Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War

Rating:
Summary: A New Standard for Photographic History
Review: Commenting on Lili Corbus Bezner's Photography and Politics in America, distinguished photohistorian James L. Enyeart wrote: "This is one of the most sound expansions of photographic history that I have seen. Bezner has set a new standard for books on the history of photography, especially in the scholarly evidence which her new research and extensive documentation provide." Enyeart, director of the Marion Center for Photographic Arts at the College of Santa Fe, points to the significance of this book as a history. This is a history, but it is more than scholarship. Bezner's book is a fair, balanced, passionate, and lively history of American photography during the 20th century that is sure to satisfy both the true scholar and the general reader. No book has covered this ground. Here are photographers such as Rosalie Gwathmey, Sid Grossman, and George Gilbert, who receive for the first time the close look they deserve. Here is the Photo League, a model for artistic education, blacklisted and censored in the 50s as a result of malice. Bezner's case study of the Photo League will alert any believer in free speech and an open Democracy to just how far extremists will go to take away our freedom. Here is FDR's New Deal, which unified our nation and gave hope to all Americans, regardless of background, a unity that provided the foundation from which we were able to defeat Hitler and Japan. Here is Edward Steichen's the Family of Man, dismissed by some as a show out of the past because photographers displayed works that documented the world around them. Bezner's fresh look at the Family of Man demonstrates that although flawed this major exhibition provided photographers the opportunity to express hope and humanism along with attention to craft and aesthetics. And here is a new look at Robert Frank, whose work, Bezner argues, was elevated at the expense of others just as talented and innovative because of the political climate of the times. Bezner writes passionately and persuasively of how artists retreated into themselves because of the politics of this period. Photography and Politics in America will open your eyes to not only great photography but an exceptional new voice in photographic history. Enyeart is right. Bezner has raised the bar for all who follow her.

Rating:
Summary: A distorted lens
Review: Lili Corbus Bezner has written what she believes to be a balanced and complex account of the intersection of politics and photography in the early years of the cold war. The book is extensively researched. But the world view that underlies her account is a narrow one that will be very familiar to readers of contemporary photography and cultural criticism. In this view, the late 1940s and the 1950s in America was one of the most illiberal and dark chapters in our history because of the repressiveness of McCarthyism. Thus the hero of her book is Sid Grossman, a key figure in New York's Photo League, whose career as a photographer and teacher was ruined when his association with the Communist Party was revealed. Bezner assumes readers will share her assessment that his radical, class-based politics was both a more realistic and courageous stand against McCarthyism than the liberal humanism of Edward Steichen, whose extremely popular exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, "The Family of Man", she frequently and condescendingly describes as "naive" and "safe". Thus, in a spooky mirroring of cold war thinking, the wrongs committed against Grossman give him a greater purchase on the political truth.

In fact, this period in the U.S. was the beginning of the greatest class leveling (based on relative income) in the history of the world. It consolidated the rising power of industrial unions and birthed the civil rights movement (the Brown decision was in 1954). A third party candidate, Henry Wallace, ran from the left in 1948; the victorious candidate, Truman, proposed a sweeping national health care plan, among other liberal initiatives. A strain of liberalism that emphasized consumerism (i.e., a higher standard of living for more people) was broadly successful, as represented by the GI bill and VA loan program. Our universities started to open up to a broader range of students and New York eclipsed Paris as the art capital of the world. All these events were contested, but suggest a very different tone than Bezner's "balanced" account.

From a longer view, McCarthyism, while terrible, was not the only event and certainly not the most enduring of the period, despite its chilling effect on freedom of expression. In the end, McCarthy was censured and disgraced. However, his repression of the left-leaning artists and intellectuals, who tend to write most cultural criticism, was disproportionately heavy.

Steichen and his assistant, Wayne Miller, had witnessed the horrors of WWII first hand as part of a naval photography unit--their liberal humanism was hard won and hardly naive. Their hopes for greater human solidarity and their optimism about the human spirit was (and is) the more fundamental challenge to both the right wing repression of McCarthism and totalitarianism on the left. If American radicals were the greater political realists, as Bezner's thesis and dozens like it imply, then they should answer for their support of, or negligence in the face of, communist regimes in Russia and China that murdered tens of millions of people. The alternative is for Bezner to admit that it was photographers like Grossman, not Steichen, who looked through rose-colored lenses.