sense the umbrella term that enables the man and the group to reinforce each other). Although this study is rather classic in scope, An American Lens is deeply committed in unearthing a 'new' Stieglitz as the cornerstone of an idiosyncratic form of modernism that recent scholarship had rather successfully struggled to overthrow. Several decades after the critique of Anglo-Saxon literary High Modernism, which is now routinely denounced and debunked as the reactionary, formalist, elitist, apolitical, patriarchal, anti-Semitic, homophobic, nationalist etc. split of the avant-garde, similar critiques had been unleashed against modernist photography and the main victim of this reshuffling of the cards has undoubtedly been Stieglitz, charged with all the crimes and evils of the world by politically correct critics. Rooted in a deeply-felt and lived love of its subject -the man as well as his work (and works)-, Bochner's book offers with dash a fresh look at Stieglitz's daring and innovative practice and attitude, here illustrated with the help of close-readings of the major highlights of an astonishing career. Bochner's line of defense is double. On the one hand he identifies a basic and recurrent error in the thinking of Stieglitz's detractors: anachronism, i.e. the reinterpretation of previous cultural contexts by today's standards. On the other hand, he recontextualizes Stieglitz's work at two levels, first by rereading it in the social and artistic framework that has not always sufficiently been taken into account, and second by repositioning it in its material environment, that of the gallery, the exhibition, the book or the archive, which continues also to be overlooked many times, for instance when one does not mention the actual size (it is amazingly small, postage stamp format as says the author) of the famous 'Equivalents' and they way they were intended to be displayed to the public. In both cases, the work done by Bochner is highly convincing. His quietly and carefully written book discards without useless polemics most of the unjust critiques uttered against Stieglitz. Bochner provides us with numerous lessons of close reading that illuminate Stieglitz's work, both form the inside (what did the author wanted to achieve?) and form the outside (how was it circulated and how did the audience react?). Shifting intelligently between the foregrounding of the forma richness of Stieglitz's photographs and the enrichment provided by a profound knowledge of its historical conditions, Bochner reinvents many of these seemingly well-known images. The two best examples this internal-external close reading are the ones that open and close the book, the first on "Winter - Fifth Avenue" (1893/1894), the second on the series "From the Shelton, West" (1931). But it would be unfair to single out just these two chapters, since each analysis entails such an overwhelming quantity of information, insights, and interpretations, that Bochner's book, which finds the difficult but challenging balance between Stieglitz's work itself and that of the people that he promoted (often without making any money on it himself!) as an impresario, a dealer, or even, despite the uncountable financial and material difficulties that have pursued him all his life, as a sponsor. Yet even more interesting than this rereading of Stieglitz's life and work, is Bochner's reinterpretation of Stieglitz's place in American modernism. Here too, Bochner's merit is less one of unearthing a totally new Stieglitz than one of rediscovering and reestablishing a Stieglitz partially hidden by 'unfriendly' recent scholarship. What Bochner makes very clear is not only the quasi-identity of Stieglitz and American modernism, but the very particularities of that modernism which is, in a certain sense, anti-American as well as anti-modern. Anti-American, since Stieglitz's Secession movement opposes with ultimate energy the commodification and commercialism that define American culture at its roots. Anti-modern, since contrary to the subsequent modernist movements all over the world, the Secession is an utterly democratic movement, which has also been rather political, at least at a certain extent, and whose commitment to concrete political problems and social issues has been infinitely more concrete than in the case of many avant-gardisms, more radical in theory than in practice. An American Lens is a timely book, for it helps correcting the excesses of certain types of biased scholarship. It is also a wonderful illustration of the qualities of good old close reading, which remains too rarely exploited in photography critique. And it offers a reconstruction of an artistic movement and a Zeitgeist, which will make it dramatically useful to all readers interested in the modernity of Modernism. |
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