Back in the late 1960s, University of Washington professors Joseph and Elaine Monsen were already serious art collectors when a friend suggested they consider collecting photographs as well.

        “I told him I didn't even like photography,” Mr. Monsen said last week. “Why in the world would I want to collect them?”

        Their friend's answer to that question launched the couple on a 30-year love affair with photography that has yet to end.

        “He told me that I had an obligation,” Mr. Monsen said. “Nobody else was doing it in a systematic way, and he felt it was time for a serious connoisseur to step forward and start building a collection of important photographs.”

        The Monsens did step forward, and Cincinnati is reaping the fruits of their labor. The Photographic Impulse — A Critical History of Photography: The Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection is on exhibit at Cincinnati Art Museum through Jan. 6.

        The 200 photographs were culled from the approximately 2,000 pieces in the Monsen collection, and span virtually the entire 160-year history of the medium.

        It is a stunning show filled with rare gems, from 1840s-vintage calotypes (prints made from an early type of paper negative) by photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot to more contemporary works by such artists as Yasumasa Morimura, Thomas Ruff, Nicholas Nixon and Gerhard Richter.

        In between, there are both iconic and lesser-known images from the likes of Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Edward Weston and Lewis Wickes Hine. (I'm listing my personal favorites here; there are many, many more.)
       

Exploring art form

        Cincinnati has seen a number of “history of photography” shows in the past, but never one arranged and mounted in such an imaginative and thought-provoking way.

        This exhibit is about much more than merely the chronological history of photography. On a deeper conceptual level, it explores the ever-evolving human perception of what photography is, and what it represents.

        Guest curator Thom Collins (senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Center) has organized the 200 images into five separate sections, each representing a distinct “impulse” on the part of the artist:

        • The impulse to commemorate significant people and events.

        • The impulse to make visible distant places and cultures, and to reveal marginalized subcultures closer to home.

        • The impulse to consolidate and disseminate personal masquerades of identity.

        • The impulse to sample, organize and archive the phenomena of the world.

        • The impulse to usurp painting.

        Within each section, the photographs are arranged chronologically.

        By grouping the images according to artistic intent and vision, Mr. Collins effectively conveys a truth about photography that has been widely acknowledged only in recent decades: that there is no such thing an an objective, value-neutral photograph.

        To the contrary, every time a photographer clicks the shutter or processes an image in the darkroom, he or she imposes a personal and wholly subjective agenda on the finished product.

        To accomplish this, photographers use the full array of tools and controls at their disposal: choice of aperture, shutter speed and focus; composition and lighting; color and tonal range, and so forth.

        In short, the old adage that “the camera doesn't lie” is, in fact, a lie. Every photograph reflects the values, attitudes and even the material circumstances of the artist who creates it.
       

Searching for substance

        One of the great strengths of this exhibit is the way it demonstrates that there never has been a consensus in the arts community as to what photography is, let alone what it should aspire to be as an art form.

        The earliest photographers craved acceptance of their work as fine art on equal footing with more traditional forms of statement, such as painting and sculpture.

        Consequently, much of early photography was aimed at approximating the look of paintings and drawings, using both painterly themes (landscapes, seascapes, still life) and various technical tricks (soft focus, shallow depth-of-field, low contrast) to achieve the desired effect.

        A good example of this practice — known as “pictorialism” — can be seen in Gustave Le Gray's “Brig Upon the Water” (1856).

        By the 1920s, artists such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Imogene Cunningham were rejecting pictorialism in favor of a new aesthetic, one that celebrated the power and beauty of the unaltered, unmanipulated photograph.

        Practitioners of this new “straight” photography reveled in the camera's inherent ability to render nature in clear, sharp images. (See, for example, Karl Blossfeldt's starkly elegant 1928 works “Stem” and “Flower.”)

        Mr. Weston and his disciples came to believe in the photograph's capacity for capturing the essential, unvarnished truth of whatever subject it was concerned with, and thus was born the myth of the “objective” photograph.

        Over the past quarter of a century, critical theory has largely succeeded in undermining this myth, proposing instead various philosophical models that acknowledge photography as an intensely personal and utterly subjective form of artistic statement.

        It is impossible in a short review to do justice to the richness and depth of this exhibit.

        Suffice to say that if you love photography, you must go. If you don't love photography, go anyway. Like Joseph Monsen, you might have your mind changed.
        The Photographic Impulse — A Critical History of Photography: The Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection, Cincinnati Art Museum, through Jan. 6. 721-2787.

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