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PHOTO-OPPORTUNITY: PHOTOGRAPHY ASTECHNOLOGY PatrickMaynard How useful were the 1989 celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the announcement of photographic processes for reviewing American conceptions of photography? There were large and important shows with hefty catalogues, notably "On the Art of Fixing a Shadow,"put on jointly by Washington's National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago, and moving to The Los Angeles County Museum at the end of the year. The Museum of Modern Art waited for 1990 with its "Photography Until Now" review arranged by John Szarkowski. The most ambitious project, "The Art of Photography, 1839-1989," with almost 500 pictures and an over-400-page catalogue, was deployed only at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts before departing for Canberra and London, where it had actually been planned. There were smaller shows, such as "APanorama of Photography: 150Years Since Daguerre" by the Worcester Art Museum and "Capturing an Image: a Century and a Half of Fine Photography," shared between the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard's Fogg Museum. Art museum colloquia included "Memory of Light" at the Detroit Institute (with various photo exhibits) and another, exhibiting rare and valuable images at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, to which someone neglected to invite me. The U.S. press rose to this occasion onlyin part.1 Life did best, rather too early. Its splendid Fall 1988Anniversary Issue actually came out in the summer of 1988 and was long gone before the leaves turned. Another of the great historically popularizing American photographic magazines, National Geographic,which in 1982 had caused a stir with its digitally-shiftedPyramid photo cover, allotted no cover story to photography, though it did print a well-illustrated essay about "photography's first fiftyyears." (It was left to the Detroit Institute to exhibit over 200 of Geographic's own images from the 1870sto the present.) While Maclean's made an April 1989coverstory of the anniversary, the American competitors Time and Newsweek simplyprinted in the course of thlngs short reviews of the exhibitionsjust mentioned. Similar editorial decisions were made at such popular magazines as USA Today and, surprisingly, even at the specialist Historyof Photography. 502 Patrick Maynard Among the larger-circulation American art journals, Artnews was alone with its cover story and virtually alone in giving any special coverage during the year. Artf orum produced a beautifully illustrated historical article, but that was a review of the Getty colloquium, andAntiques's historical essay by Weston Naef turned out to be a reprint of the Getty's photo curator's contribution to the same symposium. Popular Mechanics photography editor, Stephen Booth, offered three informative pages on dates of important photographic camera and film inventions,including recent ones of more than historical interest: the Leica 35mm of 1923,the 1925first flash-bulb, 1936and 1942for Kodachrome and Kodacolor, 1952for Asahi's first widely available SLR, 1963for the one-minute Polaroid (first produced in 1948), 1976 and 1979 for Canon's point-and-shoot 35mm SLR and the automated infrared focusing rangefinder now so popular, and 1989 itself for Canon's start of magnetic disc sales. This approach was complemented by Popular Photography's brief mention of optic and photochemical historical benchmarks, in which Bob Schwalberg grumped about the "pomposity and boredom" of anniversary enthusiasts: "sesquicentennial be damned!" Photography, in his view, didn't get interesting until lenses and chemicals became modern in the 1880s. We should not make too much of the fact that, despite Schwalberg's complaints (and parallel ones by photographer Robert Heinecken in LA Style), the press made so little of the sesquicentennial. General press writers could not be expected to produce perspectives on historical events of long ago or on complexand continuous processes. This was not like the D-Day or Pearl Harbor anniversaries. Furthermore, an excellent general historical basis had already been laid down by a variety of very readable illustrated books, by Brian Coe (1974),Aaron Scharf (1976), Michael Langford (1980), Ian Jeffrey (1981),the Gernsheims (1969,1982),Beaumont Newhall (5th rev. ed., 1982),Jean-Luc Daval (1982), Naomi Rosenblum (1984), Peter Turner (1987)and ColinFord (in the anniversaryyear), and it might well be said that whoever wished to know...

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