A new exhibition at Princeton University Art Museum, running through September, celebrates the photographers who turned the medium into a movement. Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan — influential mid-twentieth-century photographers who taught other men to see. The show is called Photography as a Way of Life. The title tells you everything you need to know about which life, and whose way.
I want to put two photographs next to each other.
The first: Harry Callahan’s Eleanor, Chicago, 1949. His wife standing in shallow water, body exposed, the photographer’s eye holding her still. Mastery of light, composition, the decisive fraction of a second. The hand that presses the shutter knows exactly when.
The second: Evgen Bavčar, a blind Slovenian photographer who has been blind since the age of twelve, photographing the streets of Paris by touching objects to estimate distance, using a small flashlight to paint exposure times he cannot verify, then handing the film to someone else to develop. He has never seen a single image he has made.
The mechanism is the same. A shutter opens. Light hits a surface. Something is recorded. But the photography tradition celebrated in major institutions and historical surveys — built its entire theology around one half of that equation — the seeing eye, the transcendent gaze, the photographer as a person who looks harder than you do. Bavčar, working since the 1980s, introduced something this tradition still refuses to absorb: that a photograph can be made by a body that relates to space through touch, sound, heat, and time rather than sight. His images are beautiful. They are also an argument nobody asked him to make.
In June 2023 I attended a photography talk in Rotterdam about photographic aesthetics where the speaker projected thirty images in forty minutes and used the word “vision” as a metaphor eleven times. I counted. I was there because the venue had a flat entrance and clear views from a chair — rare enough that I note it. The speaker described photography as “learning to see.” I looked around the room. Everyone was nodding.
Here is what I notice from a seated position that a standing person misses: the world is designed at eye-level, and eye-level is five feet six inches off the ground. I see the underside of tables, the rust on railings, the texture of pavement that most people’s gaze skips over entirely. My relationship to space is not worse. It is different. Pete Eckert, a blind photographer known for creating elaborate photographic setups using thermal sensors and long exposures, said in a 2014 interview with Wired about his photographic methods: “Sighted people see with their eyes. I see with my whole body.” He was describing photography. He was also describing Tuesday.
The Princeton exhibition, by every account, is careful and well-made. Julien Faure-Conorton, who curated this show, clearly loves this material. The photographs are extraordinary. I am not arguing they shouldn’t be shown. I am arguing that calling this tradition “photography as a way of life” makes a claim so large it swallows everything outside itself. A way of life. Not a way of life.
Bavčar once described his process as “photographing the images I carry inside.” That sounds like a metaphor. It isn’t. He means it literally. He constructs a scene from memory and spatial understanding, sets up the camera, and produces an image he will never perceive through the sense the medium supposedly requires. The photographs exist. They hang in galleries. They are sensitive material in the oldest sense — surfaces that respond to light whether or not a sighted person is holding the camera.
The Princeton show runs until September. Bavčar is eighty-one and still working in Ljubljana. Eckert continues to exhibit. Neither appears in the exhibition. The tradition has had forty years to notice. What I find funny, in the way that means not funny at all, is that Callahan and White were genuinely radical for their time. They insisted photography was art when institutions said it wasn’t. They fought to be taken seriously. Then they built a house and forgot to check who couldn’t get through the door.
I have a photograph on my phone from that Rotterdam talk. The speaker is mid-gesture, mouth open, pointing at the screen. Below the projected image, at knee height, someone has taped a small paper sign to the podium: Please do not block the fire exit. Nobody blocked it. Nobody could see it either.
Two cameras. One requires an eye. The other requires a body.
This article was prompted by Backflips, boulders and dancing dogs: the images that shaped art photography – in pictures from Guardian Art & Design.