Photogenics

Abstract

This essay was prompted by an exhibition of the past decade's photography acquisitions at the Art Museum of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.1 Not that the work in the exhibition was particularly exceptional. As one might expect in a museum already well known for its photography holdings, it featured a broad range of different photographic approaches, functions and techniques (from an anonymous 1865 portrait of an amputated leg made for an Army Medical Corps to an illustrated fan by contemporary Japanese photo-artist Yasumasa Morimura), and exemplary prints by some well-known names (Watkins, Seeley, Salomon, Lange, Friedlander). An impressive collection, especially for a university museum. But what caught the attention was not the work itself but the way in which it was presented. Hung on the usual tastefully coloured walls, the display was organized in a roughly chronological fashion; that is, as a kind of history, a history of photography. Nothing exceptional here either, except for the way the exhibition chose to begin and end its chronology. For the exhibition's curators began their historical exposition with one of photography's earliest products, an 1850 cyanotype contact print by Anna Atkins, and ended with another much larger cyanotype work made in 1977 by American artist Barbara Kasten. The exhibition thereby seemed to be presenting photography's history, as one of the wall texts explicidy told us, as a ‘full circle’.

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