Upstate Gem: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
It’s surprising what amazing stuff you can find nestled in the small burghs of upstate New York. (Before anyone accuses me of being a big-city snob, you should know I’m originally from the middle of nowhere in Colorado.) For instance, last fall I stumbled across a finely done historical camera exhibit in the basement of the Glens Falls public library. And a week ago, I had the opportunity to visit a new photography show, The Material Image: Surface and Substance in Photography, at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, about two-and-a-half hours’ drive north of NYC. It was absolutely worth the time to get up there.
Drawn from the museum’s own collection of over 1100 photographs plus the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s equally large collection, the show features 130 photographs spanning the entire history of photography and covering most, if not all, of the major and minor photographic processes. From a variety of different perspectives, curator Beth Wilson has created a unique opportunity to explore the concept of photograph as object, not just a surface for an image to play within or upon. Group shows are hard to pull off successfully. It is a rare photo that stands solidly on its own outside of a project or series, so finding enough such photos to fill out a whole exhibition is a real challenge for any curator. I'm glad to say there are many images here that stand solidly on their own.
The real question then becomes, do these images add up to a cogent commentary on "the material image"? It's hard not to be completely engulfed by the images' content itself - which is the very issue the show raises. Only those photos separated from our personal experience by the passage of time - and those that mimic them, such as the 1988 daguerreotype of Beaumont Newhall in this show - draw significant attention to their physical qualities as objects. The tangible nature of the photo was more clearly evident in the first decades of photography when pictures were encased in ornate little cases for safe keeping and denoting their value as mementos. Today, we are so bombarded with photographic imagery and creating photographs is second nature for so many people, we take their physical nature for granted. Every day we are exposed to literally hundreds of photographs, all of which encourage us to focus on the subject matter within the image. Perhaps only when digital display technology reaches a level of quality and pervasiveness that paper prints are no longer common will we recognize the last century's photographic output as objects along side the tintype or photogram.
The issue of photographs as art objects and the importance of seeing them in person rather than little Web graphics is one of the reasons I started this site. Looking at low resolution digital representations of photographs on a computer screen is no match for getting out and seeing the real thing in a gallery or a museum. For instance, in this show there is a technically amazing print by Kenro Izu, "Blue #1002B" that demonstrates the difficulty of representing photographs at reproductions (ironically). I don't fully understand the print process Izu used, but I do know the example above, from the same series, does no justice to the experience of seeing the physical print. Seems John Perrault's been thinking along the same lines lately.
Oddly enough, about the same time Beth Wilson contacted me about the SDMA show, I got a press release for a group show ('tis that time of year again) at Von Lintel gallery on this very same topic, the materiality of photographs, entitled "The Photograph in Question". Clever title.
Through Aug. 7 at Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
SUNY New Paltz (you'll want a map)
