If only there were a photograph of soccer star George Best in London Tate Modern’s new Street & Studio show. Not one of him strutting his stuff on the pitch (the sporting equivalent of the street), but sitting in a studio — TV, I mean — retelling, for the umpteenth time, the story of how he was holed up at some luxury hotel in Monte Carlo or wherever. He’s in this suite of rooms with an open suitcase full of cash, Miss World is draped over the bed, the floor is littered with empty champagne bottles. There’s a knock on the door: room service delivering another magnum of vintage bubbly. The waiter takes everything in and asks wanly: “Mr Best, where did it all go wrong?”
Confronted by an intoxicating scene of enviable excess and success, the visitor to Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography will surely identify with that waiter. To view the show not as a triumph but solely as a site of squandered opportunity is, however, to succumb to the false dichotomy suggested by its title: for this is triumph and waste simultaneously. Its ultimate failure is the inevitable culmination of a long history of victories and successes.
Let’s start, like the show, a long way back, in the last decade of the 19th century, with one of these early successes. Partly through a misunderstanding, partly through a desire to allay the suspicion that the mechanical medium of photography was more suited to scientific investigation or numb empirical recording than artistic creation, there developed the international movement known as pictorialism. As the name suggests, the idea was to make painterly photographs, images that had the subjective blur or atmospheric haze — another misunderstanding — of impressionism. With this aim, negatives and prints were physically worked on as though they were little canvases by photographers who — the hands-on approach proved it — were indeed artists.
Few embraced this cause more enthusiastically than the young Alfred Stieglitz — and none was more active in its subsequent repudiation. Not just in his own work as a photographer, but as proselytizer, editor and gallerist, Stieglitz — together with his ally, the painter-photographer Edward Steichen — labored to establish pictorialism as the dominant form of photographic art in the US. By the end of the first decade of the new century, they had succeeded. As often happens, the moment of official institutional triumph — a retrospective exhibition in 1909 — was also an acknowledgment of creative exhaustion. Not that Stieglitz personally was tired (or, rather, he was one of those men for whom exhaustion was an incitement to further exertions): within a few years, he had shifted his matchless powers of persuasion and advocacy to promoting “straight” photography, especially as practiced by a young photographer who, under his tutelage, had become hostile to any residue of pictorial fuzziness and had achieved an “absolute, unqualified objectivity”.
In a sense, the twin strands of Street & Studio begin with the work made by Paul Strand around 1916: the quasi-abstract still lifes done on his porch (his studio, let’s say) and the photographs taken surreptitiously on the street. Speaking of the best-known of these, Blind Woman, Strand said that, although the picture had “enormous social meaning and impact, it grew out of a very clear desire to solve a problem.” That problem was how to photograph “people in the streets without their being aware of it”. (The problem these days, as Brooklyn-based street photographer Gus Powell recently explained, is that “it’s harder and harder to take a picture without somebody in the picture who’s also taking a picture”.)
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