The Politics of Modernist Criticism of Art Photography : Medium-Specificity and Abstraction in Photography
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This essay explores the relation between modernist photography criticism and modernist art criticism, tracing the transition in American art criticism from the era of Stieglitz’s dominance to that of Greenberg. It problematizes Greenberg’s marginalization of art photography in his modernist art criticism. Greenberg denies decades of the unique American contribution to photography theory and criticism his predecessor Stieglitz ardently had pursued. The essay argues that unlike Greenberg’s disconnection of photography from being a modernist art medium, photography was an integral part of American modernism and his denial of the tradition created a fissure in modernist art criticism and beyond. To prove this, the essay analyzes the notions of medium-specificity and abstraction in photography, mostly known as two root concepts of Greenberg’s modernist art criticism. It introduces how the concepts emerged and gradually developed in American art photography since the early twentieth century, along with the varied activities of the promoter of art photography and American modern art, Stieglitz. Greenberg creates a direct genealogy between Analytic Cubism and American abstract paintings, and he excludes photography from that tradition of abstraction. The essay makes a counterargument by investigating evidences of commonalities found in both Stieglitz’s The Steerage and Pollock’s abstract painting mediated through Picasso’s Analytical Cubism. Further, through the analysis of Stieglitz’s series of cloud photographs, Equivalents, created in the 1920s-30s, and Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings created in the 1930s-50s, it proves the Greenbergian root modernist concepts which had excluded photography are equally applicable to both photography and painting. Lastly, it investigates the underlying politics of the photography criticism of Greenberg during the 1940s and 50s. He assured art photography’s exclusion in American modernism in favor of painting and of authority of his art criticism, though the practice of art photography continued to develop and Greenberg himself still considered photography as an art under certain conditions. It argues that photography, far from being marginal from abstraction, occupied a leading position in American modernism until the 1930s, continually developing abstraction in form and theory in the sense that Greenberg appreciated from abstract paintings.
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