Facing modern truths

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The art form of the modern age is photography. In the same way various schools of painting defined ages previous, the modern age is defined by the camera, and using the camera as an art form came of age during the period between the two World Wars. Foto, now at the Milwaukee Art Museum (February 9 – May 4), explores this time period in photography and photojournalism in Central Europe. It’s a sweeping show that covers almost 30 years of photography as it became a popular and accessible form of expression.

All manner of subjects are represented: from photo collage to portraiture, landscape to action photography. There are abstract pieces and images that look like they could have been torn from the pages National Geographic. The work is arranged thematically, and roughly chronologically, which gives the impression that the movements which took decades to take hold in the world of paint and canvas swept through photography like a wildfire.

What is most striking about the photographs included in Foto is how contemporary they feel when you stand in front of them. This show celebrates the onset of modernity, yes, but that was 60, 70, even 80 years ago from today’s perspective. You’d never know to look at the offerings on display. Photo collages assembled by cutting and pasting, tricks of exposure and development, look as if they could have been created in Photoshop. They evoke the same notion of the absurd and the surreal and create the same sorts of statements that we make digitally today – and they are just as easy to decode, if you know the language. Sometimes the code is so personal to the artist that you can only guess, or create your own language to read the message imprinted on the paper with light and chemicals.

Photographers in this period played with the same social statements that photographers today attempt to make. They created the idea of the “modern woman,” strong and capable and pretty to boot, at a time when women’s liberation was still a whisper of a dream. They photographed the downtrodden and made a political call; they photographed the detritus of urban life and turned it into art. They romanticized the past in scenes of pastoral life, strangely interrupted by the onset of modernity: barefoot peasants building a railway, set against sweeping landscapes.

Perhaps it is hubris that makes us think we are reaching new horizons in the art of photography with all of our fancy gadgets; perhaps it is only ignorance. Either way, standing in the Milwaukee Art Museum and looking at these faces and places and dreamscapes from the past, one comes face to face with the fact we are not, in truth, the great innovators of the photographic age. We are merely doing what’s been done by those that came first. VS

Foto runs at the Milwaukee Art Museum through May 4, 2008. For gallery hours, admission prices and a complete list of supplemental programs in connection with the exhibition, visit the Museum’s website.