The Ornery & the Holy

Can photography rub shoulders with painting and sculpture as a fine art? Master U.S. Photographer Edward Steichen has never doubted it.* His main job nowadays is planning exhibits of camera craft for Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, and every year since 1947 he has mounted shows to prove his point. Steichen's latest demonstration: his selection of 187 of the best pictures that have appeared in LIFE in the past 15 years.

Steichen makes one of his main points quickly: a picture sequence can often add up to much more than the sum of its component pictures. In support, he offers a nine-shot panel of a country doctor making his rounds, seven stages in the teaching of a deaf child, four stages in a marine's homecoming (the Steichen caption: "Boy and girl--and a visual love song"). But many pictures suggest their subject in a single, self-contained flash: a Nebraska wheatfield canopied with monumental clouds; dead G.I.s on Buna Beach; Evita Peron getting her last primps before a party, while her famous husband stands by in gold braid, cooling his heels. "Humor," says Steichen, "is one of the rarest elements to be found in photography," but he finds some here--in a misanthropic rhesus monkey, squatting armpit-deep in water; in the earnestness of a Sigma Chi inaugural dinner; in a blase dog star of television.

In portraits, the photographers can catch as much as the easel men do nowadays, and Steichen groups four of them together in a single panel to show the camera's range: Sweden's Gustav V ("the simple dignity of a democratic king"), Jersey City's Hague ("the arrogant power of a mayor"), Britain's Attlee ("the bewilderment of a politician"), and U.S. Technologist Vannevar Bush ("the serenity of a distinguished scientist").

The Museum of Modern Art has bound all of Steichen's choices in a LiFE-size catalogue, on sale at the museum for $1, and has let Steichen sum it up thus: "An historical procession where wisdom and nonsense, the ornery and the holy, the poisons of hate and the selflessness of heroism are all written into the visual record of the world we live in."

* Neither did Bernard Shaw. In An Unsocial Socialist (1883), Shaw let one of his characters speak for him on the subject: "Nine-tenths of painting as we understand it at present [will be] extinguished by the competition of these photographs, and the remaining tenth [will hold] its own against them by dint of extraordinary excellence."

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