Memo to: The Corcoran Re: Sharpening Your Focus

Early Building Blocks

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In 1955, the Corcoran brought in the landmark "Family of Man," organized by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art. And starting in the early 1970s, during the tenures of curators Walter Hopps, Jane Livingston and Frances Fralin, the Corcoran itself initiated many pioneering photo exhibitions. The street photography of the so-called New York School was thoroughly surveyed, the National Geographic's collection was put on show, and the camera's place in surrealism was explored in depth.

Brookman, the Corcoran's first full-time photo curator, arrived in 1994. He has tried to keep alive the Corcoran's reputation as a center for photography. (It took a blow in 1989, with the museum's last-minute cancellation of an exhibition of the controversial photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.) Brookman has organized important touring shows of Swiss-born street photographer Robert Frank and of photojournalist Gordon Parks, who donated more than 200 of his pictures to the gallery.

The Corcoran gave Sally Mann an early solo show in 1977, and Brookman organized another one last year. In 2000, Brookman also curated the first Corcoran Biennial to concentrate on photography and other newer media, in place of the paintings that had dominated until he came along. As the rest of the Corcoran's programming has often seemed to flounder, its photography department has managed to remain active, and widely respected.

But even without all that photographic tradition, you could still argue that almost everything on view at the Corcoran, throughout its entire history, has had the camera in mind.

The Corcoran's monumental "Niagara," painted by Frederick Church in 1857, is a kind of demonstration of how painted landscapes could deal with color and scale in a way that their budding photographic rivals couldn't. American master Thomas Eakins, another painter featured at the Corcoran, used photographs to guarantee the realism of some of his images -- and took pains to hide that fact. Edgar Degas deliberately captured a photographic "look" in his paintings of modern life, of which the Corcoran has some superb examples.

In the 1960s and '70s, the Corcoran had a moment of fame when it championed the most radical American abstractionists. But even they depended on photography, as a medium to push off against: They often argued for their figure-free art by insisting that photography had made all forms of realistic painting obsolete.

The "new" Corcoran might want to consider making an absolutely clean sweep of its collections. Curators could sell or trade any object that isn't photo-based, to acquire that many more that were. (All sales could be conditional on pictures some day ending up in other public collections, preferably in Washington. So long as an art work can be seen, how much does it matter which wall the public sees it on?)

But Brookman himself, the guy you might expect to put the Corcoran's photography ahead of everything else, thinks that would be a mistake. When I ran my cockamamie idea for a new museum by him, he insisted that if you switched the Corcoran's focus fully to photography -- and he's not sure he would, even if he were in charge -- you wouldn't want to get rid of the paintings and sculptures. You would use them to "contextualize the photographs," he said.

The Corcoran, that is, could become the nation's preeminent "Museum of the Modern Image." As such, it would show photography, mostly, but also all the art that has reacted to it over the years since the museum's founding.

I have to admit that the project I suggest would only be my second choice for how to keep the Corcoran alive and well. First choice would be to find someone to fork over a few hundred million dollars in endowment funds, so that the museum could go back to sleep. There's nothing better than a quirky little art collection, tucked out of the limelight, where you wander halls that you know will be unchanged the next time you visit. Most great cities have such a museum -- the Frick Collection in New York, the Wallace Collection in London, the Doria Pamphili in Rome -- and they are havens for any art lover who knows to seek them out.

But as things stand, the Corcoran Gallery of Art could not manage on just a few dozen connoisseurs each day. So I can't think of a more certain, even nobler way to guarantee a substantial daily gate than by providing a new center for the photographic image in the capital of the United States.