The Flea Market Museum

Afterimage, Sept, 2000 by Warren Zanes

Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection

Curated by Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York, New York

June 6-August 27, 2000

Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Collection of Thomas Walther

Sante Fe, NM: Twin Palms Press, 2000

212 pp./$50.00(hb)

In picking through a mildewed box of old photographs at a flea market one can experience the curious pleasures of a licit voyeurism. Here flights of the imagination collide with flights of memory. A momentary feeling of transport comes as another's past is almost greedily taken in and shuffled together with one's own history and desires. Pleasures of this kind await the audience of "Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection." Taken between 1910 and 1960, many of the untitled and anonymous images are contact prints and, as such, small enough to fit in the hand. One has to edge up and almost look into them rather than stand back, which provides the exhibition with a notable intimacy.

Perhaps it is because it is in photography's nature to seem to say more than it actually can say that viewers will almost instinctually expand upon an image's meager narrative offerings. What at first appears as the photograph's capacity to tell a story often becomes a matter of collusion. John Berger has said of a photograph's content that "what is shown invokes what is not shown." It is this invocation, this calling forth, that signals the event of photography for the viewer. If in leaning into the images of "Other Pictures" the feeling of intimacy becomes a feeling of having seen them before, it is almost certainly mistaken. One thing is sure--you have not seen them at the Metropolitan.

It would be fair to think of "Other Pictures" as a landmark exhibition for the Met, where the designation "anonymous" is reserved for many works but rarely those of the modern West. The principle of the masterpiece, born in the Renaissance and since transformed into a figure of cultural religiosity, is without question one of the Met's conceptual foundation stones. Even if inadvertently, "Other Pictures" unsettles certain of these foundations. Glass-encased scrapbooks at the center of the exhibition space remind us of the origin of these photographs and their long, curious journey to the museum. The photos are often so suggestive and yet so elusive that the fiction writer in each of us emerges almost by reflex as an agent of explanation. Perhaps because the images have no "master" there is a comfort in allowing and enjoying our own projected offerings. After all, these images are presented as snapshots.

Prior to this, the snapshot has entered the museum only as the "snapshot style" of certain modern masters of photography. The snapshot itself, associated with amateurism and accidents, has remained outside the museum's door. With "Other Pictures" this changes. The sense of motion in one blurred image of two animated men in dark suits and hats pulls us into the men's play; in another, a zeppelin lifts a sailor into the sky as he foolishly holds onto its riggings, an unintended lcarus. These photographs are radical in composition and inventive in how they break the rules, yet they cannot be understood with regard to the intentions of their makers. We know too little. And in this we find our license.

If this is a landmark exhibition, it doe not draw attention to itself as such. As the catalog essay attests, the curators have not attempted to squeeze out of this show a critique of the museum and its reliance on the category of the masterpiece. Neither have they presented a sustained argument regarding the slippery category of "art photography" and its historical construction. In assessing what seems to be the exhibition's capacity to stay out of its own way, it is easy to appreciate its humility. For those who choose to look upon these images as they might an old box of photographs found in the back of a closet, nothing on the part of the exhibition's packaging suggests they do otherwise.

Part of the appeal of "Other Pictures" has to do with the fact that it can be approached both as a collection of forgotten flea market artifacts and as art historical documents. A double-exposed image of a train coming through a bedroom reminds one of both Jerry Uelsmann's photographs and Rene Magritte's surrealism, while farther down the wall a photograph of a man in a glowing suit might recall a happy uncle on his way to a wedding 50 years ago. For many, these two ways of looking will merge into one. It is easy to imagine that such different ways of seeing marked the collector's experience in gathering these images in the first place. Even amidst the quotidian disarray of the flea market, his trained eye clearly did not give up its aesthetic interests. One might say that such an act on the part of the collector mirrors the bringing of "art into life" that an early twentieth-century avant-garde hoped to effect in their artistic production.