Gene Thornton, New York Times, April 19, 1970
Photography
MOST photographic prints are no bigger than book size or, at biggest, picture mag azine size. The print reproduced on this page, an un titled work by John Spence Weir currently on exhibit at the Witkin Gallery, measures 5 by 13 inches. There is no reason why photographs should be so small—no technical reason, that is. In last year's “Harlem on My Mind” at the Metropolitan Museum, photographs were blown up to mural size, often to great effect. Huge enlargements occur when pictures are projected, as in this season's “America in Crisis” at the Riverside Museum or in any movie theater, and the back lighted color transparency in the Kodak advertisement at Grand Central Station is 18 feet high by 60 feet long, or roughly 50 times the size of Weir's print.
The current Kodak advertisement shows a glider flying over a pleasant country side, and at Grand Central the Kodak people wisely confine themselves to such conventional panoramic landscapes—that is, to a straight forward, head‐on approach to subject matter that has, in reality, a scale and scope commensurate with the huge ness of the print. Moviemakers, who must fit every conceivable type of subject and approach into the same in variable format, are not so lucky. The charge of the Light Brigade looks splendid in Cinema Scope, but a closeup of the heroine frequently looks absurd. Here the difficulty is not technical but artistic; there is too much meaningless background; it is too far away and too unrelated to that huge, looming object in the foreground. The picture, though a mural in size, is a snapshot in scale, and does not hold the wall.
Which brings me back to the Witkin Gallery, 237 East 60th Street, where John Spence Weir and three other young San Franciscans, Judy Dater, Leland Rice and Jack Welpott, are exhibiting to May 3. The Weir print re produced here, and a dozen others like it in the show, would look just as good, perhaps even better, enlarged to something like the size of the Kodak mural, because it does hold the wall. That is, the various parts of the picture —foreground, middle ground, background and the various objects depicted—have been brought into a definite and understandable relationship to each other and to the picture plane. “Holding the wall” is a painter's term, and doing it is much easier for painters, who can alter things at will, than for photographers, who must take things as they come.
Persian miniaturists draw people, trees and mountains in profile from the front, and in the same picture draw rivers, rugs and floors from almost directly above. They hold the wall, or the page, by making everything parallel to the picture plane, even the ground, which is, in reality, perpendicular to it.
Chinese landscapists do not do such violence to common sense and natural vision, but they too, as they unroll their long landscape scrolls, move along and draw every figure, house and hillside from a point just in front of it, rather than drawing them all in perspective from a single point of view, as Renaissance and post ‐ Renaissance European artists would do. The photographer's basic instrument, his camera, limits him to the post Renaissance approach, but even within this convention the painter is far freer than the photographer to organize, regroup and eliminate non-essentials in order to make his
picture hold the wall. Consequently, many photographs, like the Cinema Scope closeup, though technically expert, fall apart artistically.
I do not know if John Spence Weir has studied painting, but knowingly or not, he has adapted to the camera the treatment of space perfected by Ben Shahn in his great frescos of the late 30's and early 40's in Roosevelt, New Jersey, and in the Federal Security Building in Washington. Faced with a large wall and a complex program, Shahn divided the wall into several panels each with a separate scene in it. Each scene had its own fairly naturalistic perspective, but the perspective shifted from one panel to the next as a different point of view was adopted. The result was a kind of undulating effect for the mural as a whole; at some points deep space, at other points shallow space, but the various parts of the picture in clear, if sometimes startling, relationships to each Weir in his photographs achieves similar effects by purely photographic means; by using several frames to combine different images in one picture, sometimes joining the separate images by a discreet band of darkness, at other times overlapping them with a partial double exposure. Nothing could be simpler, at least in principle, but I do not imagine it was easy for Weir to organize these complex pictures in his mind and then turn the film back just the right distance and point the camera in just the right direction to make it come out as he planned. There is also a more than formal complexity in his work. His subject matter borders on the banal: shop windows with reflections, posters, flags, people on the street. But the overlaps and juxtapositions give these commonplace motifs an unexpected weight and mystery.
What is the meaning of these billboard portraits of Freud suddenly interrupted by a plunge into deep space, at the end of which is a pleasant tree ‐ shaded neighborhood? I won't try to answer the question, but again I am reminded of Shahn. In Shahn's time, the urgent social and economic questions seemed to have simple answers: the problem was unemployment and poverty, the answer was work for everyone and an equitable distribution of wealth.
Nowadays almost everyone who is employable has a job and the nation is rolling in wealth unprecedented in all human history, yet we seem further from the millennium than ever. The children of the most privileged classes are busily making bombs to blow it all up and, at the other end of the social scale, there exists a knot of chronically unemployed persons which has so far resisted all efforts to dissolve it. In Shahn's pictures of sick children, honest workmen and helpless old people, the questions and answers are as clear as the treatment of space. In Weir's ambiguous street scenes, the space is cleanly articulated, but neither the questions nor the answers are clear.
Gallery hours at the Witkin are: Tuesday through Saturday, 12:30 to 6 P.M. (Thurs day to 8 P.M.), Sunday, 2 to 5 P.M.
Gene Thornton, New York Times, April 19, 1970