The Trials of Sir Galahad

Pablo Picasso once took a look at a 1907 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz and exclaimed, "That man is working in the same direction I am!" Picasso spoke for the small group that had long realized that a great photographer is also a great artist. But one pesky question remains: Since even a bad or indifferent photographer--unlike a bad painter--can by accident produce a great picture, how much is art and how much is fortuitous subject matter? Last week, in Manhattan, the question was noisily reopened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of 176 photographs, a few of which are reproduced above and on the following color pages.

The exhibit bore the ambitious title of "Photography in the Fine Arts," and was the brainchild of Ivan Dmitri, a onetime etcher who switched to commercial photography when etching lost to the camera in the 1930s. Dmitri decided that most museums would not bother with the serious photographer, and galleries were not interested in showing or selling his wares. What photographers needed, Dmitri argued, was someone to screen out the best from the millions of pictures taken each year.

Kudos & Kicks. Last summer Dmitri held his first show under what he considered promising conditions. With help from the Saturday Review, he campaigned to get amateur and professional photographers, libraries, camera associations, magazines, even advertising agencies to send him hundreds of their best pictures. He then got together a jury consisting not only of photographers, but also museum curators and art critics. Director James J. Rorimer of the Met Museum agreed to hang the final selections as works of art. When the show opened, it was an immediate hit with gallerygoers--but the more successful it became, the more bitterness it aroused among some professional cameramen.

The attack was led by famed 81-year-old Photographer Edward Steichen, who is also director of the photography department at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which has been taking photographs seriously for nearly 30 years. The professionals claimed that they alone were qualified to judge their own work; the way to stage a proper show was to select the best photographers and let them submit their best. The magazine Modern Photography published a biting attack on the Metropolitan's exhibit under the title "The Day Photography Was Kicked in the Head."

Cameras on Guns. This year's Met show found tempers even higher. When Dmitri asked Steichen to serve on the 1960 jury, the old man contemptuously dismissed Dmitri as "the Sir Galahad of Photography," denounced his campaign as "the most damaging thing that has ever happened to the art of photography"; it was as if the Metropolitan "went to the sign painters' union for its paintings." Besides, said Steichen, getting to the nub of the controversy: How could anyone tell from one or two entries whether a photographer had been guided by art or accident? "Some of the finest photographs of the last war were taken by automatic cameras mounted on the machine guns of our planes."

Still, the Met's show proves that pictures can be art even if picture takers have no pedigree as artists. It also gives proof again of what a versatile instrument the camera has become. It can encompass seas or explore a drop of ink, suggest the whoosh of motion, record the moment that a cluster of hands falls into an unforgettable pattern or the mood evoked when a great critic pauses to contemplate an art treasure. Two pictures that were favorites of the judges happened to be snapped by amateurs. Manhattan's William Froelich, an ex-electronics salesman, produced a design of blazing reds in his The Sellers of Holi Powder at Benares. And Methodist Minister W. George Thornton of Titusville, Pa. put two photographs together to create a Dreamboat gliding out of a mist, as if emerging from another world.

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