Photos Sparkle In a Cathedral Of Painting

Photos
Photographic Discoveries
In the 16 years it has been actively collecting, Washington's National Gallery of Art has amassed more than 5,000 photographs. "Photographic Discoveries: Recent Acquisitions," an exhibit on view through July 30, features 70 prints from the medium's early days, 1840-1940.

When the German artist Ilse Bing (1899-1998) sailed to New York in 1936, she brought along her Leica, then a new machine. If she hadn't been equipped with a 35mm camera so small and fine and fast, she never could have shot "Horse Act, Circus, New York," a wonderful photograph now on exhibition in "Photographic Discoveries: Recent Acquisitions," a pleasure of a picture show at the National Gallery of Art.

The photograph Bing made -- the center ring, the tent -- is in many ways archaic. Her horse is black as night, immaterial shadows flitter in the smoke, dark suggestions rise. All these themes are standard in old German art; Bing's picture has Hell in it. Its only light is Hell's light, the flickering of flames.

"Pictorial Discoveries" is in the gallery's West Building. In the context of the place, all the photographs chorus the same message. It has two parts: I belong to the picture image stream, to the 30,000-year history of pictures; and, I could not have been made before, look at me, I'm new.

What happens when a gang of young visual technologies appears in the temple where painting has long ruled? There are answers in this show. The gallery, remember, came late to photography. True, it had accepted a major Alfred Stieglitz gift in 1949, but it did not begin actively collecting other sorts of photographs until 1990, suggesting by its hesitance that pictures made by passing light to chemically coated film through shutters and lenses weren't quite art.

That prejudice is dead now, and everybody knows it. The auction market knows it (single photographs have sold for more than $1 million), all the art schools know it and the gallery knows it, too. Photographs now matter there; the museum researches, seeks and buys them. It has its own photo specialists, two of whom, curator Sara Greenough and assistant curator Diane Waggoner, organized this show. In 16 years, the gallery has selectively acquired more than 5,000 photographs; 70 of these, all acquired since 1998, are included in the show.

The collection begins at the beginning. Photography has a beginning. Painting doesn't. No one knows who first tied hairs to a stick, mixed fat with colored earths and started painting on the wall, but L.J.M. Daguerre, who found a way of printing photographs on glass, and William Henry Fox Talbot, who figured out the negative, both announced their great discoveries in 1839. Rolled film was available by the 1880s, as were clumsy, hand-held cameras. Bing began to use her Leica in 1927; the first one was sold in 1925. Photography's first century is the period of this show.

After the daguerreotypes ("Boy With Cap," a portrait made in Boston by Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, is particularly fine), and with a salted paper print of Orleans Cathedral, which Talbot made in France in 1843, the changes keep on coming. The collodion glass plate, the gum dichromate print, the albumen print, the silver print. The technology keeps surging.

This is one telling difference between painting and photography. Painting, more than most things, has been relatively impervious to changes in technology. Considering the many millenniums between them, a painting from a cave and, say, Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" -- the same scale, the same ochers, same snorting horse and bull -- are pretty much alike.

But technology is just technology. The photographers encountered in the exhibition, especially the early ones, are similarly bound to picture-making's past. The cave horse reappears, as dark and emblematic and powerful as ever, in Bing's silver print of 1936.

What were painters painting before photography came along? They were painting posed portraits, picturesque landscapes, ruins, fruit-and-flower still lifes and cathedrals. And what do these photographers, these inventive pioneers, decide to show their viewers? Pretty much the same.

Consider cathedrals. Talbot shot Orleans. In 1854, Charles Negre, a Frenchman, aimed his camera at Chartres. The same year, Auguste Mestral worked at Notre Dame and, in 1858, C.D. Winter photographed Strasbourg. The pre-Raphaelites of England were similarly taken with the purities and pieties of the medieval past, as were the antiquarians who were making measured drawings of every Gothic church in sight. These cathedral shooters join them, but they do so with a difference.

The earliest of photographs show us something we seldom see in paintings -- a quality of chance, of fortuitous discovery -- what Greenough calls "photography's disjunction between subject and environment." In 1854, when Mestral photographed a new faux-Gothic carving prepared for Notre Dame, he couldn't help but include the timber and the rope and the trash of the construction site that surrounded it. In 1858, when Roger Fenton shot Lichfield Cathedral, he did not aim our thoughts, as a pre-Raphaelite painter might have, at just the Middle Ages: He intentionally included such reminders of the present as a hitching post, the public pump and a gas street lamp.

Often one can see these somewhat insecure technologists trying to assure us that their machine-made pictures are just as good as oil paintings. On the day in 1860 when Fenton loaded up his table top with glass goblets, grapes and lilies stuck in vases, he surely had in mind the long tradition of the fruit-and-flower still life. But his "Fruit and Flowers" isn't really like a 17th-century Dutch flower piece. It's clumsier, creepier and somehow less symbolic. We feel as though our heads had been shoved a bit too close to all those grapes and blossoms, all that scented stuff.

Old photographs are weakest when imitating oils. When Jean-Baptiste Frenet shows us a young man considering a skull, we don't really believe the man is pondering mortality, as we might before a similar painting with a skull by Titian or Cezanne. We can see that he is posing, just playing a part.

Such artificiality diminishes as soon as these photographers, their technologies permitting, begin to leave the studio to record the amazing sights out there in the world. In 1871, Timothy H. O'Sullivan captured the Iceberg Canyon of the Colorado River. In 1911, the great Eugene Atget, who could lend his dead-straight documents an aura of enchantment, photographed in Paris the eerie and illegible patterns that he finds reflected in plate glass.

His is not the only famous name encountered. Edward Steichen, Lewis Hine, Alfred Stieglitz, August Sander, Clarence White and Dora Maar (a woman less well known as a surrealist photographer than as Picasso's longtime girlfriend), A.M. Rodchenko, Lotte Jacobi and Brassai, they're all here, as well.

Photographic Discoveries: Recent Acquisitions can be seen through July 30. The exhibition is supported by grants from the Trellis Fund and the Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation. The gallery, at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays. For information, call 202-737-4215. Admission is free.