Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Survival Piece VII: The Crab Farm, Scylla Serrata (Forssk l), 1972-1973. Photographic documentation of installation. Dimensions variable.
Most people would probably agree with the premise that photography is an art form. But just what makes a photograph a work of art is more ambiguous.
For a certain kind of purist, the landscapes of Ansel Adams set a standard: beautifully composed and gorgeously printed. For another, a vivid street scene or a carefully planned portrait translates into a distinguished image. But in the late 1960s, when John Baldessari created grainy black-and-white images of the drab sights along the streets of National City (a town just south of the San Diego city limits), it's a safe bet that few would have thought this was a significant use of photography. As it turns out, it was, not because they set a new tone for artfulness but because they raised new ideas about how to think about photography, combining image with text and challenging ideas about the role of the artist.
From its earliest years, the art department at the University of California, San Diego - established in 1967 - brought in artists who were inclined to think this way about the role of the artist. Baldessari, a key California conceptual artist, was an early hire - though he left in 1970 for California Institute of the Arts. Allan Kaprow, inventor of the genre-busting form called the Happening, was another. Poet and highly regarded critic David Antin also came on board and, shortly thereafter, so did his wife Eleanor Antin, a seminal feminist and multimedia artist.
Eleanor Antin, Caught in the Act, 1973. Black-and-white video, sound. 36 min. | Image: Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
As Jill Dawsey, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, sees it, photography became a connective thread in their disparate works. And one group of early MFA students made it front and center with their desire to push this experimentation in the direction of social and political issues. To tell this history, she has assembled a large scale exhibition and catalog, The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium.
The exhibition and book have examples from the full range of artists at UCSD who employed photography, video and filmmaking in conceptual ways from the late 1960s to the early 1980s: Eleanor Antin, Baldessari, Kaprow, Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, Louis Hock and Babette Mangold, among them. But it is a particular group - Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Phel Steinmetz and Fred Lonidier - who provided the core focus of this project. They took a doubtful view of the notion of photography as a form of visual truth, images that persuaded you that they were lifted from life itself, as in the documentary tradition - whose major figures included Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. They were nothing if not ambitious.
Allan Sekula, Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972/2011. Twenty-five archival grayscale pigment prints. Framed (each): 14 1/4 20 1/2in. (36.2 52.1cm). | Photo: Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, museum purchase with funds provided by Danah and Lynn Fayman by exchange and proceeds from the 2012 Biennial Art Auction
Proof of that determination: the title alone of Sekula's often anthologized 1978 essay, Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary. Dawsey's title for the exhibition and book alludes to his with its use of reinvention.
They were not a movement, but they were clustered, so I prefer to call them a constellation, Dawsey said.
For her, it all began with a chapter in her doctoral dissertation on Rosler, the incisive and innovative feminist video and multimedia artist, who has had a five-decade history of exhibitions and writings. Rosler's formative work was done while studying at UCSD. And in learning about Rosler's cohorts at UCSD while doing her research for the dissertation, Dawsey thought there was surely an exhibition worth doing about the group.
They just deserved more art historical attention, Dawsey asserted, explaining her motivations for the show.
All of these then emerging artists, in different ways, sought to make the viewer aware of photography as one information system among others. And all of them would have likely agreed with key points of Sekula's essay, when he argued for an art that refers to something beyond itself, and for an art that exposed the myth that accompanies the label of documentary.
Martha Rosler, Boys' Room from House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, c. 1967-72. Photomontage. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Rosler's photomontages from this time - some prominently featured in the landmark exhibition Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) - were an incisive critique of fashion photography and it's use of female beauty as a sales tool. The entire series, Body Beautiful or Beauty Knows No Pain (1966-1972), have a witty in-your-face quality. They use photomontage to create images like Cargo Cult, with its stack of containers that become frames for women's faces from various advertisements on the deck of a ship, as if ready for shipping.
Rosler also found an effective way to play street images off of text to suggest how neither really get to the heart of a social problem. In The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974-75), each black and white picture has a companion panel with phrases. The words evoke people who are never there: an image of a bottle in front of a storefront is accompanied by stewed/boiled/potted/corned/pickled and so on. Another image of liquor bottles piled along a fence is accompanied by a panel that reads: dead soldiers/dead marines. Rosler asks us to make whatever meaning we want from the pair of inadequate syst
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Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Survival Piece VII: The Crab Farm, Scylla Serrata (Forssk l), 1972-1973. Photographic documentation of installation. Dimensions variable. 
