“Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
September 25, 2007-March 23, 2008
The inaugural exhibition in the Met’s new galleries devoted to contemporary photography, “Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan,” seems more dearth than depth. The Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography is dedicated to photography “created since 1960,” a bold move for the Met, which has been amassing these works over the past ten years. Yet the nineteen images on current display, many of them on the scale of Old Master paintings, add up to less than the sum of their parts. The current selection feels both random and predictable. (Future exhibitions will be presented “thematically” and such curatorial constructs as “landscape and the built environment” or “the body” sound less than promising.)
One photo documents an afternoon the artist Charles Ray spent bound to a tree branch. The wall text claims his gesture “inextricably binds the human body to the medium of sculpture.” With Rodney Graham’s Welsh Oaks #1, we’re told, “The almost hallucinatory transformation wrought by the inversion of these images is profound.”
In Sharon Lockhart’s Untitledthe emptiness of a hotel room, illuminated from within, set against the dark rainy night, does have a haunting quality, but it is more a factor of size and voyeurism than of deep mystery. And anyone who has endured the over-exposure of work by the Bechers and their disciples “Struthsky”—the German trio, Thomas