I decided to subscribe to the modern version of Aperture, primarily for the purpose of gaining access to the archive, all the way back to the first issue in 1952. There have been some problems getting set up, and the interface isn’t all that one might wish, but Pandora’s Box is now at least openable, and it’s worthwhile to keep track of some of my impressions and findings as I explore 65 or so years of high-end Photography.

I’ve poked a bit at recent issues, enough to observe that Aperture isn’t focused these days on what I think is photographically interesting, which just means that I have to do some work on understanding the dimensions of my interests, and then start seeking backwards through time for the various turning points and deviations from the Aperture that I knew 50-odd years ago. LensWork is now doing what I think Aperture used to do (and I subscribe to that as well), at least as defined by the criterion of my notions of what’s most interesting in Photography.

One of my tendencies turns out to be a species of mouldy-figism, characterized by a strong preference for an aesthetic based in the past, and emphasizing strong composition in black and white (‘mouldy fig’ is an epithet from the Culture Wars in jazz, one brief narration of which is here).

Think the pantheon of Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Paul Caponigro, Aaron Siskind, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Minor White; and include more recent discoveries Emmet Gowin, Berenice Abbott, Florence Henri, Margrethe Mather… and of course Lewis Hine and Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Henri Cartier-Bresson and August Sander… and Edward Weston and Brett Weston and (eventually) Robert Frank… (not that they’d all appreciate being lumped together). They continue to define for me the acme of Photography.

So where did I get off the bus, and become identified with crusty traditionalism? Might have been sometime in the 1970s, not too long after Vision and Expression, a 1969 show of the “younger generation of photographers” at George Eastman House. I could admit even the most fanciful of those images into my understanding of Photography, and appreciate the directions of the (entirely black-and-white) experiments at the frontiers of image-making. Soon after that I was in Nova Scotia, far from the cutting edge of the arts world, but Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye (1966) and Looking At Photographs (1973) were the personal cynosure and touchstones for my understanding of Photography.

And then along came John Szarkowski’s Introduction to William Eggleston’s Guide, “the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum’s first publication of color photography” in 1976. And the issue that hung me up was probably color. I’ve never quite caught up.

See Abigail Cane’s A Road Less Traveled: How William Eggleston Transformed Photography in America, and Dennis Haritou’s Discussion too. And Perfectly Banal: William Eggleston.

Technologically, the innovation is the vibrancy of color made possible by the dye transfer process

And via YouTube: William Eggleston Documentary: In The Real World and The Colourful Mr Eggleston and Ted Forbes on William Eggleston

I did have occasion recently to see Eggleston’s work in a show at Pier 24 in San Francisco, and I’m now much less puzzled by his modes of seeing than I was. But with many of his photos I still think: so what?