Drawn by Nature's Pencil

By Richard Lacayo

No one can put a date on the cave drawings at Lascaux or on the first drumbeat. But photography has a birthdate of sorts, 1839, the year it was ushered loudly into the world in a clamor of patents and the claims of two separate inventors, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England. For that reason 1989 is being marked as a sesquicentennial -- 150 years in which photographers have remade the world in their own images.

All through the calendar, museums in the U.S. and abroad will be mounting shows that will attempt to map the many lines drawn by what Talbot boasted was "the pencil of nature." The first, and one of the most ambitious, is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston until April 30 (stops in Canberra, Australia, and London follow). Curated chiefly by the collector Daniel Wolfe, "The Art of Photography: 1839-1989" is a thorough but not a definitive history -- one version of the story, splendidly but narrowly focused upon questions of style through the work of just 85 major figures. It would be possible to assemble another equally large exhibition from the prominent names left out -- Mathew Brady, Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams and Richard Avedon, to name a few -- but the shortcomings of the show are paltry compared with its pleasures.

In the mid-19th century, the modern world was taking shape, in some respects the shape that photography gave it. The new art form fostered the trend by which the antique notion of fame was supplanted by the more salable idea of celebrity. And in the great age of imperial expansion, the camera was just the tool to bring home views of the exotic places that had been gathered in by the Western powers.

By the early 1840s, the world's first portrait studios had sprung up in New York City and Philadelphia, churning out likenesses of glassy-eyed sitters who looked as though they had been whacked with a board. But it was in England and France that photography took on the character of an art in the work of men like the Parisian caricaturist Nadar, who brought a warm-blooded gravity to camera portraiture.

Yet the device remained for decades an exotic box, a contraption mostly for adventurers and the wealthy. That changed after 1888, the year George Eastman introduced the inexpensive Kodak. Amateur photography became the new folk art, and fine-art practitioners had to scramble for a way to distinguish themselves from the mobs of snapshooters. Their response was pictorialism, an international style of soft focus, poetic yearnings and darkroom tricks that were beyond the abilities of the untrained. During the pictorialist phase of their careers, Alvin Langdon Coburn in England and Edward Steichen in the U.S. turned away from mere realism toward a metaphysical art, one of broad hazy forms that hinted at an elusive realm of ideas and spirit.

Though they produced all too many pictures of farmers wrapped in a fog borrowed from Whistler, the pictorialists made the invaluable discovery that the camera could create a new kind of symbol. In a photograph, almost any object could be made to appear as a correlative for the artist's interior state. By World War I, pictorialism was in retreat before an emerging modernism pledged to clear focus, high detail and unvarnished fact. Yet even modernists like Edward Weston and Paul Strand would still sift the world for facts that would be expressive of spirit. For Gustave Le Gray, working on the coast of France in the mid-1850s, the cloud-streaked sky was an atmospheric effect to be rendered as lustrously as the equipment of the day would permit. For Alfred Stieglitz some 70 years later, long after he had abandoned the pictorial style, the clouds above Lake George, N.Y., were still "equivalents" for his own shifting emotions.

Even when it was used as a blunt instrument, the camera could make reality turn this way and that. In the photographs he took across an America burdened by the Depression, Walker Evans worked to see how much feeling could be extracted from plain fact, severely rendered: a storefront approached head-on or a pedestrian caught in rapt self-absorption. But in the same years in Europe, the surrealist Man Ray used the camera to give a gleeful stamp of reality to the patently unreal.

In the years after World War II, the mood of American photography in particular had turned edgy. To see the great work that W. Eugene Smith did for LIFE not far from the somber, inward-looking images of Harry Callahan draws out the way both men shared in a progressive darkening of temperament. In the 1950s it hung over the pictures of Robert Frank, who produced a cross-country document of the American scene as a place of canceled expressions, glum highway strips and spent energies. That cloud cast shadows on the landscape too. Ansel Adams could go on making nature appear awesome, but Joel Sternfeld has become the recording angel of a more beleaguered land: polluted, invaded by concrete and minced into real estate.

The show ends with a too brief sampling of postmodernism, work by photographers like Cindy Sherman and Boyd Webb, who stage scenes for the camera. The essence of postmodernism is the belief that in advanced societies reality is a secondhand experience, a slippery substance filtered through a ghostly scrim of media images. Movie stills, news pictures, advertising -- the world is a deck of pictures; the artist's job is to shuffle and deal, making images that comment upon images. In the end, the pencil of nature has drawn a house of mirrors.