[...] The Met is launching a show that mixes Susan Sontag's thoughts on photography with photographs from the Met's collection. I'll let the show's curator, Mia Fineman, take it from there:
MAN: From where did the idea for the show come?
MF: I've always been a huge fan of Sontag, especially her writing on
photography. But I think the idea for the show first came to me when I
was reading a piece by David Denby on Sontag's film criticism in the
New Yorker about a year ago.
At the time, we were trying to come up with ideas for shows in the
Gilman Gallery, a two-room gallery that’s great for focused shows of
works from the museum's collection. After reading the Denby piece, I
thought, 'Why not do a kind of tribute to her writing on photography,'
which was never illustrated -- except for the essay, "Regarding the
Pain of Others," when it was published in the New Yorker in 2002. None
of her books ever had pictures.
MAN: Why didn't they?
MF: I'm not really sure why she made that decision. It may have been
financial considerations or wanting to market them not as 'art books'
but as 'criticism.' So I thought why not use her words for the text on
the walls, rather than the museum’s usual institutional voice, and pair
her words with pictures from the collection that she wrote about
specifically, or that relate to her writing in a more general, oblique
way.
MAN: So did you start by re-reading Sontag's text, or with the photographs, or…?
MF: I started out by re-reading all the essays on photography and
pulling out quotes that I felt conveyed an idea very clearly and
concisely, in just a few sentences. Then I began looking for pictures.
I started with the easier part -– finding specific photographs she had
written about that were in the Met's collection. And there turned out
to be quite a few, like Capa's Falling Soldier,
or iconic works by photographers she wrote about extensively like
Arbus, Sander, or Evans. The next stage was harder. What I tried to do
was find pictures that illustrated her ideas about photography in a
more interpretive way, using works from the collection that Sontag may
or may not have known herself.
MAN: And how did you decide what passages of text to use,
how long they would be and all. I mean, given the concept, there was
the risk of endless wall-text.
MF: I wanted to quotes to be short – just a few sentences each –
because I didn't want people to have to read huge paragraphs of text
while they’re standing in the gallery. Fortunately, her writing is so
aphoristic and concise that it was easy to do that. Sontag once said in
an interview that she wanted to have a new idea in every sentence and
she very nearly succeeded. It took her five years to write On Photography,
she put so much sweat and blood into these essays. You can tell there's
been a tremendous amount of thinking distilled into each one.
So I had this list of quotes and then I started thinking about what
we have in the collection and how these pictures would work with the
quotes. Sometimes I'd have a quote where I couldn’t figure out what
picture would work with it, but for most of them I'd find some good
things after a few false starts. Then there was the question of how
these pictures would work together on the wall. It's kind of a
backwards way of curating a show, and it looks different. It's not as
classically balanced as a Met show would normally be because it has a
particular didactic purpose, which is to respond to this writing. I
ended up with some interesting walls and some pictures that we never
would have put together -- going back and forth from the 19th century
to the 1970s.
MAN: Is Sontag herself in the show?
MF: There is one portrait of Sontag in the show by Peter Hujar
(above), which I consider to be the most beautiful and iconic portrait
of her. She was a celebrity -- and very beautiful and photogenic – and
there are hundreds of portraits of her, but I didn't want to emphasize
her physical appearance in the show. It's really about her thinking and
writing.
MAN: This is definitely an untraditional show, especially
for a place like the Met, which is not known for experimentation. Was
it a hard show to get approved, to get on the schedule?
MF: It turned out to be a surprisingly easy show to get approved.
It's pretty uncharacteristic for the Met -– or for any museum -- to do
a show that deals with art criticism, but there's room for
experimentation, even here. Besides it's Susan Sontag. She's really
important to New York intellectual life, and she spent a lot of time at
the Met, looking at the art here.
MAN: Did she hang out in the photography study room or anything like that?
MF: Not that I know of. She saw photographs in exhibitions and in
permanent installations both at the Met and at the Modern, but she
wasn’t a historian of photography -- and she never represented herself
that way -- though she obviously knew a lot about it. She was learning
as she went along, thinking about the medium very seriously, probably
also working from books and reproductions.
Sontag also didn't revere the vintage print the way the photo world
does today. Some people in the photography world -- people who are
photographic historians who were doing the primary research when she
was writing these essays -– disagree with her position and believe that
she was simply wrong about a lot of things. One prominent
photo-historian told me a story about interrupting Sontag during a
lecture when she was talking about Atget and asking her if she had ever
actually held a vintage Atget print in her hands. She admitted that she
hadn't. And that's one way of evaluating what she said. But I think her
ideas are important and thought-provoking whether or not she held an
Atget in her hands.
One of her most important contributions to the field was in thinking
about photography not only as art, but as more than art. News
photography, travel photography, photojournalism: She treated all these
forms with as much seriousness and intellectual rigor as the work of
great photographic artists.
MAN: Have other museums expressed interest in taking the show?
MF: Not yet. Since it’s a collection-based show, chances are it won't travel.
Related: On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others.
