Memo to: The Corcoran Re: Sharpening Your Focus

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 1, 2005

Imagine a family of Idahoans coming to see Washington for the first time. They check into their hotel, then take a look at what the city has to offer, culture-wise.

The National Gallery of Art: That's where all the famous paintings are, right? Wouldn't hurt to see the country's only Leonardo.

The National Museum of American History: Everyone knows that's where the Smithsonian keeps its neatest junk.

The National Museum of the American Indian: Speaks for itself. And anyway, there's a Native reservation not far from where our Idahoans live.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art: Uhhh. That must be where they keep the Corcorans, or something, guesses little Jimmy.

It's near the White House, notes Mom, maybe it's where they store the presidential portraits. Then Dad dredges up some memories: Isn't that the place they tried to show those dirty pictures back in '89 and then thought better of it?

You can imagine that this little narrative, or something very like it, gets repeated day after day, week after week, as visitors -- even locals -- make weekend plans that skip the Corcoran because they haven't got a clue what the museum is.

And now imagine a little change of name that might just fix all that.

Doesn't the Corcoran Museum of Photography have a nice, definite ring?

With that modest change of name -- and ambitious change of mandate -- the Corcoran would go from being a very poor relation of the city's great museums, with their world-class collections and shows, to being the only full-scale museum of photography in the United States-- and possibly the biggest in the world. New York would have nothing to compete with it.

Over coming weeks, various planning committees of the Corcoran board of trustees will grapple with their institution's future as they prepare for a meeting of the full board on May 23. The board will decide how and when -- maybe even if -- a new Frank Gehry-designed addition will get built. But almost everything about the Corcoran will be on the table, too.

It's no secret that the Corcoran faces challenges on every front from finances to programming to personnel. As a private museum with a small endowment, it can't just open its doors each day and hope a few art lovers will wander in to see the objects that it owns. It has to draw in tons of paying guests.

The board may want to think beyond a quick facelift. It may need to talk about a full sex change.

With the one that I'm suggesting, the Corcoran would at last have a clear identity that visitors would understand, and be attracted to right off.

Focus on Numbers

The Corcoran could show the certified masterpieces of photographic history, by everyone from Julia Margaret Cameron to Ansel Adams, to attract museum-goers who prefer their art with an establishment stamp. When the National Gallery launched a big Adams show in 1985, it averaged almost 6,000 visitors a day -- about 500 more than the museum's van Gogh blockbuster drew in 1998.

A huge percentage of today's most daring artists choose to use a lens where they might once have used a brush or chisel. The Corcoran would have room to install the country's most lavish suite of video galleries, as bait to attract some of the biggest names in contemporary art -- and the younger audience they would bring with them. In 2003, when the Metropolitan Museum in New York surveyed Thomas Struth, a leading "photo conceptualist" from Germany, the show's daily totals were the second highest in the world that year, right behind the Met's own "Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman." (The portraits of Richard Avedon, also at the Met, came in seventh.)

Crucially, our new Corcoran Museum of Photography could also attract hordes of visitors without much interest in fine art of any kind. Photographs document the world as well as decorate it, so thematic shows could sell their subject matter as well as their aesthetics. Sarah Greenough, curator of photography at the National Gallery, noted that casual visitors seem to find photography more "approachable" than more esoteric, and explicitly artistic, media. "People don't feel they need to take an art history course to appreciate photography," said Malcolm Daniel, her counterpart at the Met.

A groundbreaking exhibition on the history of nature photography could grab audiences from the National Museum of Natural History and the National Geographic Society, as well as from rival art museums. "The Heavens Through the Lens" might tempt some NASA fans to skip the long lines at the National Air and Space Museum. "The Body Laid Bare," which could include everything from the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge (the guy who, in 1878, used cameras to prove how horses gallop) to the recent morgue photos by contemporary artist Andres Serrano, could get medical conventioneers to come by after meetings at the National Institutes of Health.

Photographic exhibitions don't take up a huge amount of space, so at any given time our new museum could have up a range of exhibitions conceived to target different groups.

A good number of those shows could be brought in from outside. There are plenty of photo exhibitions doing the rounds at any given time, and it would be easy to become an added venue on their tours.

And it would cost much less than bringing in comparable painting or sculpture surveys, because the insurance, shipping and installation of photography is vastly less expensive.

The switch to photography would bring similar advantages for the exhibitions the Corcoran would want to mount in-house. Because most photographs exist in multiple prints, getting the images you need doesn't put you at the mercy of a single collection that happens not to lend. You'd rarely be in the situation paintings curators face, where a show has to be rethought because a crucial canvas or two turn out to be ungettable -- the good old Louvre, maybe, has once again determined that its treasures are too precious to leave Paris.

There's also more incentive for museums to lend you photographs than other major works of art. When a museum sends out one of its three Rembrandts, there's suddenly a notable hole in what's on view. But photographs, which can fade if kept too long on display, are always shown in rotation, so no one would notice if a few go out on tour.

You could even imagine that the Corcoran Museum of Photography -- why not make that the National Museum of Photography at the Corcoran, to give it a more patriotic ring -- could come to be used by the country's other museums and archives as a kind of extension to the limited photo space they already have.

Get the Picture

The Corcoran would have to do plenty of borrowing until it builds up its own holdings. Over the past 10 years, photography curator Philip Brookman has built the nucleus of a fine photography collection -- holdings have grown from 2,000 to 8,000 works -- but there's still a way to go before it counts as major. With clever strategizing, however, that might only be a matter of another decade or so.

Jane Corkin is a veteran photo dealer with clients across the United States. She says that there are so many smallish photo collections in this country -- and few enough heirs likely to share their parents' interest in them -- that they could never be absorbed by the handful of fine art museums in Washington, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles that are already famous for collecting photographs. That's where our new National Museum of Photography would step in.

As a high-profile institution in the nation's capital, the Corcoran's photo museum could tap into a whole stratum of photo geeks who would be keen to see their favorite medium getting the attention it deserves. Greenough says she has noticed far more visitors festooned with cameras in her photo shows than elsewhere in the National Gallery. She thinks a "new" Corcoran could draw on this niche market for its supporters.

"Getting donations of pictures isn't hard," explains Corkin, the dealer, especially if you're building almost from scratch, and need pictures by photographers whom all the established public collections already own in depth. Washington was once the home of pioneering photo dealer Harry Lunn. Many of the landmark photos that he sold are still hanging in Washington homes, according to John Gossage, a senior photographic artist who has lived here since the 1960s, and they might land at the Corcoran. A dozen Cartier-Bressons here, a Diane Arbus or 10 there, a handful of Mathew Brady pictures given by a local Civil War buff -- a Gossage archive, even, said that artist with a laugh -- and before you know it, the new museum has the holdings it takes to mount all kinds of shows, and to fill an impressive suite of permanent-collection galleries.

You might even get some of those donors of pictures to become donors of funds.

Museums the size of the Corcoran have a hard time competing for substantial patrons who are also courted by the boards of prestigious institutions such as the National Gallery or the Museum of Modern Art. Make the Corcoran board a special haven for photography enthusiasts, however, and you give even the wealthiest collectors a reason to join the board, and stay on it. The Corcoran becomes a club for those across the country who share its unique vision, rather than a consolation prize or steppingstone for philanthropists who haven't been invited onto fancier boards. Who knows, even current patrons who aren't photography buffs might stick around: Some might even take the money they've pledged for a new building at the old Corcoran, and let it be used instead to fund an entirely fresh idea of what the Corcoran could be.

Even if it took a while for the Corcoran's newly committed board to give or get a great spread of photography, the museum's curators would have plenty of images to build impressive shows around.

Ever since this city's founding as the seat of U.S. government, Washington institutions of all kinds have accumulated huge stores of photographs that almost never see the light of day. The Smithsonian Institution alone owns something like 13 million photographs -- scientific, anthropological and sometimes artistic -- which it has only recently begun to take stock of. The Library of Congress and National Archives have more than 20 million, including works by many of the country's great photographers. Between them, they house the fantastic pictures shot during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration, as well as the many striking landscape photos commissioned by the U.S. government as it explored the West.

Many government departments also hold their share of images, not to mention all the local nonprofits -- from the AFL-CIO to the National Geographic Society -- whose archives are stuffed with photographic images. Merry Foresta, the curator recently charged with sorting out the Smithsonian's photographs, says that 100 million wouldn't be a crazy guess at the region's total photo holdings -- but points out that no one has ever come near counting them.

Any curator could think of dozens of exhibitions to mount based on such photographic plenty. Almost the entire world, and our reaction to it looking through a camera's lens, would be there for the showing.

Early Building Blocks

If our new museum were to tap into all this, it wouldn't be the radical departure die-hard supporters of the "old" Corcoran might think. The institution was founded in 1869, when photography was hitting its stride, and a few of its first objects were photographs. William Wilson Corcoran himself donated a bound volume of photos of the American West, not long after they'd been commissioned from Timothy O'Sullivan and William Bell by the U.S. Geological Survey. The album is one of the photography department's prize possessions.

Muybridge, the great pioneer of freeze-frame photography, sold a set of his "animal locomotion" pictures to the Corcoran. In the early years of the last century, the Corcoran hosted yearly exhibitions of the capital's very active camera club, and in 1904 it held a show of the "Photo Secession," a movement whose explicit mission was to give photography the status of art.

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.