Feature

The Unphotographable

Cameras don’t just capture truth; they create it.

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Through March 23

Cameras don’t just capture truth; they create it, said Richard Conway in Time.com. This has always been true, but the great Alfred Stieglitz opened up new possibilities when he pointed his camera at the clouds overhead for his 1925–31 series “Equivalents,” saying he wanted to create photographs that felt like music. It thus seems right that one image from that groundbreaking exercise in abstraction serves as a centerpiece of this show about photography that aims to capture or represent something beyond what’s plainly visible. Such a broad theme means that the exhibit contains “quirky bedfellows,” with Victorian ephemera and the Loch Ness Monster appearing alongside works by Diane Arbus and Man Ray. But it “certainly provides a fascinating potted history of the creative use of the camera.”

So many items here “turn out to affirm not photography’s limits, but those of our credulity,” said Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. Nineteenth-century spiritualists hoped that photography might prove the existence of supernatural forces. To them, works like the unattributed Portrait of a Welsh Boy Made by a Spirit (1895) validated their beliefs. Generations later, Tom Friedman would create “a comical rejoinder to the spirit photographs” in 2006’s Caveman, in which a burst of ethereal light—the camera flash—beatifies the face of a prehistoric man. By contrast, Malcolm Browne’s 1963 sequence Self-Immolation of Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Duc is light-years away from fantasy. The series, which shows a protesting Vietnamese monk disappearing in a swirl of flames, depicts an agony that’s “beyond description.” In a show that often challenges our faith in the veracity that photographers claim for themselves, it’s one work that we wish were a fake.

Recommended

China plans to land astronaut on the moon by 2030, official says
Chinese astronauts Gui Haichao, Jing Haipeng and Zhu Yangzhu
race to the moon

China plans to land astronaut on the moon by 2030, official says

South Korean man facing prison time after opening airplane door in midair
An Asiana Airlines flight that had its emergency door opened midair.
Problems in the Sky

South Korean man facing prison time after opening airplane door in midair

Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins reelection in Turkey
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Emerging Victorious

Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins reelection in Turkey

10 things you need to know today: May 28, 2023
The national debt clock in midtown Manhattan.
Daily briefing

10 things you need to know today: May 28, 2023

Most Popular

Disney hits back against DeSantis
Entranceway to Walt Disney World.
Feature

Disney hits back against DeSantis

What the shifting religious landscape means for American politics
Ballot box
Talking point

What the shifting religious landscape means for American politics

Censoring ideas and rewriting history
Copies of banned books from various states and school systems.
Briefing

Censoring ideas and rewriting history