LETTER

Afterimage, Jan, 2001

To the editor:

I was most surprised to read in Stephen Longmire's "Callahan's Children," in the September/October 2000 issue of Afterimage, that Hugh Edwards gave Ken Josephson a solo how in 1971. As Assistant Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, I organized that exhibition. It was my decision to give Ken a show, not Hugh's.

Would Hugh Edwards have given Ken a show? He had not done so during his long and influential tenure at the Art Institute of Chicago, although he had the opportunity to show Ken's work. How did he really feel about showing faculty work from the Institute of Design? Unfortunately, one can no longer ask him. But I would suggest that Edwards' views were not as sanguine toward ID as the article suggests. In general, Hugh Edwards favored photographs such as those made by Magnum's photojournalists, precisely because they lacked the self-conscious preciousness that the Institute of Design's teaching schema fostered. He preferred picures that communicated with people about human issues, rather than photographs whose message seems to center on self-referential, philosophical issues about photography's transformation of reality.

Although Edwards exhibited work by college teachers, he truly seemed to enjoy showing photographers whose reputations were well-established beyond colleges and universities, for whom a show at the Art Institute wasn't going to become a centerpiece of an academic career. Edwards had not gone to college himself, making him a rarity among photographic curators, then and now. The Art Institute of Chicago's exhibitions of the 1960s and early 1970s were, by today's standards, minor shows done on a shoestring budget, exhibited in a gallery that was part hallway, part waiting room--shows organized without accompanying catalogs or even checklist documentation. Given the marginal and transitory nature of these shows, it is a wonder that anyone remembers them at all.

Marie Czach

Riverdale, IL

Stephen Longmire responds:

I'm grateful to Marie Czach for her addition to the slender public record on this matter, and sorry to have slighted her contribution unintentionally. As she notes, there was no published record of the exhibition in question, so, like many important details, this one nearly slipped by the wayside. I agree with her characterization of Edwards's preferences, by the way. I imagine his exhibition of Robert Frank was much more to the curator's taste than the work of the several Institute of Design trained photographers I discussed. I made a point of mentioning it for that reason, but didn't explore the issue in detail since it seemed beside my point. That photographs were being shown by someone who believed they belonged in a museum, by a maverick like Edwards who inspired quite a few young photographers at the time--one need only read his protege Danny Lyon to verify this point (in addition to the memoir referenced in my article, see Lyon's new Web site, with a section dedicated to Edwards: www.bleakbeauty.com)-- marks a watershed in the institutionalization of photography. That the hallways have become galleries, and the shoestrings substantial budgets, marks another. My purpose was simply to sketch what it was to have exhibited photographs in the years between these markers.

Stephen Longmire

Washington, D.C.